Wolfenstein: The New Order

Greetings from Lithuania.

So i finally forced myself to beat "Wolfenstein: The New Order" (2014) on PS4. This is not bad game at all , settings are pretty unique, story is also kinda fresh, game mechanics can be clumsy at times, but they are OK to. Graphics won't blow you away, but they are pretty OK. Sound design, voice acting were also OK, nothing great. So why only 7/10 ? Because this is a pretty standard FPS - it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Also more depth character development would done this game a favor - i wasn't attached to anyone. The story while it is OK, it didn't really engaged my into. And while there are some weapon upgrades, lack of any more developed weapon progress system or skills didn't helped this game either.

Overall, "Wolfenstein: The New Order" is not bad pretty standard and straightforward shooter. It doesn't bring anything better, but for what it was it was OK to play it once.

This game is awesome. Story, gameplay and graphics are all good I just want the boss battles to better but apart from that it's a 9/10.

The game knows well what the audience wants and it delivers it to them with a plate full of brutality and action. Apart from the well known fun shooting against the modern Nazis you can follow an actual story with characters that are stereotypical and funny. It's quite bizarre and violent but that's what made this game memorable.

This game was selling it self as an old school shooter in modern times, never did I imagine that it had a great story too. It has been a long time since I had such a great all round FPS game experience.

Story: The game is set in an alternate timeline where the Nazis have won WWII and now rule over the world and we are part of a rebellion to take them down. This setting alone is great enough for me, but the game gives you much more than that. IT has a pretty well developed set of characters, including our hero, and there is a hefty amount of cut-scenes to really get you into the story, something I was completely surprised to see. You actually care for the characters and what happens to them etc, I loved that. This was helped a lot by great voice acting. The game had a RPG feel to it as far as story goes and that's a good thing as RPGs usually have good stories. I loved reading news articles that showed how different things happened after the Nazis won.

The ending did felt a bit rushed to me though, would have loved it if it was prolonged or something. Also, there was this mysterious secret story part too, which I won't spoil, BUT it was underutilized. Wish they expanded more on it.

Gameplay: Since the game is like an old school shooter, it has many of those elements. Stuff like ability to carry all your weapons arsenal at once, no health/armor regen, leaning etc. And you know what, it was refreshing to play a shooter like this, took me away from all the modern shooters and felt like a refreshing experience. The shooting was fluid, gory and plain fun. Killing Nazis was a pure blast.

The game also has a stealth element in it, which was pretty simple, but effective. I found myself many times trying to stealth kill enemies. The only thing I didn't like was the weapon wheel, but that's more of a personal complaint considering I'm so used to modern shooters, changing weapons via a wheel felt odd and distracting.

Graphics: The game looked good for the most part, nice gun models, decent facial animations and such. It used the same ID 5 tech that was used in Rage, and along with it had the same problems. While many of the surroundings, open areas and such looked great, textures were really muddy or low res indoors, and very oftenly too. Took me back to the PS2 era, that bad. I mean it wasn't all row res, but you would often see switches, beams and other stuff having lame textures and they would really stick out.

Sound: Game boasted a robust and awesome soundtrack. The tracks varied from heavy rock to calm peaceful pieces. During action, most of the time you would hear rock music or such and it would make you pumped up. But during emotional scenes, or low down time, the track changes dramatically, and I loved that.

Another thing I was really impressed with was the gun sounds, they sounded so punchier and powerful, something modern shooters lack. I loved firing every weapon.

Overall: A great shooter, the best I have played in a long while now. Awesome all round experience and I'm already getting a craving to play it again. Highly recommended.

9/10

Wolfenstein: The New Order shows that we can trust that Bethesda and Machine Games can handle the franchise. The review is coming from a person, who played Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein. Now, let's list the pluses in W:TNO.

1)Nice graphics.

2)Good voice acting.

3)Better story.

4)Awesome gameplay, that mixes regenerating health and the need of health packs.

5)Plenty of guns.

6)Great level design.

7)Section where you can choose to use stealth or to go guns and blazing.

8)Various animations when you kill an enemy with knife. They don't get old.

9)Various enemies.

10)Great concept.

11)Collectables are fum to find.

12)Bits of the soundtrack.

13)Interesting characters.

14)Levels are fun to replay.

15)Game is replayable with 4 different mods.

16)The setting.

17)Newspaper articles in the game, like this is a real world.

18)Nice voice acting.

19)Finally Nazis speak German.

20)Dialogue, not only in English, but in German and (not 100% sure) Polish.

21)Great villains.

I may have missed some pluses, but now I'm going to talk about the minuses.

1)The two different timelines, that you choose which to follow, don't affect the story much.

2)When replaying the levels, I wish you could skip the non-action parts. I wanted to skip them.

3)Loading times when you die are kinda too long.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a fun first-person shooter. From BAD 1 to EXCELLENT 6 I give it EXCELLENT 5.50 - it's better than a VERY GOOD game, but not a truly EXCELLENT game. I hope that the new Doom will be better, or at least as good as this game.