#may you find something that brings you as much joy as shooting rockets at random animals brings to James

[asparklethatisblue]

Happy new year, I hope everyone had lots of fun aiming rockets at nothing!

A little James cause he makes me feel better and also for @theterrorbingo “Congreve”

[everygame]

Wolfenstein: The New Order (PS4)

Developed/Published by: MachineGames / Bethesda Softworks Released: 20th May, 2014 Completed: 21st June, 2017 Completion: Finished it almost completely on Bring It On! until I got real bored, because I’d got all the perks other than the stupidly random demolition ones. I didn’t get all of the collectibles, sometimes they showed up on the map and sometimes they didn’t? What was up with that? Trophies / Achievements: 70%

Hmm, this is why I should write these as soon as I finish the game in question, because it’s been a little too long since I finished this for me to be writing it up for it to sparkle in my memory. However, at the time I’m writing it, it all feels rather topical, what with Nazis literally rallying in the USA last weekend (“Mathew is writing this in mid-August. For all we know Wolfenstein: The New Order’s plot has become literally true by the time you read this. Has it? Please tell us it hasn’t.”—Ed.) and so let us begin.

So why did I decide to play this weeks before we’d all need a Nazi punching simulator close to hand (for when there weren’t any actual Nazis nearby, who you would obviously already be punching)? Well, it’s because I saw that trailer for Wolfenstein: The New Colossus at E3, and I thought… bloody hell, they really managed to get the look of one of those sixties TV programmes right, huh? It doesn’t look digital, the lighting is right, the costumes, the performances… it blew me away. Anyway then I pretty much immediately stopped watching the trailer.

It’s weird because it’s not like that kind of attention to detail from their marketing department meant I was going to enjoy their game or anything. And I did slightly swither on this, for a very classic “me” reason. You see, Wolfenstein: The New Order is—rather absurdly—an actual sequel to ID’s 2009 Wolfenstein, which even itself is a sequel to 2001’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein. And although I’ve played Return To Castle Wolfenstein, I didn’t play its sequel, so I was like… hmm, am I going to miss important references if I just skip to the sequel that came out five years later?

The answer is… only really with one character, and I suppose it’s debatable how much you would really want to play through an (apparently) 30-odd hour campaign in a game that isn’t generally considered to be that good to get slightly more background on one character. For once, thankfully, I decided against it.

Anyway. Here’s the thing. Wolfenstein: The New Order is—and I bet you every single critic wrote this at the time, and hell if I can avoid it—weirdly old school! I don’t feel like I’ve played an FPS like this one since, like… fuck, I don’t know, the Half Life 2 episodes or something. Because Wolfenstein is: super, super long; broken up into discrete levels but each level is usually pretty open; and all about health-packs and armour for survival. It feels odd!

And actually, I don’t entirely get the sense that MachineGames was completely comfortable with it. Don’t get me wrong: The New Order is extremely polished. But it’s also… sort of… wildly inconsistent in terms of both tone and design.

Design first: the game sort of wants to give the player complete freedom to play it as a balls-to-the-wall Wolfenstein-me-do—as you can dual wield everything and just run wildly into battle—but also as a stealthy sort, with lots of silent kill options and bonuses for doing so (such as avoiding new baddies spawning.)

The issue is, of course, is that stealth is the better option because of those bonuses. Killing a commander silently and avoiding new enemies spawning mean that you save ammo and health, and the game’s fiction makes running into any building and just lighting it up feel insanely unsurvivable (even if you can.) Problematically, stealth kind of blows because of the first-person perspective: I’d often find myself doing something like silently murdering a commander while someone watches me because I didn't turn my head 45 degrees to see them standing right there (and i can’t just blame first-person for this: the stealth in something like Far Cry 3, from two years earlier, is superb.) And the shooting is just kind of... loose feeling? When you’re letting go and just running around murdering nazis, you never feel masterful, and I can’t quite pinpoint why it doesn’t feel as amazing as it should. Maybe some of it is to do with the design of enemes, of course, which for some reason are often bullet sponges and—absolutely worst of all—armour plated, meaning that you have to watch your bullets ping off a lot until you hit the right spot. That the biggest and most horrifying enemies are fully armoured completely removes any joy you get from taking them apart—even with a rocket launcher. The lesson here: nazis are better when you can pound their pasty white flesh into a pink paste. if they’re going to be armoured, let it be a helmet we can ping off with a bullet (that also embeds in their cranium, preferably.)

So it’s not quite there in game feel, and the tone is also a case of wondering exactly what they were trying to go for. I mean, in a game this long it’s possible they just wanted to have their cake and eat it, but what we have here is a game that simultaneously wants you to think about the real horror of the actual nazis—human vivisection, concentration camps—while also enjoying the camp of "cinematic" nazis—who are all about, you know, being “nazis… but in space!”

Just like the design, it so totally allllllmost works. The things that make you consider—you know—how bad the nazis actually were are not merely disturbing but often moving, and at the same time, going into space and seeing a 60s pulp nazi moon base is fun as heck! Really the game feels like, well, this, where you have an alternate reality Jimmy Hendrix (ok) talking about racism in America (good) only to then, uh, take acid and have a guitar freak out with BJ (genuinely idiotic). It’s not like the stupid stuff removes the good stuff—you can enjoy it—it’s just... why.

The fact is, that I’d probably give the entire thing a pass if I hadn't got tired of Wolfenstein about two-thirds of the way through, and had to (for my own sanity) blast through the rest on easy even though I was committed to and interested in the story. Instead Wolfenstien: The New Order gets a partial credit, because killing nazis is right and just and feels good, man.

Will I ever play it again? No sir! However I’m pretty sure I’m going to want to play the sequel, The New Colossus. I’m happy to skip The Old Blood, tho.

Final Thought: So, there’s a pretty nice and clean way to "fix" one of my biggest complaints about The New Order, and it’s weird that they didn’t do it and I wonder if it was something that they’d planned and then—after word from higher up—decided not to do. You see, the “timelines” split after a decision fairly early in the game, and there’s simply no reason that you don’t split the levels up between the timelines. So—for example—you’d be stealing a nuclear sub in the Fergus timeline, and going into space in the Wyatt timeline, and dealing with the Nazi threat in a unique way in each. Heck, you could even, if you felt like it, make one story the grimmer reality, and the other the wackier one. And each timeline would still have been about bloody ten hours long.

But yeah, “players shouldn’t miss out on content” probably. Let’s take a look and see how many people on PS4 have finished the game, eh? Ah, 37% of owners. Brilliant decision.