The Second World War really is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of popular entertainment from the last two decades to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if every major game and film production company met up in the mid 1930s and somehow engineered the conflict so that they could have a guaranteed source of income forever.
The New Order is the latest entry in a long history of games that ritualise the slaughter of helpless Nazis. You play as William ‘B.J’ Blaskowicz, a man with a head that couldn’t be squarer if it never touched drink or drugs in an alternate timeline in which the Nazi’s have nuked New York and take over the world. You wake from a coma in 1960 and join a small band of resistance fighters as they struggle against the impossibly evil German Empire. It is a simple set-up and a strong one, as the test of a good idea is one’s ability to sum it up in one sentence, and in this case The New Order’s one sentence elevator pitch is “What if the Nazi’s won the Second World War?” an interesting question that the game explores briefly, before becoming bored and turning back to blasting Nazis in the face.
First issue with The New Order: impossibly evil Nazi enemy. I understand the legacy of theWolfenstein series as essentially inventing the Nazi-em-up, and I understand how an alternative timeline in which the Nazi’s won the Second World War creates tension in your game, but this timeline is so alternate it feels like it’s from another planet. Though I would agree that perhaps the Nazi’s didn’t get everything right, I would also suggest that they weren’t so evil as to engineer giant robotic dogs and a division of mutant super-soldiers stitched into demonic power armour.
I wonder though whether the developers weren’t trying to make a point by pushing the evil meter to eleven when designing their Nazi empire. The game isn’t above the use of caricature; you have the pervy General, the General with the eye-patch, the vaguely homo-sexual General, the General who listens to classical music, and the slightly un-hinged lady General. The characterisation of the low-level grunts is more nuanced however and does portray at leastsome of the Nazis in the game as vaguely human. You overhear conversations between soldiers talking about their families and children, all the while running a thumb along the edge of your blade and eyeing their jugular hungrily. The New Order exploits the player’s understanding of the Nazis as portrayed in the last five decades or so by juxtaposing the depiction of its characters while simultaneously taking a sideways-glance at the genre it invented, a comment that is well executed when you give the game time do its thing.
If Wolfenstein invented the concept of Nazis as guilt-free bullet and blade storage solutions, it also invented shooting from a first-person perspective, and while I don’t want to get into an argument about ‘the original FPS’, Return to Castle Wolfenstein was the first to marry Nazis and heavy ordinance in a video game experience. There has been over two decades of development in the FPS genre since Castle Wolfenstein, and The New Order references every major milestone along the way; the crowbar from Half-Life, the beach assault section from pretty much everyMedal of Honour game, character perks from Borderlands, and Vault 101 from Fallout all make appearances in The New Order. It doesn’t really do anything with these references though, aside from saying ‘look, Half-Life is a game that exists,’ and I can’t help but think that an opportunity has been lost.
If the Wolfenstein games invented shooting, The New Order doesn’t reinvent it. The way the game blends stealth and action is excellently executed – in the first two thirds of the game, almost every situation can be resolved quietly with a knife, or brutally with a shotgun, and you are never penalised for going all-out stealth or all-out action. Instead, The New Order cleverly rewards you in a way that is appropriate for your play-style; it understands that players who prefer to stealth their way through the game are more likely to be interested in collectibles, and so rewards stealthy players by highlighting the locations of collectibles on the in-game map, for instance.
When things do go loud the gameplay is somewhat less satisfying, however. Shooting is competent at best and dual-wielding weapons is a novelty I used a handful of times before returning to wielding one weapon for greater accuracy. Shotguns are also curiously float-y, and, since most of the combat is at mid-range anyway, rather pointless as well. There are also sections in the game where what is meant to be a quick, exciting escape from a powerful enemy turns into tedious trial-and-error. Call me inept but in some instances I only found the way to escape by accident rather than by any intuitive understanding of what I needed to do. I understand what the developers are trying to do with such sequences, but the impact of a sudden heart-stopping struggle in the middle of gameplay will be lost unless you manage to survive it first time.
As the game progresses, an attempt to ratchet up the action to an explosive crescendo means the emphasis leans much more toward action than stealth. The latter third of The New Order is all shooting with very few stealth paths available, and as a result the game suffers. Stealth is really where The New Order shines, but it seems to get bored around about the point you go to the Moon (spoilers) to literally print-off some nuclear deactivation codes and from then on is room after room of Nazis eager to have their faces rearranged with your lead.
The last third of the game in general seems rushed; character relationships are hinted at and then forgotten, some characters are forgotten about entirely, and in one section (if you’ve played the game, you’ll know exactly this point) ripe with potential for some interesting physics-based combat, you walk from one point to another and destroy exactly three drones.
All of this is frustrating because the game starts out so well; it’s alternative history setting is interesting, the blend of stealth and combat is excellent, and B.J’s character is well developed through a combination of cut-scenes and interior monologue. Once The New Order leaves Earth’s atmosphere though, it turns into Call of Duty but with Nazis. And Call of Duty has already done Nazis. So just Call of Duty then.
The difficulty with finding issues with a game like The New Order is in recognising the difference between genuine flaws in the game and flaws in the FPS genre in general, as the game has it’s tongue so firmly in it’s cheek it often isn’t clear whether the game is making a comment or not. Its attitude toward women is certainly taken from the modern-day FPS, with the main female character stepping into her role as boob-appendage with considerable aplomb. The visuals are average, with the occasional muddy texture, and more polish could have been used in cut-scene transitions, with somewhat jarring jumps from and into gameplay being the most common example.
What The New Order signals is an end of the World War Two-themed shooter, which is a shame because I think there are plenty of stories left to tell from that era . The problem is that any future game involving Nazis on any level will have The New Order somewhere in it’s DNA, and as soon as we start referencing games that are already themselves parodies, the space-time continuum will collapse.