Wolfenstein: The New Order

Oh gosh, I was going into this expecting something just alright but I was quite surprised by this latest entry into the Wolfenstein franchise. The last entry from 2009, just titled Wolfenstein, was pretty forgettable and before that, there had been no entries for 8 years before that so the franchise had, for the most part it seemed, fallen by the wayside.

The main thing that stood out to me when I was playing through Wolfenstein: The New Order was that the developers really seemed to care about the game that they were making!

Generally Wolfenstein isn’t known for its story but The New Order attempts and actually succeeds pretty well at giving B.J. Blazkowicz characterization instead of being not much more than a blank slate like he generally is. There are a few other characters who are all fairly unique and interesting but the main focus is really on B.J. for the most part. You also have a choice to make fairly early in the game which changes some mostly minor elements of the game.

I really enjoyed the designs in the game, even if some of them were a bit gruesome to say the least. You’ve got a range of varying creations from dogs with armour plating grafted on to them to a giant tri-legged robot the size of a city building!

The gameplay was quite enjoyable too. Being a Wolfenstein title, it’s a singleplayer first person shooter. It’s a nice change going back to having to pick up health packs and armour instead of having blood smeared on the camera. For the most part, I had no real issue with finding enough health and armour can drop from some enemies but it would probably vary greatly on the highest difficulties.

So, yeah! I haven’t really had a lot to say but I quite enjoyed my time with Wolfenstein: The New Order! The inclusion of a proper story was surprisingly, the gameplay was pretty fun despite my first assumption that I would run out of health way too often and wow, I can’t really say enough about the designs! It’s very much still a silly game in concept, something I always think wouldn’t look out of place as a stereotypical ‘murder simulation’ videogame in a movie, but a very much enjoyable one nonetheless!

Developer: MachineGames
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Released in 2014
Platforms: PC, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One