MachineGames certainly tried with this game, and there are many things about this game which are excellent, but there are also many things which drag this game down more than necessary. Some guys called this a retro shooter because you don't have regenerating health and because you can dool-wield, but TNO is a FPS more in the style of 1999-2006 shooters such as FEAR, HL2, Doom 3, and so on. Yet it still throws some more modern things in the mix.
A premise where the Nazis won WW2, have conquered the entire Earth, erected concrete monstrosities, set foot on the Moon, nuked America first, and crushed all forms of resistance, is fairly interesting. The art guys must've been really proud of their work, as the game gladly shows you all kinds of concept art and designs as you play through the game by shoving an concept art unlocked reminder in your face every five minutes or so. But their pride is not unjustified, the retro-futuristic art design with a tinge of Nazi Germany (Aharoni fucking everywhere) is really what sets apart TNO from other games visually. The team really worked hard on envisioning such a future and all the technological advancements which would come with it. What also sets apart TNO from other games is MEGATEXTURES, which ensures you will never see the same texture twice. Every environment is visually distinct from another as each environment is packed to the brim with unique details (perhaps too much), though a downside to Megatextures is that they only look good from a distance. Shove your face in the wall and everything will look like a PS2 game.
The music for TNO is alright. It is composed by Mick Gordon, who also composed D44M's OST, which I didn't think was alright, and another famous heavy metal guy called Fredrik Thordendal. Right from the main menu a theme plays where you can tell straight away
SHIT IS FUCKED, through masterful use of distorted guitars and choirs which excellently set the feel of the game. The more noisy songs
like this one can be attributed to Mick Gordon, that's really his trademark style by now. Just like D44M, I like his songs when I hear less dubsteppish sounds and more rocking guitars. I bet the more heavy metal-ish songs can be attributed to Fredrik. The most stand-out track has to be the theme
when you raid Deathheads' HQ in the last level, just listen to that shit. Unfortunately the sound options for this game only have a Master Volume rather than separate volume sliders for sound, music, and so on. Overall, there's some really good shit in here and some more average stuff.
I wouldn't say that TNO is a mix of retro and new, rather less-retro and new. There's really three ways you can play this game, like a stealth game, a popamole cover shooter, and John Rambo wielding two guns at a time. However, you can never stick to one playstyle for the entire game due to the way the game is set up. There are thankfully no
forced stealth sections, as stabbing everyone in the face works just as well in levels where nobody has guns. There are forced combat sections, however, but that's not really that bad with this kind of game. Playing stealthily lets you take down less enemies with less hassle as a silenced pistol absolutely trivializes stealth (though the game does frequently take away your weapons), and doing so is really the easy way through. Playing the game like your standard cover shooter lets you hide behind rocks and shoot enemies safely, as most nazis go down fairly easily, but it's not that fun. You can dual-wield at any time, which gives you increased firepower at closer ranges, but exposes you to danger greatly as almost all enemies are hitscan and will shred your ass if you aren't behind cover, so dual-wielding is only recommended to do in close ranges. Of course, since most enemies aren't really that aggressive and will stick behind cover too, dual-wielding is at its best when the levels allow you to flank the enemy through many tight passageways, like in FEAR. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and as a result the best moments of TNO are few and far between.
The story goes as follows: nazis stole some Jew technology, nazis won, you got knocked into a coma for 17 years, wake up as everything's changed, and then kill nazis, find the resistance, kill nazis, kill nazis, kill nazis and kill na
Along your path you will find many characters, especially the villains get a good amount of screen time. I did like the Tarantino-esque approach to the villains where you get introduced to them in one way or another before fighting them, and they end up being more memorable than most generic Nazi lieutenants. Deathshead's smile has to be one of the most genuine smiles I've seen in any videogame.
Allied characters are also written in ways which make them stand out from others. Not great, but good enough.
B.J. is pretty much what you'd expect from a Nazi-killing badass who's been stuck in a crazy house for 17 years. All he cares about is killing all the nazis and Deathshead in particular, which tends to have adverse effects on one's psyche. Sometimes he tells stories of his childhood to himself which are somewhat related to what's happening on screen, and everyone comments on him being a rather crazy fuck. When people in-game told me to flat-out KILL THE NAZIS!, I couldn't help but smile with glee. And that's why I think all the effort placed in the story feels wasted. There's alot of supplementary story tidbits in the form of letters, concept art, diaries, and all kinds of shit. Not even Marathon throws that much at you to read at once. A lot of effort is placed into worldbuilding, but the gameplay treats all of that as just a background setpiece for you to kill Nazis in. In the end, it's really just about killing a lot of Nazis, and all those personal letters pale in comparison. If TNO were a different kind of game where you actually got the time to talk to the people, see the effects of a Nazi empire on the people, basically a game where all that worldbuilding can be properly explored other than combat, we'd also have a setting that's interesting to explore and find out more about it. There just isn't much that makes you care about the deeper parts of the world because you are a badass who must kill all the nazis.
What's also kind of a bother is the stop-start-stop-start method of storytelling TNO, as after every two-three fights or so you end up having to deal with more STORY. And the STORY present isn't all that engaging as it mostly involves people talking, some cutscene, or whatever action you are performing which you have no control over. Compare this to the horror sequences of FEAR which served as an intermission for the combat, which weren't pantsshittingly scary, but they were subtle and freaky enough to keep the player on his toes and
engaged. Both do the same thing by not having me kill things, but one of them keeps my attention.
Most enemies you face are nazis with light or medium armor. They die fast, but on Über difficulty you'll be torn to shreds if they flank you. There's Kampfhunden which are armored dogs who lock you in a ridiculous QTE where you repeatedly stab each other in the shoulder until one of you gives up (same goes for melee nazis), and is inevitably how most melee encounters end up as most melee enemies inevitably pull you into doing so. You can block, but it is pointless as it only reduces damages rather than nullifying it entirely. Then there's Commanders, who you can take out stealthily, or just make some noise so they can call in reinforcements. They're a neat way of controlling how much opposition you want to face (if you want to face any enemy that is). They tend to hide and stay in the back, which is a nice touch.
Each FPS also needs heavy enemies, which in TNO comes in the shape of Übersoldaten and heavy armored shotgun guys, and on Über diffculty those guys are SHIIIIIIIIIT. Loads of HP + highly-damaging hitscan = FUCK YOU. Initially I thought TNO was easy despite me playing it on the second hardest difficulty (Über), that is until those guys came along. Even if you are blasting two auto-shotguns in their face, they will still wreck your shit because they do not know the meaning of hitstun. These fuckers are more dangerous in open areas where you have barely anywhere to cower behind. Sometimes the game straight up gives you a heavy machine gun to just deal with the problem like some kind of band-aid, but most of the time fighting them is not fun. You should have been able to kill them quicker with a rocket launcher or the Laserkraftwerk, but you only get them way later in the game. Had the heavier enemies been projectile-based, this wouldn't have been as much of an issue. Later on there's rocket-launching heavy guys who are precisely less of a bother because they fire PROJECTILES.
Your weapon arsenal consists of pistols which you'll mostly use for stealth, a knife whose usefulness pales in comparison to a silenced pistol, two assault rifles which you'll use for pretty much everything, a sniper marksman rifle which you'll never find any ammo for, two auto-shotguns which are AWESOME if there's any non-heavy enemies not hiding in range, a Laserkraftwerk which is upgraded over the course of the game from a laser cutting tool to a harbinger of death which requires to be recharged after every shot, there's detachable machine gun emplacements, and later on the Marksman gets a laser attachment whereas the Assault Rifle gets a rocket launcher attachment. The shotgun also gets bouncing pellet ammo which ricochets around walls, but I didn't find it to be that useful. The grenades in TNO rarely kill anything and work better as a stun, but at the same time their range tends to feel too small in order to feel useful. The weapon balance is -ok-, there's reason enough to change weapons time to time, but still feels rough around the edges considering how efficient most guns already are by themselves at killing nazis. The universality of the assault rifles (and dual assault rifles) makes other weapons feel like their situational uses are not as useful when (dual) ARs can do the job well enough on their own.
But the gunplay is just HNNNNNNNNNGH. It feels great to fire your guns, it feels great so hit something with your guns, your guns look great, your guns sound great, unleashing your dual auto-shotguns on a pack of confused nazis is the greatest thing. Unfortunately your guns don't have much effect on the backgrounds, as MEGATEXTURES turned everything in the background in one giant background decoration with no individual moving parts.
Another thing that needs to be talked about is the items, of which there are shittons. It's unlikely you'll ever run out of ammo for the assault rifle, while using shotguns have to be used in moderation considering that shotgun ammo is relatively sparse. There's always enough health items so you'll be walking with 100 HP in and out of every enemy encounter, though the same can't always be said for armor. Most enemies do drop a helmet on death, which grant you +5 armor every time you pick one up, just don't fret over how that works. With the abundance of health items, someone must've come up with the idea to let the player overcharge their health, meaning you can sacrifice using medkits in the long term in favor of higher chances of survival in the short term by temporarily boosting your health, which is a neat idea. I think your boosted health drains a bit too quickly, but that's just my opinion.
However, the overcharging mechanic's potential is diminished by how you pick up any items in TNO, as you do not pick them up by walking over them like in any other FPS, but you have to look in the vicinity of the item and press E. Not only does this slow down whatever it is you're doing in order to patch yourself up or pick up some ammo, and is a massive pain in the ass, but having to mash E while on an overcharged killing spree doesn't exactly keep one in the zone.
Thankfully there's no limit on the weapons you can carry, your stamina is infinite, your health regenerates in segments (which begs the question why items which heal +4 aren't just +20 because of how the regeneration works), so tiny mistakes are forgiven and you at least have a little bit fight in you when your health regenerates to 20 HP (which is gone in a flash on Über, mind you). Additionally there's a sprint slide, though I never used it because it limits your ability to aim to just in front of you, and doesn't seem to reduce the chances of you getting hit. Save for a few platforming sections, it's quite useless really other than looking cool in front of your friends and promo footage.
As with most modern games, there must also be upgrades, which comes in the form of perks. However, rather than obtaining points as you play the game, unlocking these perks usually involves requirements which you must fulfill like killing a bunch of guys from cover, shooting a bunch of guys in the head, stabbing this many people from behind, overcharging your health over a 200, killing multiple guys with one grenade, and so on. These aren't required by any means, but they do make things easier. Initially I was constantly switching to the perk screen to see if there's something I could do to complete perk challenges, though that's just me being a completionist, and thankfully you won't have to worry about perks too much later on once you've completed most basic perks anyways. But I like that for once getting upgrades involves playing the game rather than obtaining arbitrary points.
Somewhere around the first act, you must make a decision which places you in one of two timelines. What this does is change some cutscenes, decide whether you get the lockpicking or hotwiring minigame, and decides whether you get maximum health or armor upgrades (hint: health upgrades are more useful). It does add a bit more replay value, though I ended up liking Fergus more because he's a pretty cool guy with an accent.
The level design is a mixed bag, really. Sometimes you get to choose your own approach when commanders appear, who you can kill stealthily, or have them set off an alert so more cannon fodder can appear for you to shoot. Sometimes you are in an enclosed space with a lot of winding hallways which let you flank the enemy in many ways FEAR-style which are by far the better levels. Sometimes you are funneled in an outdoor linear area where you can't move anywhere without being shot. Sometimes you are stripped of your weapons and have to temporarily stealth your way through before you get some weapons. Sometimes you are forced in a setpiece moment where you are piloting some kind of vehicle or some big beast chasing you. The levels with the commanders are the best, which is probably unintentional by design, as forced combat sections don't give you much space to move around, whereas you can use passages meant for stealth in order to flank the opponent. Thankfully the AI in TNO isn't psychic and will only focus at your last known position, otherwise flanking wouldn't even be possible at all.
One thing I think all games should keep in mind that you should be able to play
offensively and defensively. Playing defensively means picking the safest options for your survival while not being able to use all mechanics in the game to your disposal, which in TNO's case is playing the game like your standard cover shooter. Playing offensively implies high risk and high reward, using all mechanics of the game to your advantage, and usually implies high-level play. Which in TNO's case is moving around efficiently, using the right weapons, using grenades as a distraction or a stun, and so on. In the olden days, a balance between offense and defense was achieved with fast player movement and projectile weapons, amongst other things. If you got hit, you didn't dodge right. If you missed, you didn't aim right. In modern first-person shooters, being hit is a matter of staying out of cover for longer than a second because of how every FPS uses hitscan now (because it is realistiiiic) and turns most combat encounters into a game of whack-a-mole. Hitscan and regenerating health encourage defensive play rather than offensive, and as such the skill ceiling (in singleplayer modes) feels rather low. And that's where level layouts come into play.
I keep comparing this game to FEAR because FEAR got it
right and TNO almost seems to realize that unlike most contemporaries. Flanking a bunch of nazis with double shotguns is more fun than sitting behind a wall only to pop some heads with your AR every now and then. Defense in FEAR relies on constantly changing positions and outwitting the opponent rather than dodging projectiles or hiding behind cover. Even more fun is when the enemy is capable of doing the same thing to you, which is the very reason why FEAR's AI is held in such high regard. When both parties are trying to outwit eachother, what can you expect behind that corner? Unfortunately TNO's AI's doesn't really come close to that, but in terms of level design it manages to nail that feeling every now and then. Modern hitscan-reliant shooters need to take a good look at FEAR and at what it did right, and expand on that. Perhaps I'm deepthroating FEAR right now, but if you can name me a hitscan-reliant FPS released after 2004 which makes the same use of level layout as FEAR did, I'm all ears. I can only think of the first half of FarCry 1 and Black. I don't know if I should count predator games like FarCry 3 and MGS V considering their open-world nature and relatively overpowered nature of the players.
Overall, Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game with great visuals, an ambitious story, and gameplay which is great every now and then. We were left on a cliffhanger, so maybe we might see more of TNO in the future. It's an ok game which might be a worthwhile purchase in a sale, depending on what you like most in videogames.
And after that, I also played
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
Needless to say, I liked TOB more than TNO. First off, level design is better all around, it has much more of those open commander levels I liked so much in TNO. Second, there's comparatively less story intermissions. After you escape from your jail cell, it's pretty much running and gunning your way through Castle Wolfenstein with a minor torture sequence to break things up until you get to the Bavarian village. Third, the bulletsponges are gone. Shotgun guys now reasonably die within half of a shotgun clip, and Übersoldaten can be taken down with stealth (considering the difficulty of taking an Übersoldat down, you'll be more likely to consider the stealth option). Fourth, the first half of the game you are running around half naked, which is pretty damn cool actually. Fifth, The Old Blood can be considered a reimagining of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, with the same amount of Wolfenstein-escaping and supernatural involved, and I kinda liked RtCW.
The weapons are also somewhat different. Your regular ARs have been replaced with older version whose magazines are smaller, your shotguns are semi-automatic, you obtain a bolt-action rifle for long distance sniping with plentiful ammo this time around, and you also get a flare gun which fires explosive projectiles, which are somehow more effective at blowing things up than a grenade. You do get the sniper and explosive weapon earlier in the game than TNO, so in my book the weapon arsenal of TOB feels better than the TNO arsenal as visually they are on an equal level.
TOB is a prequel to TNO, where you must Find The Files to Deathshead's Compound from a fat lady called Helga who has a penchant for the supernatural. It starts off with you and a fellow Brit infiltrating Castle Wolfenstein undercover, until scripted sequence happens and you get thrown into jail by Rudi, some big guy who likes dogs. What follows is obtaining The Pipe, which this game seems very keen on forcing as something essential to the game, yet is never seen in TNO (probably because the Laserkraftwerk had that role). You can use the pipe to takedown enemies, and there are two modes where you take the pipe apart so you can use the head and the sharp end for stabbing, or just stick them together in order to transform the pipe into a pipe and hit harder, which is probably what you'll be doing most of the time. The pipe is used to open things, and climb walls with a particularly unengaging QTE. It's also used for breaking weak walls.
After that follows a stealth section. While TNO didn't outright FORCE stealth on you, having to sneak up on Übersoldaten without any decent weapons doesn't leave you with much choice. You can take one out stealthily and assault the rest with their miniguns, but doing so tends to leave you exposed to minigun fire of other Übersoldaten. Taking down Übersoldaten involves powering down a power source by holding a lever for five second, as you finish them off with a takedown. Rinse and repeat. These stealth sections aren't really well designed as they could have been, you'd think that patrolling hulks of steel with their weakness in the middle of the route would prompt more interesting layouts, but alas. Then you find yourself some guns and break outta prison. What follows is a terrifying journey into the world of magic, mystery, and violence.
Just killing squads and squads of nazis in Castle Wolfenstein without any hassle feels good. You briefly get tortured by Rudi, but break out again and kill his dog, and after that you escape on the railcar to the snowy Bavarian village wearing nothing but pants and shoes. More shootouts ensue in the village and its underground mines, until you reach a bar where you must help fellow allies escape by fighting off Nazis. This ends in a boss battle against the aforementioned Rudi wearing a powersuit because he's fucking PISSED that you killed his favourite dog and openly laments about how great and happy that augmented half-dog half-killing machine was as it tore the flesh of many prisoners. In retrospect the boss battle wasn't that hard, but a man treating a trained killer as his best friend is pretty hilarious.
And so you escape with your allies in order to make your way to a tavern where Helga is residing. You don a waiter outfit, enter a tavern where a Nazi party is going on, get stabbed in the hand because of your terrible German, when suddenly zombies happen. Apparently everyone who dies gets turned in a flaming zombie now, also known as 'shamblers', because of the underground gas (oh the irony). Dealing with zombies is fairly easy, even in groups. Just dual-wield ARs and aim for the heads. Zombies hit really hard and can unpredictably start to charge towards you, so you can't exactly hold down the trigger buttons and let go. It's a decent break from shooting Nazis, sort of like popping Clot heads in Killing Floor, but there's no special zombies aside from the occasional Nazi zombie which is able to inaccurately fire a gun at you. Also worth noting is that there are zombies falling from the sky. There's even a sequence where BJ saws off the barrel off a coach shotgun because no zombie killing is complete without a sawed-off shotgun.
What's more interesting is how the zombies interact with Nazis during gunfights with you, as anyone who dies get turns into a zombie, so you can turn people into zombies and have them distract the Nazis, and then sneak up on the rest of the Nazi bastards. Unfortunately the game is near its end at that point, so there aren't that many levels which involve Nazi-zombie infighting. The game ends with some more tomb raiding and a final boss fight against a massive blind monster which responds to sound, which is rather easy. You kill the monster, grab the folder, and get ready to assault Deathshead's compound in the sequel...
While some might consider the campy B-movie story a bad thing compared to TNO's story, I preferred TOB's less intrusive story which accepted its own nature. Sure, there's not as many characters, dramatic storytelling, or as much shit to read, but it suits the journey of an American Nazi-killing lunatic in more ways than TNO did. The visuals are still amazing, with a beautifully detailed Castle Wolfenstein and the captured beauty of a snowy Bavarian village before and after everything went to shit. It has more of TNO's best with less of the fat, and that's why I prefer TOB over TNO.
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