Review: Wolfenstein: The New Order

Story:
The story was the first thing that very quickly stood out about this game. The characters are really brought to life with an engaging and surprisingly deep story, helped with great facial animations. The appearance and personality of civilians that have been thrown into a life of war - either by choice or not - is done really well, and is leaps and bounds above the shallow bromances that so typifies the FPS genre.

Some of the twists and turns were a bit easy to work in out advance, but the execution was done well enough to keep the plot interesting and engaging throughout the story.

The relationships and appearance of multiple characters throughout the story does well to remove the realisation that you spend most of the game by yourself, in what is (by modern standard), a fairly classic FPS feature. The variety of support characters - along with more personal conversations with the in-game love interest - during missions livens up the whole experience.

Without doing any spoilers, I found the ending somewhat meh, but it was a lot better than the ending I had predicted would happen happen after the first mission. That aside, the story throughout the game, and it's execution, is honestly one of the best in that genre that I have come across!

Mechanics:
It's not all pretty faces and good story telling! Wolfenstein: The New Order, comes equipped with a set of functional mechanics, that really make the game playable to a much wider audience than I had perhaps expected. What do I mean? Well, I always play a stealth character when I can: I enjoy the pacing and atmosphere of the gameplay if it's done well. As I mentioned earlier, I was originally expecting to be playing a dumb shooter game, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a set a competent stealth mechanics, which manage to be functional, while still maintaining the fast pace of the game.

What I enjoyed the most about the stealth elements was that if a guard thinks he can see something (but hasn't actually realised you're an enemy), he will remain facing that direction for as long as possible while he continues along his patrol route. This means you can't break cover until they've moved on, otherwise you will be spotted instantly! This does well to make the guards seem more 'alive' than I've usually found in games.

Moving on, one thing I usually hate about modern FPS's is cover based shooting: I find the controls usually don't lend themselves well to ducking in and out of cover. In Wolfenstein: The New Order, however, the cover based mechanics are seamlessly integrated into the movement controls. For example, in most other games, you take cover by pressing a button that spot welds your back onto the nearest piece of available cover. But Wolfenstein is very different: you move to the relevant cover using WASD (ducking if needed), and then the game detects what objects can be used for it's cover mechanics. As you look around while you're in cover, you will see a white arrow appear around your crosshair, showing which direction you will emerge from cover in when aim using the right-mouse button, dropping you back behind the cover when you're done. All this is done without needing any additional keys, and makes the mechanic practically seamless!

On a minor note, as a Physicist, I thoroughly appreciate the fairly realistic use of Physics (within reason; gameplay considered), particularly the moon-walk mission, which has a realistic depiction of sound in space and the lower gravity caused by the reduced mass of the Moon.

Useless Weaponry :
Now onto the bad stuff. The first thing I realised that I didn't like about the game, was that the guns are all bollocks. For practically the entire game, I used the Assault Rifle, except the parts where I was forced to use the Lasercraftwerk and sometimes other guns. The pistol became useful when you got the silencer, but once you went "loud", the very low damage made it completely useless. The shotgun was also useless, and I found it unable to take down even the basic enemies at relatively close range! Finally, we move on to the Marksman Rifle. Now don't get me wrong: when I can't play as stealth, I always play as a sniper, but the fast pace of the game - as well as the high health of some enemies - made this a practically impossible task (probably not helped by the fact I was playing on the second highest difficulty). So really, what already was a pretty limited variety in weapons, was made even more limited by the fact that the rest of the guns were crap!

Derpy AI:
Later in the game, I came across a problem with the AI on maps with elevation changes, namely, they would kill themselves by pathfinding off walkways. This happened across several levels, so wasn't just an isolated incident. In the U-boat level, I put this to the test: at the very start of the level, I put one round in the back wall and then hid. Within 2 minutes, 3 of the 5 enemies in the room were dead - and the only reason the other two survuved was because they were on the bottom floor to begin with. So there's that.....

Graphics Issues:
Finally, there were some minor graphics issues that blighted the game. Some of the bitmaps used for the graphics are of very poor resolution. While, I became aware of this quite early in the game, it was barely noticeable until later on. Where it became brutally obvious, was in the level with the Da'at Yakut (no idea if I got that right) library, where the bitmaps were of exceptionally poor resolution - despite my game being on ultra graphics! Given that some of the objects covered by these bad bitmaps were the focus of the mission at that time, it was a pretty poor show.

Summary Again (Because I'm too lazy to write a proper conclusion):
My last encounter with a Wolfenstein game was Wolfenstein 3D (if you can believe that), so I was expecting to be a continuation of the concept: you have some guys and you have some guns, and you have to get from A to B killing of many of said guys with said guns as possible. So, when I first Started up Wolfenstein: The New Order, I was expecting a dumb shooter, but what I got was far more than that! What really struck me was the depth and quality of the story, which was probably the best for any First Person Shooter that I've played. The game was also boosted by a set functional and enjoyable game mechanics. It did have it's faults however: some levels were plagued by AI issues, I practically stuck to one gun throughout the entire game because the rest were useless, and despite being a relatively new game (2014) running on Ultra graphics, some very low resolution bitmaps were a bit blatant and off putting.
 
Overall, I found the gameplay and story of Wolfenstein: The New Order to be highly enjoyable and I'm even considering going back through to play the other timeline - which I don't often do! The flaws, when they appear, are noticeable, but ultimately do little to detract from what is otherwise a great game!