Dubai: Long before Wolfenstein 3D started the first-person shooter genre in 1992, there was a little game called Castle Wolfenstein.
It was a stealth-based, top-down affair that involved breaking out of a Nazi prison camp along the lines of Colditz.
And while Wolfenstein has come to symbolise all that’s best — or worst, depending on your perspective — about first-person shooters, I was delighted to discover that the new release has put stealth back as an option.
Yes, you’re still free to run-and-gun your way around levels, and it’s an absolute blast, but you can opt instead to keep low, keep sneaky, and take out opponents with a blade or, once you find it, a silenced pistol.
The New Order is, in all senses of the word, a ripping yarn. There’s not a great deal of subtlety to it, even in stealth mode, but the game makes that a strength, not a weakness. Full-frontal attack is a blast, especially when you combine dual-wielded assault rifles with a well-placed grenade. Sneaking offers a nice change of pace.
The setting is pretty cool, a dieselpunk nightmare in which the Nazis won the Second World War and now dominate the world. Series protagonist BJ Blaskowicz begins leading the final, desperate assault on recurring villain General Deathshead’s lab, only to face armoured SS troopers, mechanically augmented dogs and giant robots.
Deathshead, by the way, is wonderfully voiced by Dwight Schultz, the A-Team’s Mad Murdoch.
It turns out that the assault is no more than a lengthy prologue to the main game. Blaskowicz is hit in the head at the climax, and wakes up 14 years later in a Polish sanatorium in a world utterly dominated by Nazis.
The Nazis decide to shut the sanatorium down, massacring patients and staff, which jolts our hero from his coma and sets him on a mission to rescue his favourite nurse and break the last members of the resistance out of prison in Berlin.
The Berlin sequence is a delight — zeppelins floating over a city of brutal Nazi architecture, with searchlights reminiscent of Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light.
But we’re not here to admire the pretties — though make no mistake, The New Order makes full use of the new consoles’ graphical power to make the visuals very cool indeed. We’re here to do what Blaskowicz does best: kill Nazis with extreme prejudice.
And this is where Wolfenstein really shines. It’s absolutely, straight down the line old-school shooter. There’s no multiplayer mode — instead, you get a decent-length solo campaign, featuring health pickups, armour pickups, weapon pickups and ammo pickups. None of this modern limited weapon selection malarkey — if you find it, Blaskowizc can carry it. Two of it — oh, the fun of dual-wielding the biggest weapons you can find!
You can boost your health above regular levels by taking extra mudpacks. These health boosts deplete quickly, but do allow you to take on crazy odds when you have to.
And, while there’s a skill system, it’s nothing you actually choose — gain stealth achievements, and you’ll unlock extra stealth abilities; gain assault achievements and you’ll find it easier to run with two weapons, for instance.
There are enough twists on the battlefields to keep the interest and the challenge up. Shooting while climbing a wall, as Nazis pop out of the windows above. Taking out fast-moving jets with anti-aircraft cannon. Dodging, weaving and positioning to take out near-invulnerable robot.
Stealth, if you pull it off, will stop enemies raising the alarm and calling in reinforcements. But if you love your hot lead, forget the sneaking — a second wave of bad guys is what you want anyway.
There are even a couple of levels you can just blitz, taking out only some of the enemy and heading for the next level as fast as you can.
But aware that although The New Order’s marketing is pushing its storyline, it’s pretty thin and very clichéd. But that’s not what we play Wolfenstein for, is it? Fortunately the storyline isn’t that intrusive — it’s really just a thin excuse to kill Nazis. Huzzah!
Also be aware that the game’s 18 rating isn’t messing around. There’s blood and guts in abundance, and Blaskowicz even gets to share some hot coffee with love interest Anya.
All in all, The New Order is a fine, fine game. Best Wolfenstein in recent years — and that’s saying something.
