At a time where pretty much every game announced seems to be blindly following each other down the same road - a road of either trimming down, or ditching any sort of single player story altogether in favour for concentrating on the online multiplayer mode (for more, see: Why I won't be buying Titanfall), Wolfenstein: The New Order is a brave standout - a game that ditches the multiplayer altogether to focus on crafting a solid, lengthy, story driven adventure. This isn't one of those games you can finish in a few hours - it's a game you can plough evening after evening into without seeing everything there is to see.
A modern day reboot of a series that's been rebooted more times than we care to remember, Wolfenstein: The New Order sets out to breathe new life into a game that essentially single handedly popularised the first person shooter back in 1992. An alternate reality WW2 themed shooter, The New Order picks things up in 1946, as the Allies stage a last ditch assault on the Third Reich to begin a typical "what if" scenario - what if the Nazis won the war? What if, rather than being defeated by the twin powers of an unexpectedly resilient British, and an unexpectedly harsh Russian winter, Hitler had somehow managed to win, pushing east and west around the world until practically the entire planet had fallen under Nazi rule? And forget about 1946 - what would things be like in the swinging 60s if the Nazis were in power, with flower power replaced by nuclear bombs, rainbows and colour replaced by grey Nazi concrete, and hippies trampled under jackboots?
We're Nazis on the moon (we carry a harpoon!)
But Wolfenstein is far from an accurate recreation of the path the war could have taken - instead, it's a kind of dark sci-fi game, set in a world where the Nazis have taken their genetic experiments to the next level. With robot dogs, robot soldiers, giant robot mechs that you can drive around for yourself, and in one of the earlier games, giant robot Hitlers, it's all fairly fantastical stuff - and it's into this almost post-apocalyptic environment that the somewhat unfortunately named BJ Blazkowicz finds himself thrust. Having almost lost his life while trying to topple the nefarious General Deathshead, a Nazi scientist who conducted terrifying experiments on humans, melding man and machine, Blazkowicz ends up taking a shard of shrapnel to the back of his head for his trouble, earning himself fourteen years in a mental asylum in Poland. There, he met a nurse called Anya, who helped him regain his strength - until one day, the world was turned upside down again. The Nazis came to the asylum with orders to shut the place down, taking some patients with them, while murdering the others, and kidnapping Anya for her trouble. Managing to escape, it's up to you to find Anya, and join up with the resistance (making sure you listen carefully to their plans, as zey will say zem only once) to topple the Nazi empire, and bring General Deathshead down.
But Wolfenstein is anything but a run of the mill shooter. From its focus on telling a single player story, to its intricately hidden secret areas and collectibles, it's a game that strays from the norm in many different ways, although in some it's more successful than other. Attempting to give the game a more human feel, by making the story about the people behind the war, rather than two faceless sides going at it, it's a game that tries to make you care about the characters you're fighting alongside in the resistance, and the ones you're up against - but there's none of the subtlety that games like this really need. From Max Hass, a deformed, simple guy who kind of reminds you of Lenny from Of Mice and Men, to Klaus, a reformed Nazi who joined up with the resistance, too many of the characters still feel like poor caricatures rather than their deep, interesting people, and that does affect the story.
Still, slightly disappointing characterisation aside, almost everything else here is really good. One of the most impressive things about Wolfenstein is the amount of variety in its levels. From the opening, that sees you squeezing yourself between the instrument panels of a transport plane as you prepare to storm a castle (you even get to man the turrets and fight off the baddies for yourself), to swimming around a flooded cave using a personal submarine, stomping your way through a concentration camp in a liberated Nazi mech, or even, yes, heading off to the moon, each and every level is memorable in its own way - something that few other shooters manage.
One of the cooler features is that, as has become in vogue recently, you can upgrade your character to suit your play style. As you're playing through the game, depending on how you're playing, you'll unlock various "perks" - or, in plainer English, new special abilities that help you mould your character to your liking. Stealth kill a commander character (i.e. without being seen), and you'll unlock the ability to throw knives, an incredibly useful move that makes sneaking into bases and staying in the shadows a heck of a lot easier. Kill two enemies with a single grenade, and you'll unlock the ability to throw grenades back, while killing enemies using a handgun from cover lets you increase the size of your handgun's ammo clip. It's really rather cool.
Each level contains at least one secret area - like this little shooting hole in the castle.
There are loads of other nice little touches throughout the game too, that each help Wolfenstein add up to something rather special. Rather than throwing hundreds of enemies at you without any change of pace, there are plenty of quiet sections where the supply of enemies will drop off, and you'll be given a different sort of objective to complete. Whether you're sneaking up on a commander (a little meter pops up in the top right hand corner to let you know when there's one nearby, and if you can kill them without being spotted, it'll mark some of the collectibles on your map), admiring the retro signs and posters scattered about the place, or hunting down the game's many, many collectibles, there's plenty to do here beyond mindless shooting.
And in fact, the collectibles are one of the most interesting parts of the game. Hidden within each level are several different types of object waiting to be found, from vinyl records to golden artefacts and even concept art - but some are more useful than others, and some are harder to find. one of the more interesting collectibles are the Enigma code pages, of which each level has around half a dozen pages waiting to be found, often hidden in incredibly tricky places. While that's all straightforward enough, the cooler twist is that finding all of the pages of the Enigma code will let you unlock decryption puzzle, which, if you can solve, will let you unlock a cheat. Meanwhile, with no map to mark the collectibles on, no obvious glow or glisten to draw your eye to them, and the fact you have to be looking directly at them for the game to prompt you to pick it up, the collectibles can often be rather fiendish to find.
One of our favourite ones is hidden in the resistance's hideout. In this level, you'll be told to retrieve a document, which Max Hass has taken - but there are several ways of getting to it. If you want to stay in everyone's good books, you can go and talk to Max, and his guardian Klaus directly, getting a bit of backstory into their weird-yet-touching situation in the process. If you'd prefer a more direct route, you can go and find a crowbar, find where Max Hass has hidden it, and break the boards down yourself. Or, if you prefer the collect-o-phile route, you can find the hidden passage downstairs, and net yourself some hidden gold in the process too, before swiping the document without anyone being any the wiser.
Even the weapons here are more inventive than in other games, and it's not often we'll talk about the weapons in a first person shooter. A mixture of kind-of upgraded WW2 weapons and futuristic laser/beam devices, one of the handiest is called the Laser Kraftwerk, or LKW, which is a gun that serves a dual purpose - in its one mode, it can be used to zap enemies with laser projectiles, while in the other, it turns into a high powered cutting beam, which lets you cut through mesh, and certain metal crates alike, letting you nick the hidden items that were buried inside. Pretty cool.
Zzap
But sadly, Wolfenstein isn't without its flaws, and a few of them are big enough to sour the experience, at least for a while. Perhaps the biggest misstep it makes isn't so much in the story it tells, but how it tells it. Much like many other games, Wolfenstein is one of those games that thinks that over the top violence is both big and clever, and relies on shock value as a cheap way of getting an emotional reaction out of you, rather than going the trickier, yet more rewarding route of getting you to form a bond with a character. It's a ham fisted way of trying to fake a connection, and in the end it falls flat on its face, because explicit gore is only shocking the first time it happens. With the game pretty much opening by showing you a machine peeling the skin off a person's back, by the time one of the game's beaten up baddies grabs you, and pushes her mangled, deformed face as close to the screen as possible, spitting blood over you as she speaks, you're pretty nonplussed. It still churns the stomach, but you don't really care either way.
Unfortunately, it's not just violence either - what could be a touching relationship with Anya is spoilt when the two characters can't even go the space of a single level without succumbing to their carnal desires (a theme which replays itself several times during the game), with the end impression being they're only showing you it to make the game seem "mature". It's a shame, because Wolfenstein has a decent cast of characters - it's just rather than developing them, they've chosen to go the extreme violence route instead. We don't need to see a Nazi's throat being slowly torn open with your knife, thank you very much.
Another issue here is the accessibility, which isn't all that great. While the game does have plenty of tutorials, it also uses an absolutely tiny font to show you them in, which means you can't actually tell which button it's asking you to push. There's also a distinct lack of prompts in certain situations - like when you're attacked by one of the Nazi's robo-dogs. As the mechanised hound jumps on you, the game seems to transition into a cutscene, and we actually sat there for a few seconds waiting BJ to automatically fight it off - but it turns out that despite looking like we were no longer in control, it wanted us to mash the right trigger to fend it off. The fact waypoints have been hidden away on a separate map is an issue too, not only because it makes it far too easy to get lost (and sometimes the waypoints don't show on the map either), but it also means it's harder to go the opposite way to where the game wants you to go when you're hunting out collectibles...
You want me to push what now?
Still, flaws aside, Wolfenstein: The New Order is nevertheless is a refreshing change from the norm. As a shooter that focuses on producing a deep, lengthy, and varied single player campaign as opposed to a five hour blast in the hopes the multiplayer mode will keep you hooked, it's a game we're hoping to see sell well in in the hopes it'll encourage other developers to do the same. With a refreshing setting, levels that will stick in your mind, and a huge variety of things to do, Wolfenstein is a great pick for shooter fans - but one that may not be the best title to start with if you haven't played one before.
Format Reviewed: Playstation 4
