A break in the role for action - Wolfenstein The New Order

Shooters are such a weird thing to me, nowadays.

First off, not that many people played Doom or Quake. Not among the gamers you see talking about "old school" shooter design. I've come to the conclusion "old school" is basically the most meaningless pair of words you can see applied to a shooter, and that people say they played old school in the same way people claim nintendo and apple are innovators.

Wolfenstein The New Order is old school, according to the usual chorus of voices on the internet that always say that. But that doesn't actually mean anything, and if you're like me and expecting a Doom/Quake early era design... Welp, forget it, that's not this game. That's not this game at all.

Second, texture pop in is so strange. I only ever see it in shooters, for obvious reasons, but it's just so wonky to me. It feels like something you shouldn't ever see, but you clearly do, and what's up with that?

Also was I the only one who seriously thought this game would pick up after the earlier Wolfenstein and just involve a time travel plot? I guess that's sort of a spoiler, but it doesn't involve any time travel, which totally disappointed me. I guess that's sort of the theme of this game and my interactions with it.

Wolfenstein TNO is a first person shooter about violently attacking fascist ideology with firearms, and then a lot of strangeness around that. If you played the last Wolfenstein shooter, though, you'll be confused to find this is more of a "weird science" than "occultism" centric shooter, which I believe goes more toward the game's roots but I could be remembering wrong.

It's also kind of generic among id games for that. Actually it kinda reminds me of Fallout mixed with Quake 2. It sort of does that more than anything, though.


I've played three roleplaying games and a platformer in the last two months. There's some elements I would contrast with WTNO. Going into this game I expected the writing to be probably the worst of all the not-Shantae games. But Shantae proved to have better writing than Divinity Original Sin while Wolfenstein, in all honesty, is actually closer to the Witcher in writing. Close than D:OS, closer than I expected. Divinity Original Sin is closer to a tire fire. The New Order is also closer to the Witcher in terms of sexuality, which was completely unexpected. There is sex in WTNO, but it's more played to ... Ah, I don't know, the need for human intimacy in the face of nerve-wracking tension and laboring at the edge of horror. It's a little awkward, but the game's writing is strong enough I thought it fit nicely.

I will note that TNO actually feels not a little but a lot Fallout, and I started to get the hankering to pick up Fallout 4 while playing this. I'm not saying the writing is altogether great, but I liked Anya and I liked the supporting cast. I'll talk about Nazis and writing Nazis in a bit. Better than expected is always a good place to be, though.

Visually, Wolfenstein The New Order is a complete non-starter when it comes to being a surprise. Its an id tech game, it looks gorgeous, it has lots of texture pop in. Not much else you can really bother to say - id tech games pretty consistently look great, but they also seem to have the worst texture pop in. I'm imagining being stuck at 2 gb ram on the GPU isn't the best choice but this is a recurring theme. Hopefully when I grab DOOM this year they've fixed that, or it's just going with 2 GB and I'll buy a new GPU to fix that.

Oh, the one stand out section is on the moon, and was some of the best fun I had with the game. Had that Dead Space feel of the designer trying to make a legitimate site out of science fiction. That's a bt of a spoiler, but I wanted to mention that. The visuals were really great there, though it does feel like they cut content midway through the level.

The UI is pretty normal stuff, a little bit lacking but in the usual ways. Iconography is sometimes poorly chosen, your ammo isn't obvious enough on some weapons, but this is all pretty common in shooters.

Audio wise, game is rock solid. The music isn't overbearing, but it's solid across the game, with a couple great tunes but mostly just "quite good". Sound effects are good, nice and punchy. The voice acting is very, very strong. BJ has a lot of quiet lines you might miss that breath characterization without being intrusive, and interactions between the characters are generally quite good. The voice actress for the secondary protagonist, a polish woman (in both cases) does a stand out job.

I think WTNO might be unique in gaming for me that I don't think I hit a single bug. I mean maybe I did without noticing, but other than the usual FPS AI being kinda dumb at times the game ran a solid 60 fps without crashing or hiccuping once.

Combat is, to be honest, a mixed bag. I started out playing on the middle difficulty and found the game rapidly deteriorated into pure bullet sponges. The game seems really confused about what kind of game it wants to be, and you end up with this weird half old school half cover shooter, with parts missing from each. So that's kinda weird, but what's kinda dull is just... Enemies take so many hits you just run out of ammo fighting them. I had to turn down the difficulty in the one section because I emptied multiple clips into armored enemies and they just did not die. Eventually I turned it down one step, because you'd fight 12 guys at a time and run out of bullets. I'm a bad shot.

The game is good at making you feel like you're playing it wrong, but googling doesn't seem to turn up much. People post things like "just get behind them and shoot their weakspot" but enemies just seem to instantly see me, lock on and never stop spitting hitscan rounds at me. If you're familiar with that grating irritation where enemies have unlimited ammo, spray it nonstop, and then drop nine bullets... Get accustomed to it.

I think you might seriously benefit from doing this game stealthy, but there's sections I couldn't figure out how you stealth, and those were usually the worst ones. The game simply does not seem to be coded for enemies to "forget" to be on high alert, they just kept finding me instantly and back to dodging hitscan weapons... And by dodge I mean going into cover, because you can't strafe and scoot Doom style.

Enemy design is... Terrible. It's weird, I feel like the last Wolfenstein game I played had more variety and felt fairer. I think I was mis-using the cover mechanics - I'm pretty sure this game is like DEHR where you're supposed to "stick" to cover, but F that - but enemies just locked on and stayed on, firing hitscan weapons endlessly. Anyway they all look the same and the only real difference is how much armor they're wearing. Honestly the lower end guys don't have much lower DPS, and since every fight involves hitscan with absurd accuracy you don't notice much difference. You can't stand in front of them.

You may notice that enemies just seem to randomly appear in spots in Wolf:NO. They do. Enemies are simply teleported in, though if there's infinite respawns or what, I'm not certain. I don't think so. What I do know is that this sucks, sucks hard, and had me suspicious from early on. Until an enemy appeared out of thin air in front of me. So sometimes you'll think you have the lay of the land, when a soldier will spawn in your blindspot and start pelting you. Argh.

The guns are great, but Wolf:NO is a game with too many additions. The original Crysis has a scroll wheel of abilities to quickswap to, and I can remember this working wonderfully. The scrollwheel in Wolf:NO is just awful, and I'm not exactly certain why. Well, for one thing, it has too many options. I don't know why it feels the need to have single and dual wield on the same wheel, and I also don't know why you have so many samey or useless weapons. On the other hand I just hate alt-fire options nowadays. Why can't I just have a missile launcher and not switch to firing rockets from my machine-gun? It's just gimmicky. All the weapons feel good but between alt-fire and dual wielding, and half that being on the scrollwheel while the other half doesn't, it just didn't work for me at all.

Also, you get stripped of ammo after every level and I honestly wasn't sure the designers knew this was happening, so fights flopped around in terms of difficulty. I mean, ultimately, the combat just isn't as good as RAGE, which is ... Weird to me. But it isn't bad or even approaching bad, it's fine, it just feels that much like RAGE you have this weird hybridization of old and new elements going on that don't feel like they mesh together perfectly. Most of the time it's quite solid, but it's often at the mercy of the level design. Granted, and just to be clear, RAGE hybridized three different things on top that had nothing to do with shooting.

But again, kinda weird how both games feel really Fallout-y.

There's a problem I have in my mind I kinda refer to as "the Crysis 2 problem", which is when urban geometry is bent and twisted to conform to FPS standards and creates level design that has very specific paths that all look like other, not paths through the geometry. The game usually has good flow, then you hit this issue and it can be incredibly frustrating abruptly. Then back to normal. This is an issue that bothers me in lots of games.

I mean, basically, I don't think the level design works with being a cover shooter, but the enemy health pool is so massive on even the middle difficulty you need to duck into cover just to reload during firefights to kill all but the most basic enemies. It gets monotonous and samey. I ended up turning down the difficulty near the end, and then just putting it on the easiest set at the awful last boss.

The perk system is probably one of the worst systems I've seen jammed into a game in my life. Basically you can get achievements, which unlock new abilities. I didn't engage with it til the latter half of the game, and all the perk stuff is just stupid to unlock. Like you imagine you'll unlock stuff as you play, but no, you won't. Not naturally. There's stupid stuff like "kill enemies while sliding" and "headshot an enemy with the pistol" to unlock basic stuff. You're never going to do this stuff without looking at the perks.

Again, it's like one system meshed with another. It's achievements, in the more useful sense, unlocking basic upgrades. You need to look up the perks and force yourself to do them as soon as possible.

Nazis are such a weird topic to discuss, but here's my big problem with using nazis in a game that is akin to the Man in the High Castle - that is, years after the war - it just doesn't feel like it is being used beyond anything but lazy writing. It's 1960 and they're almost identical to their wartime attitude. Hitler is still alive, of course, and they're still jackbooting around. The problem here is you really don't want to humanize the post-victory nazis, you don't want to have them move on or move forward other than putting soldiers with laser guns on the moon. So you can't really move forward the timeline.

It feels like you could do interesting things, build a timeline around fascism breaking down and the cost of perpetual conflict rising too high, but you can't because you can't humanize them so you're left with laser guns and moon nazis. Which is visually cool, but kinda messes with the need to go to 1960. Bit disappointing. And don't get me wrong, there's some stuff here where BJ actually thinks about what he's doing and he's more than a little disgusted with some of his acts.

Also, as a mild spoiler, there's a subplot dealing with the 'source' of the sudden improvements in nazi technology that have nothing to do with other wolfenstein games, very little meaningful to do with the game's plot and just ... Felt incredibly weird. It felt like someone wanted to put the Dwarves from Morrowind in the game and I'm just not sure why. It is dropped almost immediately.

Anyway, concluding thoughts: Did WTNO surprise me, and would I recommend it? To the former, yes, but not necessarily in good ways. The combat is very, very cover shooter and doesn't feel as exciting as I'd like. It's not doom and no, it is not 'old school'. It's a cover shooter through and through, albeit without regenerating health, which just felt bizarre. The biggest issue is the level designer is just kind of crap, and you have a lot of spots where it's hard to pick out if/where enemies are firing from, even before they start spawning in random places.

The writing and characterization, however, even given my misgivings above, was just miles ahead of what I was expecting. There's an almost touching sombre and bittersweet tone to the game. It's certainly not as vainglorious as I expected, much the opposite. The ending sucks and is entirely a sequel

The RPG elements, perks and collectibles and stuff just don't add much to the game for me. There's a section of the game where the secondary protagonist reads off her cousin's diary about killing nazis, and while I understand the story purpose it comes off as weirdly celebratory.

So, in summary, while I'd recommend the game I'm a bit surprised at its nine out of ten rating, but it's entirely likely I'm just not good at gelling with cover shooters. I expected a big step up from RAGE, but instead it feels like an id tech reshuffle, with a little less texture pop in. It feels rather 'designed by committee'. I won't be picking up the Old Blood, but I'm definitely grabbing Doom this year and I'll probably pick up the sequel to this game years from now.