Wolfenstein: The New Order (Xbox ONE)

This is another example of me playing a series out of order but the original Wolfenstein for the 360 is such a fuck ass of a game I won’t be getting to that any time soon. Wolfenstein: The New Order is a solely single player experience which pushed it up my Xbox One ‘to play’ list. A list which is growing faster than I thought it would.

The New Order has a story routed in a twisted version of World War II where the Nazis win and apparently have access to advanced technology with mechanised dogs and giant destructive robots. You play as War Hero B.J Blast... Blashko... Blazkowicz? Is that right? Anyway, you play as B.J. – William to his love interests – as he tries to turn the fight against the Nazis by killing the evil, scary Nazi General Deathshead.

The storyline is well crafted and the set pieces are good, but the one major issue is big boring B.J. himself. Many of the other characters are quite colourful and have a lot of personality but not B.J. He sounds like he is just not bothered a lot of the time and his facial expressions are, well, expressionless. His monologues nearly put me to sleep on several occasions.

Graphically, New Order is one of the prettier games I’ve played and I would go as far as to say it’s almost flawless in its presentation. There were very few instances of me getting caught on scenery or scenery providing my enemies with an unfair advantage. Musically, it is also vey in-keeping with the steam-punk theme and is eerie and epic in equal measure.

The gameplay, I have to say is probably one of the best I have played in a long time, especially in the FPS genre. It feels very fluid and very rarely messed me up. You have a choice of several guns and carry grenades as a secondary back up so it uses a lot of traditional qualities however, they had what I consider a non-standard cover based system. If you stand B.J. facing a wall near a corner and aim your gun, he will naturally lean out to shoot around the corner. I found this to be much more intuitive and seamless than having to press A to enter cover and then press another button to leave cover and it is more in keeping with what you would do in reality.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

There are three categories for the achievements in New Order; collectibles, perks and difficulty playthrough.

Now, as you all know I’m not a fan of forced second playthroughs unless it makes a massive difference to the story or game experience so thank you Bethesda for having the Uber difficulty available from the beginning. I honestly don’t know what it’s like to play a game through on an easy difficulty anymore. New Order however, I found quite forgiving on its toughest level. It certainly didn’t give me more trouble than some of my other completions. That said, there were a few bits which gave me cause to scream.

In one level, I was messing around trying to get a perk upgrade and got shot to shit... right at the same time as I hit a checkpoint. This meant that I had to do the next section of the game with no margin for error. Needless to say I died several times with lots of swear words.

Once the hard playthrough is done, if you were thorough and picked up all the collectibles, you won’t have much left to do. If you were amazing (unlike me) you will most likely have some skill achievements left to unlock. If you are completely like me, you will most likely need to replay most of the levels to get all the collectibles as well. Playing on the lowest difficulty to do this after playing on Uber is like playing with invincibility activated.

Other comments I’ve seen suggest that you only need to complete the last mission on Uber to get this one but that felt really cheap so I didn’t go for it.

I managed to play through the entire campaign without unlocking the first perk for demolition which involves killing two enemies with one grenade. Watching me handle grenades in FPSs is a painful experience. I am about as capable of throwing a well placed grenade as I am at, say, having a baby. That said, this is obviously nowhere near as tough as the grenade achievement in Matt Hazard.

Anyway, so once you’ve completed the game in Uber mode, you will need to complete off the remaining perks and collectibles if you didn’t get them in the first play through and this is very simply done on the easy difficulty level. You can also reload checkpoints to stack kills for the perks which removes the grindy element to anything you have to do which is a major plus point.

There are two missable achievements for making a moral choice but this happens at the beginning of the game so it’s not a multiple playthrough issue. Although that said the multiple choice actually will produce a slightly different gameplay experience, It would only have made a slight difference to the story though which is probably why there isn’t a multiple playthrough achievement requirement.

The last achievement I earned was for solving the fourth enigma code. To solve the enigma codes you need to get a certain set of collectibles and then solve the code in the extras menu. They are basic mathematic problems which you can solve by using the internet... or working it out for yourself.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I thoroughly enjoyed playing New Order despite B.J.’s constant monotone and lack of character. Had that not been an issue for me, it would have turned a very good game into a great one. The next instalment is out now and I will definitely be playing it on this evidence.