Wolfenstein: The New Order

Developed by MachineGames, Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game of extremes that goes from brilliant moments of action and character development to some absolutely boring and shallow ones in a matter of seconds. Its level design suffers from the same problem, sometimes being inventive, sometimes being limited and repetitive. It’s an FPS with good and bad ideas and the end result reflects this inconsistency.

The story begins with this franchise’s old protagonist, Captain William B. J. Blazkowicz, on a desperate mission to defeat the Nazi army in 1946. In the story, Germany has mysteriously acquired technology too advanced for its time and is using it to turn the balance of the war in their favor. The captain’s objective is to infiltrate the castle of the scientist Deathshead and kill him, eliminating one of the main figures responsible for controlling and improving this new weaponry. His team, however, fails in their mission and is caught, with Blazkowicz himself being wounded in the head. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a hospital, many years after the battle, when the Nazis had already won World War II.

The narrative moves fast from there. After fleeing from the hospital with one of the female employees, Blazkowicz attempts to locate a resistance group so that he can return immediately to the fight. Fighting, by the way, is one of the main elements that define the character. It’s no wonder that it’s during a moment of brutality, when soldiers are gunning doctors and patients in front of him, that the captain wakes up from his apparent coma: what moves Blazkowicz is violence and the desire to kill his enemies.

The protagonist faithfully represents the inconsistency of the game, ranging from boring cliché to surprising complexity. On the one hand, Blazkowicz is your typical FPS protagonist: the big athletic white man of few words that boasts a hoarse voice and a tendency to enjoy violence. His thoughts – which come up almost like whispers during the levels – develop this side of him, painting Blazkowicz as a “badass” that has gone through a lot in life and has become stronger because of it. On the other hand, there are scenes when he shows a lot of vulnerability: his unshakable appearance is revealed to be a mask, which is always removed when the violence becomes overwhelming. The climax of the first level, though cliché, works precisely by showing Blazkowicz completely lost, not knowing how to act, feeling helpless before the events.

More important, however, is the fact that the game recognizes that the protagonist could very well have been fighting for the Nazis. His blue-eyed biotype clearly fits the concept of the superior Aryan race advocated by German officials. This is important not only because it serves as a comment on the current state of the FPS genre – Nazis would love this genre’s typical protagonists – but also because it develops Blazkowicz a bit more.

A counterpoint will make this clearer: one of the resistance members working with Blazkowicz is a retired Nazi who switched sides when his son was born with a deformity and had to be sacrificed for the sake of the purity of his race. The character, therefore, changed sides not because he felt it was right, but he was wronged and now wants revenge. Blazkowicz, on the other hand, confronts the Nazis simply because he understands that they are horrible monsters: even though he’s someone who would have greatly benefited from the Nazi regime, he opposes it on principle.

The Nazis themselves are yet another element developed in an uneven way in The New Order. The two major antagonists of the game are sadistic and abominable creatures, who take pleasure in torturing people and have no redeemable traits. The main antagonist, Deathshead, is even named like a villain from a superhero story. Nazis are often portrayed in narratives as absolutely evil and monstrous, in a pattern that has unfortunately proved insufficient to alert people to the cruelty of their ideology. On the other hand, Blazkowicz can find German letters during the levels that show multifaceted individuals who, despite defending a racist and violent ideology, still show signs of still being human: one of the first letters that can be found by Blazkowicz, for example, is written by an officer who, on a trip to Africa, after a violent encounter with those he calls “savages”, reflects on the horrors of war, laments his decision to become a military man and expresses concern and love for his beloved. The Nazi here is portrayed as a person: a horrible, despicable person, without a doubt, but still a person.

This is actually a pattern in The New Order: character development is more layered in optional letters and secondary audios than in the main story. One of the most fascinating figures in the game, the nurse Ramona, for instance, appears only in audios narrated by Blazkowicz’s romantic pair, Anya. Whilst Anya’s development is almost non-existent during the cutscenes – she likes the protagonist because “why not” and fights the Nazi because “hell yes” – Ramona is shown to have moral conflicts and dilemmas and even idiosyncrasies in her way of speaking: she’s always cynically “discovering” a particularity of the Nazis to murder them with it. It is a tragic character that recognizes the complexities of the situation in which she finds herself, but does not hesitate to do what she can to help everyone.

Spoilers until the end of the paragraph: the audios open the possibility that Ramona is only a persona of Anya, and that the events described with the nurse have, therefore, actually occurred to her, which doesn’t change the fact that all the character development takes place through these secondary audios and not during the main cutscenes.

These cutscenes, however, deserve applause for their surprisingly witty editing that employs several visual match cuts to accelerate time: one of the most inspired ones has the scenery suddenly changing from a room on a train to one in a hotel, putting the characters in their next destination in a split second.

With some strong moments of social criticism – the systematic and institutional racism of pre and post-War America makes a certain character compare the American people to Nazis in a scene of pure revolt –, The New Order also oscillates between being socially relevant and completely innocuous. The game’s level design follows suit. For every provocative and ambitious level, as the one staged in a concentration camp, there is also some filler, like all the moments that take place in the sewers of a resistance base, which don’t develop a single remarkable mechanic or idea.

The levels themselves are divided into combat arenas interconnected by corridors and stairs. Players have at their disposal a vast arsenal and can even wield two weapons at the same time. But there is also a contradiction present in its design. The New Order normally encourages an active stance, putting the player always on the move, either with destructible covers or with an AI programmed to flank. But, on the other hand, the game is also rife with sponge-like enemies that can quickly dispatch you with massive laser weapons, which ends up stimulating a defensive approach, with the player avoiding leaving cover.

Moreover, the game offers a simple stealth approach that involves three options: shooting with a silencer, throwing a knife, or performing a takedown when approaching an enemy silently when crouched. The problem is that Wolfenstein is not Deus Ex:  the levels are not designed in a way that enables the player to do everything silently: stealth is not an alternative but a plus. There are enemies absolutely immune to this approach and levels in which shooting everyone is mandatory. In the highest difficulties, it’s advisable to kill the so-called “commanders” silently to avoid reinforcements, but the function of stealth ends here.

Finally, a point where The New Order gets very right is the character’s progression system, which works hand in hand with the way players express themselves on the battlefield as it unlocks new skills and upgrades as they perform certain actions. Using a specific weapon, for example, increases its ammo capacity while acting stealthily increases the movement speed when crouched. The progression system here is an organic one, being built from the player’s own actions, and avoids falling into abstractions such as experience points.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game with a lot of ups and downs. Its narrative oscillates between some fascinating scenes and some tedious ones, while its level design offers combat arenas that are designed for long and intense shoot-outs but also packed with enemies that usually drive the player into a corner. In the end, it’s still a good game, but one marked by its unevenness.

June 21, 2019

Review originally published in Portuguese on April 06, 2018.