Wolfenstein: The New Order

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game of extremes that goes, in a matter of seconds, from brilliant moments of thrilling action and engaging character development to some boring scenes rife with cliché. Its level design suffers from the same problem, sometimes being inventive, sometimes being repetitive. It’s an FPS with good and bad ideas that marvels with its inconsistency.

The story begins with Captain William B. J. Blazkowicz on a desperate mission to defeat the Nazi army in 1946. If the date caught your attention, it’s because in the story, Germany has mysteriously acquired technology too advanced for the time and is leveraging it to turn the balance of the war in their favor. Blazkowicz’s objective is to infiltrate the castle of scientist Deathshead – his name says it all – and kill him, eliminating one of the main figures responsible for the design of this new weaponry. His team, however, fails in their mission and is caught, with Blazkowicz himself being wounded in the head. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a hospital, many years after the battle, and discovers that the Nazis have won World War II.

The narrative moves fast from here. After fleeing from the hospital with one of the female employees, Blazkowicz attempts to locate a resistance group so that he can return immediately to the fray. Fighting seems to define the captain. It’s no wonder that it’s during a moment of brutality, when soldiers are gunning down doctors and patients in front of him, that he wakes up from his apparent coma: what moves Blazkowicz is the desire to kill Nazis. He’s the hero we need right now.

Blazkowicz represents the game’s general inconsistency, ranging from boring clichés to surprising complexity. On the one hand, Blazkowicz is your typical FPS protagonist: the big, athletic white man of few words that boasts a hoarse voice and a tendency to enjoy violence. His thoughts – which come up almost like whispers during the levels – develop this side of him, painting the captain as a “badass” who has gone through a lot in life and become stronger because of it. Yawn personified. But on the other hand, there are many scenes where he shows a fascinating vulnerability: his unshakable appearance is revealed to be a mask, which is always removed when the violence becomes overwhelming. The climax of the first level, though cliché, works precisely because it shows Blazkowicz completely lost, not knowing how to act, feeling helpless before the terrible events.

More importantly, however, is the fact that the story recognizes that he could very well have been fighting for the Nazis, as his blue-eyed biotype clearly fits the concept of the superior Aryan race advocated by German officials. This is important not only because it serves as a comment on the current state of the FPS genre – Nazis would love this genre’s typical protagonists – but also because it paints Blazkowicz in a more interesting light.

One of the resistance members working with Blazkowicz is a retired Nazi who switched sides when his son was born with a deformity and had to be sacrificed for the sake of the purity of his race. The character, therefore, changed sides not because he felt it was right, but because he felt personally wronged by the Nazis and now wants revenge. Blazkowicz, on the other hand, confronts the Nazis simply because he understands that they are horrible monsters: even though he’s someone who would have greatly benefited from the Nazi regime, he opposes it… on principle.

The Nazis themselves are yet another element developed unevenly in The New Order. The two major antagonists are sadistic and abominable creatures who take pleasure in torturing people and have no redeemable traits. The main antagonist, Deathshead, is even named like a villain from a superhero story. Nazis are often portrayed in narratives as absolutely evil and monstrous, in a pattern that has unfortunately proved insufficient to alert people to the cruelty of their ideology. On the other hand, Blazkowicz can find German letters during the levels that show multifaceted individuals who, despite defending a violent, racist regime, show signs of still being human: one of the first letters we may find, for example, is written by an officer who, on a trip to Africa, after a violent encounter with those he calls “savages”, reflects on the horrors of war, laments his decision to become a military man and expresses concern and love for his beloved. The Nazi here is portrayed as a person: a horrible, despicable person who should be tried for war crimes, without a doubt, but still a person.

This is actually a pattern in The New Order: character development is more layered in optional letters and secondary audio logs than in the main story. One of the most fascinating figures in the game, the nurse Ramona, for instance, only appears in some audio logs narrated by Blazkowicz’s romantic interest, Anya. Whilst Anya’s development is almost non-existent during the main cutscenes – she likes the protagonist because “why not” and fights the Nazi because “hell yes” – Ramona is shown to face moral conflicts while displaying some fun idiosyncrasies in her way of speaking: she’s always cynically “discovering” a particularity of the Nazis to murder them with it, for example. She’s a tragic character who recognizes the complexities of the situation in which she finds herself, but never hesitates to do what she can to help everyone.

The game’s main cutscenes, however, deserve applause for their surprisingly witty editing that employs several visual match cuts to accelerate time: one of the most inspired ones has the scenery suddenly changing from a room on a train to one in a hotel, putting the characters in their next destination in a split second.

With some strong moments of social criticism – the systematic and institutional racism of pre- and post-War America makes a certain character compare the American people to Nazis in a scene of pure revolt –, The New Order also oscillates between being socially relevant and completely innocuous.

The game’s level design follows suit. For every provocative and ambitious level, as the one staged in a concentration camp, there is also some filler, like all the moments that take place in the sewers of a resistance base, which don’t develop a single remarkable mechanic or idea.

The levels themselves are divided into combat arenas interconnected by corridors and stairs. We have at our disposal a vast arsenal and can even wield two weapons at the same time. However, true to form, there is also a powerful contradiction present in the game’s design: The New Order normally encourages an active stance, putting us always on the move, either with destructible covers or with an AI programmed to flank us at every chance, but it’s also rife with sponge-like enemies that can quickly dispatch us with massive laser weapons, which ends up stimulating a defensive approach, letting us dread leaving cover.

The game also offers some simple stealth options: shooting with a silencer, throwing a knife, or performing a takedown when approaching an enemy silently when crouched. The problem is that Wolfenstein is not Deus Ex:  the levels are not designed in a way that enables the player to do everything silently. Stealth here is not a viable alternative, but a plus, something we can do sometimes to shake things up a little. There are enemies immune to this approach and levels in which shooting everyone is mandatory. In the highest difficulties, it’s advisable to kill the so-called “commanders” silently to avoid reinforcements, but the function of stealth ends there.

Finally, a point The New Order gets very right is the character’s progression system, which works hand in hand with the way players express themselves on the battlefield, as it unlocks new skills and upgrades as we perform certain actions. Using a specific weapon, for example, increases its ammo capacity, while acting stealthily increases the movement speed when crouched. The progression system here is an organic one, being built from the player’s own actions, and avoids falling into bland abstractions such as experience points.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game with lots of ups and downs. And it’s fun precisely because of that.

December 21, 2025

Review originally published in Portuguese on April 06, 2018.