VideoGame Excellent All Around
Wolfenstein: The New Order is kind of hard to describe, in a way. It's got a not-serious premise that it takes seriously. It's got regenerating health with medpacks and non-regenerating armor packs. It's a gung-ho shooter with well-integrated stealth elements. However, everything is so well balanced that none of it seems out of place, and it all combines to make The New Order one of the best shooters I've played in a while.
The gameplay is fantastic. Everything just works. The guns are fun to use, particularly the automatic shotguns, and the "anything akimbo" mechanic is stupidly awesome; with different firing modes for each gun, you can tote an assault rifle in one hand and a rocket launcher in the other. Stealth is satisfying without being too intrusive. In combat, there's a sense of mobility that other shooters seem to lack; enemies move around a lot, keeping you from hunkering down, and you'll need to scrounge a lot for health and armor. The levels are fairly large to let you move around and strategize, and even the no-button cover system seems designed to let you break away as quickly as possible if need be. It makes the whole game feel very energetic. The perks also encourage you to experiment with different play styles without making the game too difficult if you ignore them.
The story is surprisingly good, and not just for a game where you blast cybernetic Nazi attack dogs with dual automatic shotguns. Legitimately good. It takes what could be (and sort of is) an incredibly goofy setting and treats it fairly seriously, making the world feel real and oppressive. Not many WWII games remind you why the Nazis were evil, so when the warden of a concentration camp compares the prisoners to cancerous tumors on society, it's pretty shocking. The characters, while not as rounded as they could be, are reasonably well-developed. However, I would've liked to see the villains a bit more. They're sufficiently frightening and vile while onscreen, but they're not onscreen a whole lot.
I was one of those who liked 2009's entry, but this game improves it in pretty much every way. It mixes the better of the old school with the good developments of the modern day, and makes its own tweaks to both to make everything run smoothly. If you like shooters at all, I strongly encourage you to try out The New Order.
VideoGame Good Gameplay, ruined by Terrible Story
What Machine Games has done to this series is the equivalent of someone taking Flash Gordon and trying to turn it into Sin City. I cannot express how often I was completely removed from my enjoyment of killing Nazis by the terrible story choices, dialogue and characters within this game. BJ's character is completely ruined, reduced to another boring ass sad sack whinny asshole who can't help but moan about how horrible war is and how he hates all the killing and blah, blah, blah. This is not BJ! BJ is Indiana Jones mixed with Doomguy, not some brooding little bitch who whispers constantly in a pathetic attempt to sound bad ass by speaking in purple prose.
Worse still they saddle him with a painfully bland forced romantic interest in Anya, who they continue to try and force upon us is so perfect and pure and BJ's soul mate and I can't stand it for a single second. She's a Mary Sue, plain and simple. It is so painful to watch as they try to convince you that this love is real and all I see is BJ sleeping with a girl old enough to be his daughter at this point because the writers wanted to give gamers something to wank off to. At the point BJ says all he wants is to see her face again while falling from space I was completely fed up. Just shut up and kill Nazis asshole!
But the most painfully terrible thing is the asspull that is the Ancient Order of Jewish Super Inventors who come out of nowhere. It would've been so easy to use time travel in this game and instead they opted for the biggest load of bull I've ever seen. This so-called order has a philosophy that makes no sense and dismisses the supernatural entirely, even though BJ himself has encountered it first hand and should probably be telling the ridiculously stereotypical representative of the super Jewish inventors off. At least previous elements in Wolfenstein were based on things that were real, this one is just something they pulled out of their butt hole to facilitate their stupid plot!
And why the fuck didn't they just A-Bomb Deathshead's compound in the first level? It's 1946! They have it! Use it!
This is without a doubt the weakest game in the series, bar none and the fact no one is calling it out on its bullcrap is absolutely insane!
Videogame A Great Interactive Movie
I had a hard time putting my thoughts of this game into words.
On one hand, I've beaten the game multiple times and enjoyed it immensely. The gameplay itself is freaking amazing, bringing in the old school run and gun gameplay from the past instead of the cover based/whack-a-mole style shooting of modern FPS. The plot is also incredibly engaging, with a large cast of unique characters, and unlike Bioshock Infinite, WTNO didn't pull any punches when depicting the true evils of racism and Nazism.
On the other hand, I find myself constantly criticizing the game compared to Wolf'09 and had nowhere near the enthusiasm for it that I did for its predecessor despite everyone and their mothers telling me it's a superior game. But I'm finally able to put my honest thoughts of this game into words.
This game is an interactive movie.
I generally don't play games to be told a story. I play games to reach through the fourth wall and BE PART OF a story. As a result, I've always considered player characters to be less actual characters and more a manifestation of me into the game world. Therefore, it's much more important to me for the player character to accurately reflect me during gameplay rather than be a compelling character in their own right. When I play WTNO, I'm having fun running around causing all sorts of mayhem (exacerbated by the aforementioned amazing gunplay), which means I end up taking the persona of a cocky badass straight out of a pulpy adventure novel/80's action flick. Because BJ had this characterization (what little there was) in previous games, BJ's thoughts and feelings during the story aligned with mine during gameplay, and there's no disconnect. Now, in order to give BJ more depth, they turned him into a brooding Byronic Hero, which is a compelling characterization, certainly, but it does get very awkward when I'm still having fun blasting my way through the Nazi hordes only to suddenly have BJ start moping about how his life sucks. Eventually, I ended up feeling less like I'm someone in the game world and more like an actor following a script.
Now the script is still amazing for sure and I have no reservations recommending this game to everyone. It's just that it's still an interactive movie when I've always cared more about immersion and gameplay over story, so the dissonance is incredibly bothersome to me.