Wolfenstein: The New Order - Blasting through the past

 

Hello hello there, good people! It's Amalia here, with another post about an old video game!

But there's a twist, this time! Michael never played this one back in the day, you see. In fact, We'd never had any contact with Wolfenstein before this. Because in Germany, some games of this franchise are outright banned, and the others were censored quite heavily until recently.

Now, we wouldn't ordinarily care too much about playing the censored version of a game, because even in an action game, we don't *need* all the gore and swastikas all over the place. But! The censored versions of the Wolfenstein games did something much worse than just cutting out that sort of stuff.

You see, the special censored versions you'd get if you bought it in Germany...... are only playable in the German language.

That's no good, because 9 times out of 10, translated works are just worse than the original. Something is nearly always lost in translation. And also, Michael and i are just way more used to using English when we're home.

Now yes, there's probably language patches or ways to replace some files in the game's folders and whatnot, but eh, we didn't wanna bother with all that faff.

But thankfully, the whole censoring-the-past-thing in Germany has recently become a bit more lax, and so these games are now available for purchase in their original versions, complete with gore, swastikas and god's own language, matey-old-boy!

..... thus, we've picked them all up in a recent Steam sale. And now that we're getting around to it, it's been leaving enough of an impression to inspire a blog post, so join us as we discover....

Wolfenstein: The New Order

Blazko's gettin' ready for some serious typing.

So, to begin with, there's a prologue that takes place in 1946, with the main character as part of a squad trying to storm the compound of General Totenkopf, Nazi Germany's foremost scientist/evil genius.

 

And oddly, we found this prologue to be..... kinda weak. It starts off with some strong cinematic cutscene-heavy stuff, but once you get to the proper gameplay, the first hour or so feels..... bizarrely anemic, considering how much we enjoyed the rest of the game, going forward. But yeah, in the prologue, there's oddly little in the way of a soundtrack, the level design is a bit meh, the enemy designs are weird, what with the electric coils on their back and stuff, and generally, it just didn't leave a great first impression on us. 

But then, that changes the moment your squad ends up in Totenkopf's experimental torture chamber, where you fight your first Supersoldat and the story really kinda begins to give you some context. The bad guy suddenly has a face, and the game reveals that it has more variety in it than "Shoot Electronazis and dogs in trenches".

So, you think i am comically evil, do you, Herr Blazkowitz?

 Now, you could argue that, this being sort of a modern-ish boomer shooter, the story isn't the main focus, and you'd be kinda right.

Buuuut with all the silly, pulpy stuff that happens throughout this game, the context of a story serves to really engage the player and amplify the over-the-top-ness of it all, we feel.

We'll try not to spoil too much of the game, but do be warned that there'll inevitably be some spoilers here and there.  

.... like the fact that the resistance you end up joining has it's HQ right in Berlin!

Alright, so, with a bombasic action game full of dakka and explosions, one of the first questions is perhaps....

Does it look any good?

Well, to be honest, the game looks a bit dated. I mean, look at this:

Never in mein Leben have i seen so few pixels!

...... okay no. Actually, i'd argue that while the graphics are dated on a technical level, this game is a posterchild for how little raw graphical fidelity actually matters when you have good art direction.

Look at this and tell us it doesn't get the vibe across:

Honestly, Michael and i kinda got some Half Life 2 vibes playing this. The stark architecture, the often masked enemies, the many symbols of authoritarian oppression.

It's a visually striking game, even though it doesn't have the latest in ultragraphics-technology and won't need all the power of the 7090ti+++super-mega-edition you spent 3000 bucks on. That speaks of good visual design.

But yeah, visuals aren't everything, of course! There's also...

Audio!

And aside from the oddly weak prologue, this is the only part of the game we've got any real criticism for, so why might that be?

Well, it's not because of the music, for one. The music is pretty good across the board.

The effects, gunshots and whatnot are quite good, too!

And so is the voice acting. No complaints there. All of the characters had some decent soul and feel to them. On, and bonus points here because the Germans do in fact speak German, not the meaningless "Achtung schnell schnell Panzer vor!"-gibberish like in some media. Being fluent in both English and German, we understood everything anyone ever said, no matter the language, an none of it felt weird or unnatural.

Oh, and we can read all the German text, too!

Buuuut at times, the audio mixing feels weird. For one, voices are too low across the board. We fixed that in the audio settings. But aside from that, it almost feels like there's an audio compressor plugin doing it's thing, and is turned up a little too aggressively.

Not sure if that might even really be what's happening; We don't really know anything about the practices used in mixing sound in video games.

But yeah, there does seem to be the occasional moment where the audio seems to duck and dip. It only noticeably happened a few times during our 14-hour playtime, but it felt quite weird when it did.

Beyond that, the general soundscape of the game is just fine. Mick Gordon made a lot of the music, so it's quite good as you can imagine, though not *as* good as his work on Doom. This is some of his earlier stuff, mind you.

But now, lemme get to the bit i really wanna talk about!

Gameplay!

WAAAAGH!

And dearest reader, let me tell you a thing or two, here:

It felt *so* good to play a good honest, straightforward shooter. We do that quite rarely. I mean okay, we did play Will Rock a while ago, but that was..... different. More about nostalgia than the game itself.

This, however, we had no nostalgia for. This was new to us, and yet it felt almost refreshingly oldschool.

You are action-heroman. You have the jawline of a killdozer. You shoot the bad nazi men with many bullets. And lasers. Sometimes in Berlin. Sometimes in London. Occasionally somewhere more exotic.

Before i get your hopes up: There's no Nazi-Rapture, sorry.

It's got some collectibles, but it was so nice to play a game that doesn't give you an open world with 500 hours of repetitive busywork and other such "content".

No, this game provides value for every minute you play. The shooting is quite satisfying, you get a decent, if somewhat vanilla arsenal of guns and enemy variety is quite nice, with combat dogs, robots and Supersoldaten mixed with with the usual enemy infantry. The game isn't all just mindless shooting, though.

Many of the game's encounters can be approached stealthily, for one. You can do stealth takedowns, use a suppressed pistol, throw knives and whatnot. It doesn't have *the* most robust stealth system in the world, but it's one of those affairs where you can sometimes overhear enemy conversations if you don't just run in guns blazing.

Granted, those conversations are in German and most of you will have to read subtitles, but well..... we didn't have that problem. 😉

 And also, you get a cool laser that functions as both tool and weapon and can cut through certain surfaces, creating an opening for you to get through, which leads to some occasional, light puzzle gameplay.

This thing is also called the "Laserkraftwerk", which is very Electronica.

There's even the occasional bit where you get to pilot a vehicle, like a  car or minisub. Though these bits are always quite short. No Highway 17 and Water Hazard here.

This right here might actually be the shortest driving section in all of gaming.

But being a couple of big nerds, Michael and i also got a real kick out of the alternate-history theme of the game. So, let's spare a few word for...

The setting

Because being an enjoyer of Man in the High Castle, Iron Sky, Atomic Heart and the like, you can imagine that we rather appreciate this game's nazi-occupied 1960's world.

General Totenkopf might be an M. Bison enthusiast, come to think of it.

Alternate history is always pretty cool, because you can play around with ideas like "What would have become of the Beatles if the Nazis had won the war?". This game does, look:

Mond Mond! Ja ja! Heute gehört uns die Galaxie!

And then there's Nazi Supersoldiers and Robots, flying drones, much earlier computerization, having an established moon base in 1960 and so on. But of course, in-universe, it all comes at the cost of being very, very dystopian. And they get this more serious aspect across very well, too.

There's a very clear culture of martial prowess and opressive might. The sort of unbridled enthusiasm for ideas of conquest and military power that we sometimes see from places like North Korea or Russia.

But beyond all the Nazi imagery and rhetoric, everything's also cloaked in more general, non-political..... german-ness.

I swear Michael's seen this exact image in a german dive bar in the 90's.

German is being pushed for as an international language of course, and the general culture..... there's a feeling that everyone's being pushed towards drinking beer like water and eating nothing but Bratwurst and Karoffelbrei. There's a real sense of the world not only turning into a jingoist dictatorship, but also of actual German culture being spread all over the place. Which makes it all feel surprisingly more authentic than expected, because usually in alternative fiction involving nazis, it's all just about Hugo Boss uniforms and getting rid of "undesirables".

Quite surprised the quintessential "shoot nazis in the face"-game actually goes the extra mile to make it's alternate history setting feel more authentic than most.

....... i mean, when you look past the super-soldiers and that kind of  stuff, of course.

This is getting too serious. Bring in the SS-Astartes!

..... but yeah, that's most of our thoughts about The New Order.

Before we summarize, though: Surprise! We also played....

The Old Blood

Ha, didn't see that one coming!

Okay, so The Old Blood is a prequel to The New Order, where you infiltrate Castle Wolfenstein. It's a standalone expansion kind of a deal, with a much shorter campaign (took us around 8 hours, vs. 14 hours for TNO). It -is- however quite nice and dense in those 8 hours, really packing in some good stuff.

There's new guns, an interesting new story, and more of a focus on the supernatural elements we sometimes see associated with Wolfenstein (or indeed, the nazis).

Good grief, the eye-candy is strong with this one!

Gameplay-wise, it's largely more of the same, in a good way. It's the same satisfying shooting/sneaking, and while you don't get the laser to cut through stuff, you now have..... two pieces of broken pipe. Which you use mainly for climbing specific walls like they're ice axes, or to pry open doors with. Honestly, the non-combat gameplay in this one got a bit boring without the laser.

But you do get a cool couple of new enemies! There's an earlier version of the Supersoldaten who don't have mobile power packs and are tied to overhead catenary lines to supply them with power, thus limiting their mobility. And later on, there's.... well.... okay, this is sort of a big spoiler, but you can even see it on the Steam store page so..... Zombies. There's Zombies in this one.

They do mix up the gameplay a good bit, especially in a few later encounters where the nazis you gun down can come back as the walking dead! They're not very tough basically just taking a single well-aimed headshot, but they tend to come in scary numbers to make up for it.

Conclusion

Beep boop, Hans.

But yeah, we quite enjoyed these games. Having never had any contact with the Wolfenstein franchise, we didn't quite know what to expect, and what we found was a pleasantly old-school, straightforward FPS which focuses on gameplay, but also surprises you with really solid alternate-history worldbuilding and really making the most of it's setting.

The Old Blood, in turn, leant a bit more towards pure action, allowing for less stealth gameplay and minimizing puzzle elements. In turn though, it also provided a more mysterious story and theme.

We'll take a bit of a break from this series to work through our backlog, but yeah, Michael and i are pretty stoked, knowing that The New Colossus is in our future!

...... and Youngblood, with everyone seems to hate. Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In any case, thank you very much for reading along, and if you haven't played Wolfenstein yet, you probably should.