Sponsored By: Godzilla Blitz
Time Played: 59 minutes
Achtung Baby Review
Killing Mecha-Hitler was just the beginning.
Der Commisar’s In Town Review
Wolfenstein 3D is, nearly literally but not quite, the granddaddy of first-person shooters. I say nearly because I'm pretty sure that Wolfenstein 3D did not have a drunken tryst with a Black Sabbath album that resulted in Doom being created nine months later. If we're going to carry the family metaphor properly, Wolfenstein 3D is more like Doom’s older, less famous brother.
I'm getting bogged down in semantics here (yay, writers!). The point is that Wolfenstein 3D is very likely the first experience most people had with a first-person shooter.
After years – decades, actually – of sequels and reboots, Id software, newly owned by Bethesda Software, decided to try a rebooted sequel: Wolfenstein: The New Order.
You step into the shoes of BJ Blascowicz again. The year is 1960, and despite your best efforts in the first game, the Nazis are winning. Or possibly have already won, and this is a World War Three: the Allies Strike Back. I'm fuzzy on that, probably because it doesn't really matter all that much.
You're BJ. There as more Nazis to kill. Go kill them. Oh, but they're more prepared for you this time, evidenced by the truly confusing opening tutorial.
I say confusing, but perhaps I mean disorienting. You are in an airplane en route to a Nazi stronghold, and it's not going well. The plane is taking fire, and you have to fix it while the pilot yells at you.
I always find these sorts of tutorials incongruous, because they usually give you a generous amount of time to complete the “urgent” tasks that the voice on your radio is screaming about. Somehow, though, I still manage to feel incredibly harried as I fumble through the controls trying to remember where I mapped the Alt key on my Nostromo.
After that, it's straight-up Wolfenstein. Crawling through corridors, picking up health and ammo and, above all, shooting Nazis. They threw in some new twists. Some, like the ability to dual-wield any weapon in the game, are welcome and fun. Others are, well, they're new! Like how you have to pick up ammunition manually instead of walking over it. I'd be fine with that, but they make you pick it up seven or eight bullets at a time. That's a lot of wear and tear on an E key if you don't have particularly good fire discipline.
One nice addition is the added effort to the game's writing. BJ has been fleshed out some, and he's more introspective than a lot of people can comprehend. I recall hearing a lot of podcasts trying to reconcile the dual-wielding, kick-gum-and-chew-butt gameplay with the thoughtful “war never changes” aura coming off of the protagonist. This is, I suspect, because a lot of people have never seen the Rambo movies.
It seems to me that Rambo had some influence over the writers, because contrary to the ‘roided up, brainless action hero that people who have never seen First Blood think Rambo is, the character of John Rambo is a very deep, conflicted person. He wants to go home, but he can't and he knows he can't. He is a warrior, and a good one, in a world that neither values nor wants warriors around, except to do the dirty jobs that such a civilization occasionally needs done. The bitterness engendered by that fact is manifest all through the series, and he finally comes to terms with it in the fourth movie (which is excellent, though it is graphically brutal in an entirely appropriate way) when he accepts that he has been a force for good, whether other people want to think of it or not.
There’s one moment in the fourth movie in particular that came to mind while playing Wolfenstein: The New Order. In the movie a mercenary starts to panic and makes a move to bug out of a mission. Rambo stops him and says “There isn't one of us that doesn't want to be someplace else. But this is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something. Your call.”
That’s BJ Blascowicz of the Wolfenstein: The New Order summed up in 30 words. He doesn’t want to be here. Nobody wants to be there. But there is no happy ending. That’s for other people, that’s the thing that you fight and die for.
That’s not inconsistent; that’s complexity in a character that you wouldn’t think has any claim to being complex. Well done, Bethesda.
Will I soldier on?
I really want to say yes, but I just finished Doom, I’m still working on Battleborn and, to be frank, I’m a little FPS’d out.
This one is definitely worth returning to, though. I’ll keep it on the hard drive for when I’m ready for mouselook again.
Is it the Devil Daggers of surprisingly deep reboots?
Aside from the insults the game hurls at you for picking easy difficulties, I’m going to say no. The petty insults worked and kept me from playing on the lowest difficulty, which is generally my default these days because I’ve embraced my inner tourist. Even then, the hardest part has been remembering to punch E every time I want to pick up a bullet.
Three out of thirteen daggers. It’s not particularly easy, but it’s not flaunting its difficulty in your face either.
Comments
One of the most appalling-yet-brilliant things to come out of TNO: an entire album of "what the radio would be playing in 1960 if the Nazis had won".
Neumond Recordings
It's quite horrifyingly catchy. (I sometimes find myself humming "Mein kleiner VW" without even thinking about it.)
I very much enjoyed Wolfenstein, but I too was worried about FPS fatigue so I played TNB months later. I liked it just as much as the original, despite the story oddities. I haven't played Doom yet - but it's on my pile. I hope you get back to it and update this later.
You still use a Nostromo - that's awesome. I don't play PC games anymore (got tired of the upgrade cycle, went PS4 only) but the Nostromo was one of my favorite PC peripherals of all time - so useful! I had all sorts of interesting mappings for games like City of Heroes...
PSN: Swordsman74
Steam: Swordsman74
Twitter: mmlmrx
I found the story good, but I didn't like the gameplay at all. I've left the old school FPS Run 'n' gun mode behind and don't find it very enjoyable anymore. It's also one of the reasons I've passed on the new Doom. I guess recharging shields/health are my crutch.
ClockworkHouse: He means the comic The Dark Knight Returns, where Batman and Superman get in a fistfight over Gotham. Not The Dark Knight Rises, where Batman and a loudly farting orchestra get in a fistfight over your attention.
To be clear, since this is the internet, this isn't developed by Id. It's done by ex-Starbreeze peeps.
Aaaaaaanyway...
How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.
Keep playing because it gets even better. The NPCs you encounter are some of the more memorable I can recall from a game of any type (much less an FPS) and had more depth and nuance than they had any right to. And, of course, shooting Nazis is always fun.
I still haven't finished the game, but my difficulty getting through the opening no-win moral choice led to this blog post which then led to a discussion with some other podcasters I knew, which led to the longest (and one of the best) episodes the podcast I participate in has ever done.
There's a shocking amount of depth in the game, and while it makes you angry at times, the thing that really sticks in my mind is just how overwhelmingly sad the world feels. Even the Nazis themselves don't really seem to be enjoying the world they've made. When they killed the world's hope, they buried its joy as well.
The first moment that really grabbed me in the game was the late-night encounter on the train to Berlin with a certain drunk SS Obersturmbannführer and her toothy blond boy-toy. That's when I knew how good the storytelling was going to be.
(Which was followed by perhaps the most tasteful love scene I've ever seen in a video game.)
Yeah, the story in The New Order really got to me. Blaskowicz and all the characters in the resistance are beautifully crafted. I really liked the gameplay, but I hadn't played a classic FPS in years when I started this one.
When people have lied to themselves for that long, the truth feels like an attack.
—from Frostbitten by trichy
Coincidentally, I finally finished this game last weekend, after owning it and dropping it for a couple years.
Very nice write-up, DT. Pretty much how I felt about the game as well. It had way more heft and solid gameplay than I ever expected it to, and although I took something like a year-and-a-half long break on the game for various reasons, I thoroughly enjoyed and was pleasantly surprised that the story was as rich as it was.
As an aside, does anyone else think Frau Engel's "Bubi" looked a bit too much like Jake Busey?
Really enjoyed this until:
Really enjoyed the game up to that point, but just stopped playing out of frustration.
"I would be insulted if I could figure out exactly what it means."
--*Legion*