Much as Wolfenstein 3D set the stage for DOOM, Wolfenstein: The New Order set the stage for… DOOM (the 2016 version).
This isn’t a bad thing… but it also means that if you play DOOM before you play this game, this game will seem inferior by comparison in many ways.
You play as William Blazkowicz, a brick of a soldier, sent out to kill some Nazis. After suffering some head trauma, you awake in a world where the Nazis have won, and you, along with a small number of resistance fighters (but really, just you) must win the world back from the Nazis.
The game is broken up into 16 stages of various lengths. Some of these stages (particularly the first one) are pretty long, while others are extremely short, taking less than ten minutes to complete if you don’t bother exploring much. The stages theoretically take place in a variety of locations (though one location actually repeats itself four times, and three of the stages involve very little combat at all – though all of these are extremely short stages), from a Nazi science compound/castle to a concentration camp to… another Nazi science compound, actually, but this time ON THE MOON.
The game is full of Nazi iconography, due to the Nazis having conquered the world, and takes on a generally dark and somber tone – the Nazis have taken over the world and are horrible people. So the solution is to dual wield assault rifles and take them all down.
If this sounds a little bit jarring, it is because it is; the game is at times at odds with itself. You spend a lot of time sneaking around, and indeed, are rewarded for being stealthy (getting stealth kills on commanders not only stops them from spawning infinite reinforcements, but also reveals secrets on the map)… and yet, when you fight, you can dual wield pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and even sniper rifles. The game is full of ridiculous elements, like Nazi robots, and a base ON THE MOON, and yet the game tries to take itself seriously, with horrible things going on all the time, and the plot as a whole being very somber.
The result is a great deal of tonal dissonance. DOOM solved this problem by making you a ridiculous killing machine who doesn’t care about the plot IN CHARACTER. Wolfenstein… doesn’t solve this problem at all, which sort of undermines itself.
And this is hardly the only way in which it does so.
The game is full of collectibles, and you also unlock “perks” by accomplishing specific tasks in game, such as killing 80 nazis with assault rifles from cover, or killing 20 enemies stealthily with throwing knives, or blowing up multiple enemies at once with a grenade. Some of these are pretty easily done, but others require more doing, and some of the collectibles and all of the perks give you benefits for doing them – which creates a problem.
The thing is, the game really wants you to keep on moving. But the collectibles encourage you to spend a bunch of time searching around, while the perks often encourage somewhat unnatural behavior to unlock them. Both of these mess up the gameplay flow of the game.
The worst of it is, this is probably deliberate; while the game has 16 stages, as previously noted, a number of them are very short. As a result, beating all of the stages can be done within 18 hours or so even if you do look for collectibles… but the game is probably half that long if you just go through without really exploring. The thing is, the exploration in most of the levels doesn’t really give you a whole lot of bang for your buck, and as noted, the tonal dissonance of the darkness of the story and its more ridiculous elements undermines your ability to take the story seriously. It is a grimdark world, and like most grimdark worlds, it verges on being a parody of itself, and it isn’t really clear if it knows how ridiculous it is being.
I may sound down on it, but honestly, there were a number of moments in the game where I had fun. The thing is, the game kept feeling like it was pushing back on its own fun, and it didn’t feel like it quite made up its mind.
In the end, Wolfenstein is a power fantasy that periodically disempowers its protagonist, only for him to overcome it and start murdering Nazis again. It’s fun killing Nazis, but nothing here is as much fun as killing the demons in DOOM.
My personal advice? This is an okay game, and if you haven’t played DOOM yet, you’ll probably find it decent.
But honestly, I’d just recommend playing DOOM instead. You’ll probably have more fun with it, and it knows what it wants to be.
2.5