Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014)

It may seem unlikely that I recommend Wolfenstein: The New Order, after what I am about to say about it, but in the end, it still is a fantastic game.

Wolfenstein: The New Order plays in the semi-fantasy setting of the Nazis winning the war. The way the developers projected this in the game is actually pretty realistic. The technological advances, the way they may be treating the world from that point, the fanatism it is all there.

The story of Wolfenstein is extraordinarily strong. It really changed from a Nazi shooting gallery to a Nazi shooting gallery with interaction between characters, beautiful upgraded graphics and sounds, and a main character you actually give a sh!t about. The perks and collectibles throughout the game gives it something extra and the whole game is filled with hidden story from the past and present and letters from citizens and soldiers who all tell something about the changing of the world as we know it.

But for me, there were a lot of moments that I could throw the game out of the window (if I still used discs) and many times when I repeated the question ”But how??”, throughout.

The first issue is the frame rate. Although most of the time the game runs steady at 60 fps, it has a lot of drops on certain moments, I thought it was my hardware but other players with better machines experience it too. Some people cannot get above 30 fps without tweaking the whole game.

The second issue with this game is the load times. Oh my god, they are the longest I have ever experienced, apart from Grand Theft Auto V (nothing beats that, nothing). I played the game on a SSD drive and still it took forever to load. When I died, I was eating my nails in frustration because of the loading.

The last issue I found are the perks. They give you a nice bonus for completing them, but the problem is that the game is way too short to unlock them as you progress. This means playing chapters over and over again to gain them, sometimes because a certain level is the only way to get a specific perk. I needed to search for walkthroughs and exploits to gain the demolition perks, those were impossible without the proper trick. Because of this, it ruined some of the fun I had with this game.

Another thing is that the AI is incredibly stupid. They are mindless walking guns who fire endlessly on sight. If you use stealth, you can kill the whole Third Reich all by yourself by just crouching to them in plain sight and stab a knife in their throats.

But overall, despite the problems and mindless grinds, it is still a pretty good game in which the developers want to tell you a powerful story. You can see that they made a revolutionary change with this game compared to the other parts of the series and for the story alone, I enjoyed it.

I would still recommend it.