'Wolfenstein: The New Order' Review: Nazi Killing Is Still Fun [VIDEO]
"Wolfenstein: The New Order" is another game in the inundated genre of first-person shooters. Now I’ve said in the past that I’ve grown weary of the “shoot this, blow that up, make big explosions” bro attitude, but every now and then a shooter comes along that has a good reason to play it.
The New Order, like other Wolfenstein games, puts you in the shoes of B.J. Blazcowicz. His business is killin’ Nazis, and admittedly, he’s pretty good at it. The twist is that the Nazi Reich has developed some kind of super-advanced, steampunk-ish military technology, and they’re takin’ it to the Allied Forces. Our main man gets captured and spends 14 years as a vegetable in a Polish asylum, but his soldier instincts kick in when a Nazi platoon arrives to purge the facility.
It turns out the Nazis won the war, and even America surrendered unconditionally. Hitler rules the world, and Blazcowicz is intent on finding resistance pockets.
I got an hour or so with “The New Order,” and I have to admit I was impressed. I played on a PS4 and had audio through some Turtle Beach headphones, so everything looked and sounded pretty sweet. Everyone expects that from a new shooter, though -- all the big explosions and loud noises need to be as real as possible. The controls are slick too; MachineGames didn’t deviate from Call of Duty’s layout, and that’s not a bad thing. It means you won’t have to learn a brand new setup for this game, and as a seasoned FPS player, everything works as you expect.
Explosions aside, the driving factor in my positive review is the story -- odd for a shooter, I know -- but 'The New Order' looks like it’ll actually entertain you past all the guns, especially if the game has a few U.S.-based missions. The thought of an oppressive foreign force controlling your home country is a standout in games. Usually developers just send you into some ill-fortuned Third World country to destroy things in the desert. Or Russia. Russia’s popular.
But I can’t think of a game that made me feel like my actions mattered to the country. Homefront tried a few years ago, but it was a classic example of “good concept, bad execution.” I’ve got high hopes for the full game.
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