BJ’s latest one-man resistance promises a lot
DETAILS
PUBLISHER
Bethesda Softwords
DEVELOPER
MachineGames
CREDITS
The Darkness [2007]
Escape From
Butcher Bay [2004]
Assault On Dark Athena
[2009]
PLAYERS
1
KINECT?
No
SMARTGLASS?
No
RELEASE DATE
TBA 2014
WEBSITE
wolfenstein.com
TWITTER
@wolfenstein
Wolfenstein: The New
Orderas described
by its creative director
Andreas Öjerfors sounds
really quite good. Yes, it’s still
at its core a game about
uncovering magic Nazi space guns
and turning them on their creators
in the splatteriest ways possible, but
The New Order has something of a
twist: series hero BJ Blazkowicz has
been in a coma for fifteen years and
awakes to find that, despite all his
valiant murders in the previous games,
the world is now under the jackbooted
control of a victorious Nazi superstate.
That’s what you get for not playing the
2009 reboot.
This failure of BJ’s to save the
world like a good shooter protagonist
should is key, according to Öjerfors,
who really hammers home how
committed the team are to telling the
best single-player-only story that they
can. Another generic shooter this is
not, says he. So, what does the Aryan
promised land look like in the wake of
the Allied defeat?
Right now, like a pretty generic
shooter. BJ’s solo quest to reverse
the course of the war in this alternate
history looks, so far, like everything
we’d expect from a Wolfensteingame.
BJ barges around a rather linearlooking dystopia, ducks in and out
of cover, searches out health packs,
cracks one-liners and mows down outand-out bastard Nazis in the name of
freedom. And their new, out-and-out
bastard robots.
Maybe that’s just the videos that
have been released of the game so
far. Perhaps there’s good marketing
data that shows fleeing down a linear
grey-brown path from a robot guard
dog, or watching an ooh-isn’t-he-nasty
stormtrooper murder helpless hospital
patients, is better for piquing interest
than any real exploration of what a
global Nazi empire might have looked
like. Maybe there’s some humanity to
be found in the game’s comic book
enemies, something to mark them out
as a step forward in antagonists from
the Doom-clone shooters of yore, we
don’t know; all we’re seeing is mad
scientists, lasers and mutants.
Perhaps The New Orderwill live
up to being something more than
a spit-shine on one of gaming’s
oldest franchises. But the onus is on
MachineGames to show that, rather
than just tell us that’s the case while,
on-screen, BJ blithely shanks another
SS Officer in the throat. There’s the
seed of an intriguing, challenging
story here – it would be a shame
if Wolfenstein’s galumphing hero
trampled all over it.