Not a shooter with a brain and/or soul, but definitely a shooter with a heart.

User Rating: 8 | Wolfenstein: The New Order PC

Wolfenstein pre-dated Doom. Now ponder that for a moment. What you're playing is history. History that will hopefully be made again if the game sells well enough to warrant a sequel, and I do hope you buy this game because I want to know how it all plays out since the game ends on a cliff-hanger, the almost Half-Life 2 Episode 2 cliff-hanger.

This game is one of those ultimate male-fantasy games. It just nailed pretty much everything right. It is also a tale of revenge. You play as an alpha-male with a soft heart, you get a hot chick, you travel around the world and to the moon, you get some downtime there and there, you kill Nazis and robo-Nazis, destroy their accomplishments, unravel their secrets, inspire the resistance, etc.

It's a roller-coaster of a shooter with some old-school and some "new-school" mechanics that is outrageously fun, brutal, gripping that, after 16 chapters, will leave you yearning for more.

I kept thinking about RAGE as I was playing this though (not even Bioshock Infinite came to mind). No wonder, this is still the ID Tech 5 engine which, sadly, still has ways to go in terms of rending the world around you with no texture popins (Ahem Rage, Ahem). I would also still like to see my legs. Otherwise, the engine delivers. Blown off heads, sometimes big set-pieces, multiple ways of approaching the target, tons of ricochet/explosion/smoke/bullets flying everywhere along with along with pieces of concrete whizzing by. I also love that this time (unlike in RAGE) you play as a character with a voice as well as inner thoughts. I was always surprised why so many games out there fail to deliver on the inner narration when your character thinks of something or encounters something in the world. It took Bioshock franchise 3 games to finally create a memorable character (whose face you sadly do not get to see in the game, still).

Now why do I mention Bioshock again? Well, I've noticed some subtle philosophy behind this game. The war is over, well, all wars are over now, nations do not fight each other anymore because there are no more nations. The technology put the man on the moon in 1951. There is Colonization of Venus is underway. Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Aeronautics along with Eugenics, racism, suppression, slave labor, camps. It is the New Order. All you see is conformity/normality and honest idealistic beliefs (probably reserved for Germans only). And then there is a third choice, resistance.

And that's where B.J. Blazkowicz and his friends come in. Now how exactly did the Nazis manage to conquer the world and reach Peru? Well, play the game and find out. However, with all those bad things I mentioned I can't help but play a devil's advocate and ponder that in a few more generations of the New Order the assimilated people would no longer know of the good old days. Fast-forward few more generations and people would simply take the world as it is. A technologically advanced civilization the fruits of which are reserved for the top 1%. As you read letters written by the British they will mention that even though the war was lost they have now experienced 6 months of peace - without any terrorist activity, where they can walk the streets of London without being scared for their life. Now that's where the game is trying to throw the player off a bit, I believe. However, we have very little knowledge of how the outside world fares.

I don't want to get too deep into this but I'll say this, buy the game, support the dev, and enjoy.