Wolfenstein: The New Order has the pretense of deep storytelling and rich characters, but it's a game where you go to a Nazi moon base. It's a game where a concentration camp is the setting for Summer thrill-ride action. It's a game where the hero has a jaw the width of his shoulders and the villain is a scientist who makes robots out of stolen brains. It's a game that has nothing to say about Nazis, oppression, occupation, resistance, the 1960s, sex, or anything it opens its mouth about. It's a game where the final moments is of an evil scientist's beheaded corpse laying against his destroyed robot suit, followed by the hero reciting the sonnet engraved upon the statue of liberty and roll credits over sad piano music. This is a long winded way of saying the storytelling and characters are IRREDEEMABLY STUPID AND TEDIOUS. I'm not saying that it's bad for a game to be stupid. Wolfenstein has always been stupid. But the game lacks the self-confidence to just be stupid. It has to pretend to be smart, to be dark, to have themes, that its characters are more than a collection of action movie cliches, that they aren't just recreating the setting of Half Life 2 for the five thousandth time. It tries to cover up its pretension with a thin veneer of irony, but the end result of that is simply the old cop-out standby of, "when it works it's serious and when it fails it's failing on purpose." Say what you want about Metal Gear Solid, but it has self-confidence. No matter how stupid those games get, I at least find them genuine in their stupidity. They earn the cheesy piano music over their credits.
Okay with that out of the way, the gameplay is also awful. It's unfair and splits the difference between new-school and old school in a way that seems like not only does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing, the left hand and the right hand have never met. The AI are relentless, very accurate, hitscan bullet-sponges. Shooting setpieces tend to be pure chaos akin to a Transformers movie, where you know stuff is happening but it's difficult to discern what and where. Despite all of this, you are given classic-style health and armor with very limited regen. No amount of skill will allow you to avoid soaking up large amounts of damage, but replenishing your health requires venturing out into the chaos to scrounge for medkits and no amount of skill will allow you to avoid taking more damage on such a journey. Ammunition is chronically low at all times, and being forced to reload leaves you as a sitting duck. To pick up medkits and ammo, you have to press Interact while looking at it, which is not only a massive inconvenience but is likely to get you killed if you're in a situation where you are low on health. You can pick up an excess of medkits to 'overcharge' your health above 100, but it slowly ticks down over time. This it means that if you're careless you'll expend medkits in the environment before large-scale firefights and not even see the benefits as it will tick down to 100 before it can come in useful.
In short, the adjectives Machine Games and Bethesda would likely use to describe the combat are, "intense," "visceral." On the other hand I'd use, "unfair," "not particularly enjoyable," "tedious," "exhausting." It could have been fine. If they had admitted to themselves that they made a modern shooter and used the standard regenerating health and been better about providing cover, it could have been mediocre. That's not much, but at least it's better than what they ended up with. I wouldn't recommend playing this game on anything above the two lowest difficulty settings. Actually I'm not sure I'd recommend it at all.