Its a real shame that the new Wolfenstein game doesn't quite live up to the potential of it's best story and character moments.
What a weird thing to read in 2014, eh? It's an honest sentiment though, believe it or not. It's maybe a little disingenuous to so completely pre-judge a game because of it's franchises past but Wolfenstein: The New Order really does attempt to make genuine heartfelt strides forward in storytelling terms. And while in the end it may be done in by it's more ridiculous tendencies, the successes it does earn go a long way to making B.J. Blazkowicz's newest nazi-hunting adventure pretty compelling, even outside of the gameplay.
The New Order opens up in an alternate reality 1946 where World War Two is still raging (no idea why, maybe B.J.'s desire to kill nazi's is so strong it actually kept the war going). B.J. and friends take part in a disastrous raid on the compound of General Deathshead, a purveyor of all sorts of body horror-esque experiments who more closely resembles the zombie on the front of the Resident Evil 1 box art than he does an actual living person. After all is said and done B.J. finds himself in a shrapnel-induced vegetative state for 14 years inside a Polish psychiatric asylum. During which time the Nazi war-machine proceeds to steamroll its way across the rest of the world, dominating every continent with insane levels of manpower and ridiculous nazi robots.
The Nazis show up in 1960 to shutdown the facility and in the process systematically kill all the psychiatric workers B.J. has built up a bond with in his time at the asylum. Our protagonist of course at this point smells blood and wakes up from his decade and a half long break from Nazi murder with a renewed interest in killing the everloving shit out of some facist scum, as you do. Blazkowicz and head nurse/potential love interest Anya Oliwa escape and eventually stumble onto what remains of the minuscule anti-nazi resistance hiding right under the nazi's noses. It's here you'll meet the cast of characters hoping to deal a serious blow to the establishment from their grimy hideout. None of the resistance members are particularly multidimensional but their dialogue and voice-acting is sharp across the board, what they lack in complexity they make up for in charm.
Where the game's storytelling falls apart like wet sponge though is in the pathways they don't pursue and the almost galactic jumps in tone it thinks it can get away with. They play around with the idea that in the intervening 14 years where the Third Reich took over everything they methodically Nazi-d up all of pop culture, but not nearly to the extent they could. Every now and then you'll stumble upon a famous song or monument from the era recontextualized to fit Nazi design standards but it's real blink and you'll miss it stuff. I appreciate subtlety in these things but there's a point at which subtlety just becomes invisibility. Wolf also continues the series' tradition of abnormal Nazi/Robot hybrids but none of the new inventions this game brings to the table are as far-out as they could be given the time thats passed in-game as well as the well-documented obsession the Nazi's had with all things occult. You need to gimme a lil' more, y'know?
As for the inconsistencies in tone, look. At one point in you pull a knife out of your chest and escape from a Nazi death-camp incinerator filled with emaciated corpses. At another you fly to a Nazi Moon-base in order to shoot and stab the everloving shit out of anyone wearing a swastika emblazoned spacesuit unfortunate enough to find themselves in your path. Either sequence works on its own but placed a few chapters apart it looks downlight ridiculous. I would've much preferred the game stuck to it's more outlandish proclivities as they come off far better than the awkwardly placed ruminations on the horrors of the Third Reich.
Thankfully though, Wolf is rock solid when it comes time to actually massacre some fucking nazis. MachineGames developed this one, they're a new studio made up of a lot of former Starbreeze employers, the acclaimed devs behind the Riddick games and 2007's the Darkness among other things. This lineage shows up at multiple points in the gameplay throughout the New Order. Your resistance sanctuary acts as a sort of hub or homebase that you'll come back to at multiple (predetermined) points where you can wander around and talk to folks much like past Starbreeze games. There's no nonlinearity in the choice of missions you're given, you move from level to level like any other shooter, but The New Order does attempt to give you as much as flexibility as it can muster during the missions themselves.
Although there are sections that force a stealthy or all-out approach for the most part the player is given the room to choose how they approach combat. This is a major boon as more often than not the level design is larger and less linear than that of most modern shooters, resembling more open games like Dishonored rather than a corridor crawl. Many areas will have ziplines you can ride on, locked doors you can open to reach new areas or find a room full of supplies. The somewhat freeform level-layouts meant I found myself wanting to be sneaky and dispatch Nazis in silence more often than I thought I would in a game bearing the Wolfenstein moniker. Enemy AI is not especially smart in how they respond if you decide to take the crafty approach but the tools they give you to inflict silent death upon the Nazi hordes such as throwing knives and a laser cutter you can use to slice through fences and some walls make it a very gratifying avenue to take.
Luckily though when you want to go loud Wolfenstein does not disappoint, not even a little bit. The arsenal of weapons you'll find over the course of the game fit the typical assault rifle/sniper rifle/shotgun etc archetypes you would expect barre a couple of laser based weapons. But oh mercy me do they feel great to use. The controller rumble and visual/audio feedback of the guns all combine to make for an exceptionally fun shooter experience. You also have a lean ability but rather than just horizontal left and right leaning you can bend your aim in pretty much any direction the analogue stick will allow. This feature makes cover shooting feel more viable and entertaining than it does in many self-described actual cover shooters and adds another level of pliability to the combat system.
In the end although The New Order sketches out a much more interesting layout for a world than it actually delivers, I find myself not minding a whole lot when the action is this good. There's only so far you can stretch the fundamentals of killing Nazis but Wolfenstein explores every option it can to wring as much fun out of the act as possible. If you're like me you'll find yourself coming back to this one again and again trying different approaches on different difficulty levels cause you just cant get enough out of stabbing facist robot dogs.
God what a bizarre medium this is. 8/10. 4/5. Go geddit.