Kinda staggered by this one. I wasn't expecting anything, especially with it coming out two years prior to Doom 2016 and that game not really clicking with me, but I like Wolfenstein New Order way, way more.
The shooting is sharp and snappy. There's lots of little immsim elements. There's a *ton* of narrative, and the writing floats between Call Of Duty and actually quite good, with the occasional bit of eye-rolling cheese. Mick Gordon did the soundtrack, absolutely wild that Bethesda eventually managed to fumble him, and the directing is equally solid. There's a shot where the screen breaks into different comic panels, each of which shows something different, and then they naturally reassemble themselves into the original shot, and that should be an incredibly annoying flex but actually it was stylish as hell.
Unlike Doom 2016, the progression system here is mostly tied to how you approach combat. Based on the types of things you do, you naturally unlock perks that fit that playstyle. There's some pickups as well, and you can secret hunt a little, but you spend a lot of time in setpieces and tbh they're good ones. I said the writing was kind of like Call Of Duty sometimes, but the gamefeel of the setpieces is a dead ringer.
If I had to critique the game for something, it'd be that New Order has a pretty fixed idea of what it expects you to do in a given situation, and it will sometimes insta you if you behave unexpectedly. Deaths set you back a little ways, so this feels like a slap on the wrist for trying to play the way Wolfenstein wants you to play and think on your feet.
Fortunately, outside of the instadeaths you can play fairly messy and get by just fine. If you screw up a normal stealth segment, that just means you're in a firefight.
I do think the game's handling of the nazis is ultimately a little odd, in the sense that in order to tell the kind of story it wants to tell it's created some problems for itself. Basically, it needs its enemy to be both weak and strong. The nazis have to have conquered the world and present credible threat to the protagonists, but also they need to squish when you step on them and five guys in a garage need to be able to beat them. This leads to some moments where your suspension of disbelief takes a bit of extra effort, such as the getaway car being fully ventillated, running just fine, evading pursuit, and then going to a secret cool underwater trash base in berlin.
That said, when the nazis are being weird and cruel, the game works. You don't need extra suspension of disbelief to sell that someone whose priority is hurting people might occasionally do something stupid. They're just following their priority. And this in turn gives them strong heel heat and makes the many, many times where the game kills a nazi as a punchline feel earned.
I am a little worried that it's impossible for storytelling like this to hold up across multiple games. If every game ends with you beating the nazis, they stop feeling like a threat. But Wolfenstein is intrinsically about fighting the nazis. You can't just get a different villain. They have to keep coming back.
I'm also aware that Youngblood... exists. So I guess the balancing act did ultimately implode.
In any case, at least within this particular game, there's design and storytelling that hovers between good and great. It's hard to make any game at all, much less one this solid. If you like that particular kind of jank that was common in 00s shooters, this is absolutely worth it on sale.
