Wolfenstein: The New Order (

2014

) ½

As a shooter protagonist, BJ Blazkowicz really was overshadowed by his successor: Doomguy. This is odd because on the surface they are basically the same character, a generic soldier type who moves around like he’s on a rocket-powered roller-skates and tanks injuries like he’s made out depleted-uranium refrigerators. Indeed, in the lore of the original Doom [1993], Doomguy was a distant descendant of Blazkowicz (which along with the budgetary restraints at Id Software explains why they look almost identical). The key is the setting, seeing a generic soldier guy battling Nazis is not exactly arresting, hell there were millions of them running around 75 years ago IRL. Seeing a generic soldier battling the forces of hell, well that’s a bit different. Doomguy stands out because of the absurdity at the core of his conflict. He is a mundane figure confronting the magical and surreal as it spills over into our material realm. He simply doesn’t fit with the world around him, and that tension is what makes him a compelling figure to this day.

The developers at Machine Games couldn’t exactly ditch Blazkowicz though, he’s been a series staple since Wolfenstein 3D [1992], which is to say ever since it was an FPS. They couldn’t just chuck him because he has the personality of a stale packet of potato chips, he’s far too iconic for that. So, to make him more interesting to the player, the developers tried to transform him into a more fully-rounded character. At times this is successful, like when Blazkowicz struggles with a complex espresso maker during a between mission’s cutscene. Despite a remarkable skill for killing Nazis, Blazkowicz is nonetheless out of place in this strange new sci-fi world. In this scene and others, he looks a bit like a confused gorilla trying to navigate a modern-day shopping mall. The brief romantic subplot in the game is also handled with surprising grace. Blazkowicz is a perfect gentleman to his love interest, Anya, right up until the game cuts away to a scene of them screwing. Polite, chivalrous, and virile. It’s exactly how a young man from the 1940s would behave in this circumstance; now you know what got your grandma so hot for your grandpa. Of course, not all attempts to humanize this block of wood are equally successful, and none fail more spectacularly than Blazkowicz’s voice-over narration. What dullard thought it would be a good idea to have the main character constantly reciting cringe-inducing, pseudo-poetic lines during the cutscenes?

The game is going for an alternative history style, which becomes apparent right from the very opening when a helpful text crawl informs you that the year is 1946, and WWII is still raging. Just once, I’d like to see an alt-history with the balls to start in say, November 1945, well after the war is over but not into the next year, if only to troll audience members with a looser grasp on dates. The war has been prolonged because unlike in real life, the Nazi quest for a Wunderwaffe actually struck pay dirt. The mad scientist, General Deathshead, has developed an army of robots and super-soldiers, along with all manner of sci-fi weaponry to support them. Armed with these doohickeys, the Nazis have pushed back the allies and are well on their way to winning the war. Unlike real life, where industrial apparatus would be scattered all across Europe and could only be ground down by a long war of attrition, Deathshead’s Wunderwaffe are all coming out of one fortress on the Baltic Sea. Hell, it’s even more centralized than that because it seems like if they just capture or kill Deathshead nobody else in the Reich will have any idea how to build or maintain all his cyber-nazi weaponry.

Obviously Deathshead and his fortress are the priority target for the allies, but rather than using a couple of A-bombs (remember its 1946, nukes have been a viable option for the past year) they opt for a manned infiltration instead. Naturally, America’s number one Nazi killer, Captain BJ Blazkowicz is leading the charge. Normally, having the video game protagonist present for your mission would guarantee success as they have unlimited continues, but the allied commanders made a crucial miscalculation: They thought this was the last mission of a game instead of the first. So, in short order, Blazkowicz and his men are captured by Deathshead, and the player is forced to make their only plot-critical decision for the entire game: whether to allow Deathshead to kill one of two possible allies. One has to wonder why they bothered with this, as all the choice does is determine which annoying side character you’ll be subjected to later on. The cynical part of me says it’s just so the back of the box/features list on steam can boast about how “your choices will matter.” After that Blazkowicz escapes, but is critically injured and spends the next 14 years paralyzed and recovering in a Polish asylum.

Despite being immobile for a decade and a half, Blazkowicz’s muscles don’t atrophy at all and when the player takes control of him in 1960 he is still roughly the size of a barn door. He also hasn't aged a day... Indeed everybody in 1960 looks the same as they do in 1946. As if aware of how absurd this is, the game pretends that he is somewhat incapacitated after he regains the ability to move, by occasionally blurring the camera and having him pass out in a cutscene. Never mind that his top run speed and his ability to tank bullets is completely unchanged! This absurdity is characteristic of the flaws in the game’s writing. It is constantly sacrificing believability in on the altar of action spectacle. If you stop to think about what is going on for more than a minute, you’ll realize just how stupid it all is. The game tries to keep the pace up, so you don’t think twice about the idiocy unfolding but at times it becomes downright distracting. In this case, it is a real missed opportunity, as a stage with a helpless, wheelchair-bound Blazkowicz could have been an interesting sequence in-and-of-itself. Imagine being blocked by the fact that the nearest exit is down a flight of stairs and having to traverse half the stage to get to the elevator. Apparently, someone at Machine Games agrees with me, because a stage in the sequel, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus [2017] has Blazkowicz in just such a predicament.

This isn’t the only point where the game’s need for cinematic action runs contrary to its need to make sense. Another, even more, absurd scene takes place in the second to last mission where one of the side characters drives a car off of a highway overpass, killing a couple of Nazis with the car only to be immediately shot and killed by the remainders of the squad. Why would you do that? Wouldn’t it be much more productive to park the car, snipe the Nazis from above, and then climb down with a rope or ladder? Is part of his plan to drive up the cost of car insurance in the Reich? The fact that this action results in the death of the side character makes him seem less heroic and more idiotic.

Once he’s out of the hospital, Blazkowicz begins to discover that the Nazis not only won the war but have gone on to take over the entire planet, and colonize the moon to boot. China, Russia, The USA, Japan, Italy, and Great Britain have all fallen under the German boot. A few pockets of the world remain as of yet unconquered, but that seems to be just because the Nazis haven’t gotten around to it yet, rather than the fact that anyone left has even the slightest chance of stopping them. Resistance against the German Reich has nearly collapsed, and the only remaining opposition to their rule in Europe is a single terrorist cell located in the heart of Berlin (as a nice touch, the city has been rebuilt according to Albert Speer’s plans for Germania). Naturally, Blazkowicz isn’t going to sit on his ass while the Nazis consolidate their rule over the planet, so he links up with this resistance cell and begins to plan his revenge on General Deathshead.

The quest for vengeance eventually brings him into contact with the source of the Nazis' superweapons. As it turns out they were stolen from a secretive cabal of Jewish scientists who have been developing and safeguarding highly advanced technology since ancient times. I know that the intentions of the developers were to just make a fun, pulpy sci-fi plotline but the implications of this don’t really sit well. Maybe because it sounds like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as interpreted by Alex Jones on a three-day peyote binge. The fact that Jews were developing weapons of mass destruction in secret shows that Nazi propaganda about Jewish conspiracies were not all nonsense (at least in the world of the game, back in real life it’s all comfortably bullshit). Which is an extremely odd and troubling conviction.

I’d be more inclined to overlook this ideological blind spot if the game didn’t have a side character who spends a whole cutscene talking about how Americans are the real Nazis, man; after all, the USA had segregated movie theaters which is totally the same thing as death camps. I’m not making apologies for segregation, but there is obviously a difference between American Jim Crow laws and German fascism. Perhaps Machine Games, based in Sweden, would be better served if they focused less on my country and started hunting Nazis a little closer to home. After all, Sweden not only stayed neutral during WWII but actively collaborated by letting the German army use its railways in the buildup to Operation Barbarossa and to this day the country has one of the highest rates of anti-Semitic crime in Europe. Tellingly, a poll conducted in 2005, said that about 15% of Swedes felt that “The Jews have too much influence in the world today.” I wonder how many of them are now working at Machine Games, making video games that imply that a secretive order of Jewish conspirators is steering the course of history?

Now that I’ve finished gripping about the plot and developers, let’s get on to gripping about the Gameplay, shall we? Wolfenstein: The New Order is the usual AAA-soup approach to FPS that takes a little stealth, a bit of shooting, and some token upgrades and combines them all together with little care for how they complement each other. The result is that neither the stealth nor the combat nor the upgrades feel very flushed out of important. Stealth in particular feels very tacked on as there are invariably sections where you will be spotted with no possible recourse. An especially annoying one happened in the third to last level where I opened up a door and was immediately spotted by a soldier who sprinted around the corner alerting the small army waiting in the next room. Even knowing that this would happen there was no chance to get a shot off at the guard, which makes me wonder how the hell he recognized me in the first place. The sound of my footsteps on the other side of the door? Not that the Stealth is particularly balanced in the first place, as guards tend to just stand around gormlessly with their backs to the most obvious avenues of approach. Moreover, they seem to have the reaction times of a heroin-addicted sloth, not noticing my character when he was plainly in front of their noses. They also seem to be a good deal weaker when caught unaware, as a single throwing knife to the back seemingly does more damage than ten shots from an assault rifle.

Difficulty becomes a bit unbalanced in the later levels on high difficulty. On the bridge level and the second level in London, I ran into a couple of brutally difficult sections here and there that took me multiple retries to clear. These weren’t against bosses or special enemies mind you, just regular stretches in the middle of the level where things got way harder out of nowhere. It always happened during the filler missions. Other sections in the late game, which were designed with a bit more care, like the moon base level and the final assault on Deathshead’s fortress never felt as unbalanced. Part of it is due to the fact that several enemy types are bullet sponges. I don’t care how much armor your wearing, a clip and a half of assault rifle bullets delivered straight to your head should be enough to bring you down.

The pacing of the game, especially for a AAA title, is handled with an unusual degree of skill. Most big-budget action games feel the need to jump from one massive set piece to another, always trying to ratchet up the intensity of the action from scene to scene. This gets even more ridiculous when they are part of a series and feels the need not just to one-up previous events in the game but also all the other games in the series as well. Since everything is dialed up to 11, nothing stands out and the whole campaign becomes monotonous. Wolfenstein correctly realizes that you can’t maintain this ramp-up for a whole 10-hour story campaign and instead alternates between action-packed missions and missions where you are preparing your next moves back at the base. The lulls make the action sequences more thrilling. They also help to break up the levels so that each one feels distinct, rather than just one long blur of gunfire and explosions. This is also helped along by some top-notch art direction that gives the various environments their own unique look and feel.

It’s not all roses though, and when each level tries to have its own distinct style you’re bound to have a couple that suck when compared to everything else. Wolfenstein: The New Order even manages to have a level that would suck if it was in Rogue Warrior [2009]. To the surprise of no one that has been playing games since the 16-bit era, it’s the water level. Seriously, I don’t know why this level wasn’t removed and replaced with an expository cutscene. It serves no purpose in the larger plot, as all you need to do is get torpedo to Blazkowicz can smuggle himself onto a U-boat. Moreover, it’s just so boring! You just float through the water, press a couple of buttons to raise or lower the water level, listen to Blazkowicz recite some bad poetry, float some more, and end with one really annoying shoot-out. To ease the monotony, Anya starts to send you diary entries left by her cousin. Up until his point in the game, our viewport into the world has been through Blazkowicz alone, which is to say through the viewpoint of a single-minded killing machine whose only aspirations is to discover new and horrific ways to murder Nazis. So, seeing a civilian’s perspective on the Nazi-occupied world could be an interesting diversion and a useful bit of world-building. But instead, Anya’s cousin is just as much a Nazi killer as Blazkowicz, and all her diary entries are about the different ways in which she killed Nazis. There is no shortage of Nazi killers in this game, adding another one just seems repetitive at this point.

Modern World War II games really seem to struggle with tone. As I mentioned in my review of Call of Duty: WW2 [2017], the conflict of World War II is so vast and complex that it could support almost any story one wanted to tell. There are just as many opportunities to tell serious stories about man’s inhumanity to his fellow man as there are chances to tell stories of light-hearted adventure and heroism. Nobody begrudges Kelly’s Heroes (1970) for not having a few scenes in a concentration camp to hammer home the brutality of the Nazi regime, nor does anyone complain about the lack of thrilling action scenes in Fires on the Plain (1959). One piece of media cannot capture everything that World War II was to all those touched by it, and only a fool would try. Yet there is no shortage of fools in this world because it seems like most WWII themed shooters feel an obligation to depict the conflict in its totality. Even worse, they also feel the need to refrain from offending the more delicate sensibilities of their audiences with too many uncomfortable historical truths. You really can’t have it both ways.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is somehow even more scatterbrained in its tone than Call of Duty: WW2 [2017]. At least the latter title was consistently trying to be a serious story, even though it continually pulled punches and sheltered the audience from the worst aspects of the conflict. Wolfenstein: The New Order spends 90% of its playtime being an action-packed spy adventure story, going so far as to have its hero jet off to the moon for a level. Then for the other 10%, it decides it needs to remind the player of the real-life atrocities committed by the Nazis, so we’re packed off to a concentration camp for a mission. Credit, where credit is due, the concentration camp here, is far more disgusting and soul-crushing than the one in Call of Duty: WW2 [2017], it’s just that it doesn’t fit the tone of the story at all. A game where you’re fighting Nazi space wizards shouldn’t have you crammed into a cattle car and shipped off to Auschwitz for a spell. Even if everything is handled perfectly, it still comes across as tasteless.