This week JOE has been playing Wolfenstein: The New Order on the Xbox One and quite frankly, we haven’t seen this much Nazi face-bashing since Inglourious Basterds…
Do you like first person shooters? Do you like the idea of killing endless waves of technologically-advanced Nazi super soldiers and their robot Nazi hounds? If so, then you’ll absolutely love
Wolfenstein: The New Order, just as much as we did.
Wolfenstein: The New Order, developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks, follows the story of the series protagonist, American special agent William "B.J." Blazkowicz, who wakes up in an alternate history where the Nazis won World War II.
Uh-oh...
The year is 1960 and after spending 14-years in a vegetative state in a psychiatric asylum in Poland, B.J. awakens following a traumatic head injury to find that the Nazis won the war by dropping an atomic bomb on New York in 1948. “They beat us to the bomb”, says Blazkowicz after finding out what has been going on in the world while he was ill.
A lot of work has obviously gone into the alternative history that
Wolfenstein: The New Order is based around and if you take the time to search for newspaper clippings and information stands that are dotted throughout the game, you’ll find some of the more interesting historical ‘facts’, such as the Nazis landing on the moon in 1951, among other things.
Wolfenstein: The New Order is the sequel to 2009’s
Wolfenstein, but it’s also a reboot of the series which has been on the go since 1981's
Castle Wolfenstein. This time around the game focuses on the modern high-tech machines and weaponry used by the Nazis to win the war instead of the paranormal activity that we’ve previously seen in the series. This makes
The New Order a lot easier to relate to than previous
Wolfenstein titles, which makes it all the more enjoyable.
Another aspect of
Wolfenstein: The New Order that hasn’t really been touched upon in the series before is the idea of making your way through the various levels using stealth, instead of wasting as much lead as your gun can handle. This adds an extra element to the game and allows the gamer to decide whether to go in quiet or with all guns blazing. Sometimes it’s best to sneak through a level, while at other times it’s best to shoot like your life depends on it… mainly because it probably will.
Visually, the game is stunning. It’s certainly one of the better looking next-gen games we’ve gotten our hands on to date and the cut away scenes really help to move the story along without the gamer feeling like large chunks of time have magically disappeared.
There really wasn’t much that we didn’t like about the game, but we did find that it could be a tad punishing at times. While there are checkpoints throughout each level, there are a handful of missions that definitely could have done with one or two more as the waves of soldiers can be relentless at times and we got a little bit tired of playing the same section of mission over and over again.
Other than that we really liked
Wolfenstein: The New Order and we have to say, MachineGames and Bethesda Softworks have done a great job at giving the series a new lease of life.
You can pick up your own copy of
Wolfenstein: The New Order on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and/or Xbox One over on
Littlewoods.ie from just €44.00. Check out Littlewoods Ireland's other games
here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlvfqfGTar4
