David’s Retro Rewind | Wolfenstein: The New Order

Feeling justified in calling a game from 2014 “retro” only gives me a slight existential crisis. Moving swiftly along so as not to dwell on that thought, let’s turn the clocks back so far that history itself becomes vastly different! I’ve recently played through Wolfenstein: The New Order for the first time, and I figured I might as well break out the Retro Rewind banner as an excuse to discuss some of my thoughts on it. I mean, how could I not have thoughts about a game that involves using laser weapons to fight Nazis in giant mech suits on the moon?

Yeah, I thought that might pique your interest. At the core of Wolfenstein: The New Order is one ostensibly simple question: What if Nazi Germany not only won World War II, but became effectively the most technologically advanced military in the entire solar system while they did so? In the timeline of Wolfenstein: The New Order, World War II definitively ended not in August 1945 after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, but rather at some point in 1948 after Germany dropped atomic bombs on the U.S. I guess they completed the Munich Project before we completed the Manhattan Project.

You play as longtime Wolfenstein protagonist William “B.J.” Blazkowicz, a U.S. Army Ranger Captain and a very burly man who is often literally too angry to die. During an Allied air raid on a German fortress in 1946, Captain Blazkowicz suffers a severe head injury, which also entails several inches of steel shrapnel embedding itself in his skull. He manages to get to safety despite that, and winds up in a Polish asylum while he recovers. That head injury leaves Blazkowicz in a catatonic state for the next fourteen consecutive years, though he remains somewhat aware of his immediate surroundings the entire time.

Time and time again during his recovery, Captain Blazkowicz watches Nazi soldiers enter the asylum, threaten the doctors and staff, and then leave with varying numbers of patients as their captives. Captain Blazkowicz realizes what’s happening on each of these occasions, but his catatonia renders him trapped in his own body and, thus, unable to react. Then, one fateful day, the Nazis return to announce they’re shutting down the asylum entirely. They start killing doctors, staff, and patients indiscriminately. When they turn their guns toward Captain Blazkowicz, it’s as if a switch is suddenly flipped inside him.

All at once, he regains the ability to move enough to grab a nearby knife and throw it right between the eyes of a Nazi on the opposite side of a large room. He then stands up under his own power for the first time in fourteen years, though he has no idea that much time has passed. Shaky-handed and jelly-legged, Blazkowicz manages to get hold of a couple of dropped Nazi guns, which he uses to eliminate every enemy he can find. Upon making it outside, he sees Anya Oliwa, an asylum nurse who had been personally tending to Blazkowicz during his entire recovery, lying gravely wounded.

Blazkowicz grabs Anya, places her in the passenger seat of a now-unattended German vehicle, then commandeers said vehicle and drives off. Eventually, the two arrive at a farm owned by Anya’s grandparents. Of course, they’re overjoyed to see Anya safe, and they’re immensely grateful to Blazkowicz for having saved her. As they all sit around the elderly couple’s kitchen table, Anya and her grandparents hit Captain Blazkowicz with a massive, unpleasant dose of future shock: It’s 1960, Blazkowicz had been catatonic for fourteen years, the war is long since over, and the victorious Nazis have achieved total world domination.

Blazkowicz convinces himself that, despite the unfathomably consequential events that have transpired since his head injury, there must be an underground resistance cell active somewhere. Conveniently, there’s a captured Nazi officer tied up in the farmhouse’s cellar. Blazkowicz tortures that Nazi until the officer reveals that there is indeed a remnant of a known resistance cell, all of whose members are either dead or incarcerated in Eisenwald Prison in Berlin. Blazkowicz figures if he can somehow link up with the remaining resistance members, they’ll have a decent chance of at least being a major thorn in the Third Reich’s side.

In its prologue, Wolfenstein: The New Order introduces a rather cheeky way to encourage replayability. The player is forced to choose between two of Blazkowicz’s comrades. Whoever you choose will be spared and later imprisoned at Eisenwald as a member of the resistance, while the one you don’t choose will be subjected to horrific “scientific” experiments at the hands of the central antagonist, Wilhelm “Deathshead” Strasse. This choice splits the campaign into two separate timelines based on who you chose to save, thus changing certain plot points. I haven’t done a second playthrough, and I’m currently unsure whether I will or not.

That story choice may affect the timeline and its events, but it doesn’t meaningfully affect the core gameplay mechanics. You’re going to be gunning down legions upon legions of Nazis, and thankfully, you have a decently large arsenal of satisfying weapons with which to do so. Most weapons you can acquire can be dual-wielded, which can be a lot of fun if you’re more partial to the “go in guns blazing” approach to combat. The catch is that you’ll have to re-acquire nearly all your weapons at the start of most story chapters, but that’s generally not a huge hindrance in my experience.

You’ll always have at least a knife on you, which will come in handy for all the sections of the campaign that encourage stealth. I mean, they’re Nazis, so they deserve everything bad that happens to them regardless, but I’d argue they deserve it twice as much if they’re inattentive enough to allow a man as large as B.J. Blazkowicz to sneak up on them. Even when crouching, he’s about the size of an average refrigerator. How can you not tell when someone like that is creeping up with the intention of carving you a second windpipe? Ah, but I digress.

Fairly early on in the campaign, you’ll acquire a high-tech laser cutter, which you can use to cut chains and open holes in thin wires and fences that would otherwise block your path. You’ll eventually find upgrades for it that also allow it to serve as a gun. That is, until you progress far enough into the campaign that you acquire the laser cutter’s much more powerful sibling, the Laserkraftwerk. Neither tool has what I’d call amazing battery life, but fortunately for you, there are wireless battery recharging stations scattered conveniently throughout basically every Nazi-built structure you’ll encounter during the campaign.

You’ll be glad you were introduced to all of those concepts early on, since those charging stations are also your only means of reloading the laser weapons you have to use during your romp through the Nazi research base on the moon. I told you we would get to that eventually, and I think I’ve kept you waiting long enough. Even with the artificial gravity present within the interior of the lunar base, laser weapons are much more effective at propagating through space than old-fashioned bullets. That being said, the main varieties of laser weapons are handguns and assault rifles.

I personally would have loved to see The New Order’s idea of what a laser shotgun might be like, but alas, we can’t have everything. In case you’re wondering, yes, you do get to walk around on the actual surface of the Moon in a space suit, and Captain Blazkowicz’s childlike amazement about that matches my own. I prefer to think that getting to wander around on the Moon just to kill even more Nazis is fate’s way of making it up to Blazkowicz for that whole “steel shrapnel in the skull followed by fourteen consecutive years of catatonia trapping him inside his own body” thing.

Surprisingly (and perhaps disappointingly), the campaign of Wolfenstein: The New Order doesn’t conclude during the section at the Nazi lunar research base. You don’t get to throw Wilhelm “Deathshead” Strasse into the vacuum of space after a climactic battle against him inside a giant mech suit or anything. Certain bits of that do actually happen, but I won’t spoil any more than that. Instead, once you’ve accessed a computer terminal and printed out some launch codes for the nuclear warheads the Nazis stashed in some helicopters you and the resistance stole, you’ve got more business to attend to on boring old Earth.

Much of said business requires the help of a man by the name of Set Roth, a genius who you recruited to the resistance while undercover inside a concentration camp. Set is a member of Da’at Yichud, which, to put it bluntly, is established as a cabal of genius Jewish inventors who have been secretly developing and hoarding massively advanced technology for centuries. The Third Reich has stolen much from Da’at Yichud, including the processes for making several different types of war machines and super concrete. Roth has a few tricks up his sleeve that hamper the Nazis’ ability to use this knowledge.

I have to say, that idea as not merely a suggestion mentioned only in hushed whispers, but fully established and made into a central plot point of Wolfenstein: The New Order, shall we say, does not exactly have the best optics. Even given the Wolfenstein franchise’s history as an alternate-historical fiction series of video games, I wouldn’t be surprised if this aspect of The New Order has added some fuel to the spread of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on certain corners of the Internet. After all, we all know what those Internet crackpots are like: give them an inch, and they’ll take ten miles.

The whole Da’at Yichud thing isn’t the only aspect of Wolfenstein: The New Order that makes me somewhat uneasy. Speaking as a physically disabled person who is also sometimes (incorrectly) assumed to have intellectual disabilities on top of that, I feel compelled to at least briefly discuss a character named Max Hass, who might as well be an indirect resistance member. Max’s caregiver and effectively adoptive father, a former Nazi named Klaus who swore vengeance against the Third Reich for killing his entire family, has also joined the resistance; thus, of course, Max basically had to come along with him.

Max is a physically gargantuan man – considerably bigger even than Captain Blazkowicz – who is clearly intellectually disabled and has a very obvious dent in his skull; two things which I strongly suspect are related. Only four things are known about Max: He’s somehow even stronger than he looks, he enjoys coloring with crayons and playing with toys, the only thing he can say is his own name, and he absolutely hates violence. Any time Max hears any talk of anything that could even potentially involve violence, he claps his hands over his ears, starts crying and screaming, and can only be calmed down by Klaus.

I’m going to hazard a guess that MachineGames and Bethesda likely knew (or certainly should have known) they were approaching multiple very delicate topics when they decided to include a character like Max in The New Order. That being said, though I don’t feel qualified to meticulously examine what MachineGames could have done to make the character of Max more appropriately representative. However, I do feel comfortable saying they could have handled that aspect quite a lot worse than they did. I think Max and the way he’s portrayed in The New Order helps to highlight the lesser-known horrors of global total war.

To summarize, I enjoyed my first playthrough of Wolfenstein: The New Order quite a bit. I’ve no idea whether or not I’ll do a second playthrough just to see the changes between the two possible timelines, but I’m not ruling out that possibility. I’ve had Wolfenstein: The New Order in my backlog for eons now. I decided to try it out on a whim because I seem to be on a “no thinking, just satisfying guns and objectively evil enemies to use them on” kick as of late when gaming in my downtime. Wolfenstein: The New Order scratched that rather specific itch quite well indeed.