Game:

Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014)

Category:

Review

Duration: 2:50

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4

Chaos in Wolfenstein The New Order - Bit Ideas

Summary:

Wolfenstein: The New Order is totally insane. It is a mixture of various different, seemingly contradictory things and yet it feels like a totally cohesive experience. It's a very rare, but excellent quality for games to have, and I think it's one of the main reasons I like this installment of Wolfenstein so much. It doesn't just stop at the game mechanics, either. The narrative and storyline of Wolfenstein: The New Order is the same way. How? I can't say. All I know is MachineGames has created something amazing.


This is the first episode of a new series called Bit Ideas, where I express my ideas... in a bit. Well, the idea is to have something short that serves as food for thought, even if it doesn't go into a lot of depth. I usually talk about game design and critique in detail in Armchair Analysis, but those videos involve a lot of editing and review, and thus take a lot of time to make. As a result, I created Bit Ideas to serve as a shorter series that can come out a little bit more frequently, as it requires less time to make.

As this is a new series, I'd love it if you would please show your opinion by liking, disliking, or leaving a comment. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Full Transcript:

So I've been playing a little bit of Wolfenstein The New Order, and there are a lot of things I'd like to talk about regarding the game, but I'm going to focus on just a high level overview of one thing I find especially entertaining, and somewhat confusing. And that thing is that I am entertained by the game in a great variety of different ways as I play it. Now, that's true for every game to some extent, but the sheer variance offered by Wolfenstein: The New Order is something else entirely. It has this core conventional FPS gameplay that is incredibly solid, but it also stealth, and it also has a perk system, and it also has a cover system, but the cover system's not really a cover system because it's really just leaning, like you could do old games like System Shock 2, and there are cinematic takedowns, and quicktime events that aren't exactly quicktime events because they don't give you a prompt but you still have mash buttons in a quickly timed fashion, and it has regenerating health, but you only rengerate a bit, and for the rest you need health packs, and the health packs can give you overcharge, and even the storyline pulls this nonsense on you all the time. The game can be rather touching and thought-provoking one moment, and completely absurd and silly the next. For example, the protagonist Blazkowicz looks like a complete carcicature of an action hero-- incredibly musclebound, all-American accent, and a jawline strong enough to crush diamond-- and he acts the part too. Except when he doesn't. Because sometimes he sits down and talks about his feelings, and there's more than one instance where he's made completely helpless and... weak. Weak. Wolfenstein makes this guy-- a guy who kills Nazis by the dozen, a guy who battles giant robots without breaking a sweat, a guy who straps car fenders to his chest and runs around around dual-wielding automatic shotguns-- Wolfenstein The New Order makes this guy seem weak. And helpless. And even pitiable. And not just once or twice, this is a recurring theme. And that seems kind of weird and dissonant when you say it out loud, but just like all the crazy stuff this game pulls: it works. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on and the game jumps between thoughts rapidly but it just so happens that the particular manner in which they whip around between ideas doesn't leave me wanting. In fact it's pretty satisfying, and all the insanity seems perfectly reasonable when you're actually playing the game. MachineGames has somehow managed to tightly integrate all these different, seemingly contradictory features into a cohesive and enjoyable experience, and this, I think, is what makes Wolfenstein : The New Order so damn enjoyable in so many ways. It doesn't just focus on one thing, it chaotically shifts between many different things. And again, that sounds like a recipe disaster. Like the game should lose its focus and fail to accomplish anythin g it sets out to do, but it doesn't. They've pulled it off. I don't know how they did it, and if you do I've love to know, but for noew I'm just glad it happened.

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