I feel like this game took a giant leap forward for fast paced shooters then two small steps back. The game has really solid shooting mechanics and seems to want to bring back old school shooter mechanics, yet didn't really do it correctly.
Story:
The story is a simple one. Nazis won WW2 with very superior technology. You play as BJ Blazkowicz a wounded US special forces/one man army who spent 15-20 years in a hospital paralyzed in Germany. Finally you magically get better from the grace of Uncle Sam and do what you do best and that is shooting the crap out of nazis. You find the resistance who are a bunch of different characters with their own back story you flesh out and plan your revenge.
Gameplay:
This is where I have issues with the game. Its fun, its frantic, its fast paced, its gory, it has health and armor pickups, duel welding, alt firing mechanics, sliding, and etc etc. This game has solid run and gun mechanics but you will die quickly. This is the issue I have. They give us amazing mechanics and gunplay but you are made out of paper. The game also shoe horned in stealth mechanics and while the game boasts you can play your way the smartest decision is to stealth around and pick off majority of the room before you are spotted or pick off the enemy who can call in infinite reinforcements until they are dead.
It seems every engagement sadly plays the same. Walk into a room see on your hud how many enemy officers there are (they are the guys who can call infinite or bigger and badder reinforcements) and you sneak around until you find them, stealth kill them, then try to pick off whoever is left or just run and gun. Sure you don't have to stealth kill everyone but you will die a lot until you say "screw this" and stealth it.
Another baffling move is the lack of ammo/ammo pickups. In this game of course you will shoot a lot of enemies but you don't seem to get a lot of ammo. Instead enemy guns give 4-15 rounds of ammo and while that seems like a lot some enemies require entire magazines emptied into them. If you explore the levels you will find ammo but thats hard to do while you have robots, nazis, and explosions all around. Even then you have a limited amount of ammo you can hold anyway and its a low number. Why go for realism with this? I am fighting robo nazi dogs and nazi super soldiers why in CoD I have 500-600 rounds of ammo when in this game I am lucky to have 120 rounds. But I feel the worst thing with ammo is you have to manually pick it up which in my opinion goes against the whole run and gun idea. You have to manually look down and press the "E" key to pick anything up. Nazi drop his weapon? E key, entire box of ammo on the ground? need to manually look down and press "E." This doesn't sound annoying until you have a entire room full of elite enemies wanting to shoot you. Towards the end of the game this ammo pick up system will drive you crazy.
There are some puzzles to break up the shooting sections. For a shooting game they are pretty fun, but if this was another genre they be a little stupid. It all revolves around this nazi experimental gun you find early on. This gun slowly over the course of the story gets upgraded so you can use it to fight certain bosses, cut through certain materials to get through paths, cut through chains to open new areas and etc etc. Its like a fun little bootleg Half-life 2. Its definitely not awful but a little baffling why its here.
See I guess this is my main point about the game. Its seems to be having a identity crisis. It wants to be stupid fun with powerful guns that obliterate your enemies and have heads pop off and any other body party turn into red putty. You fight nazi robo dogs, have a base inside the German capital. Yet at the same time though towards the end the campiness ends and its becomes serious BJ and his gravely voice becomes depressed, solemn, serious. I can't be serious when I just shot the head off a robot dog with the swastika plastered all over it. Why give us these fun run and gun mechanics if you punish us for using it? A game series that started as a fun run and gun now rewards us with stealthily killing guards, why are there perks? Does Wolfenstein really need a perk system? (I would go more in depth about the perk system but its no point they just give you passive benefits like hold more grenades or reload faster by doing certain things like kill 2 guys with one grenade its stupid and annoying and hinder you in the early game) why do I have to hit "e" to pick stuff up in the heat of battle? Why am I figuring out this puzzle when there are more nazis to kill?
Audio:
Friggin fantastic. The guns sound powerful, it has its own music track that sounds like nazi versions of bands like the beach boys or the beetles. The voice acting is superb apparently native German speakers have said that the Germans are speaking real German and not spouting nonsense.
Graphics/pc stability:
So I played this on the PC with a gtx 980. The game has issues the Id engine really has some issues. Pop-ins are here and annoying as ever. Rage had the same issue it just seems id can't get PC right which is sad since they started on the PC. The game does look beautiful don't get me wrong but you notice popins right away. Also there are some issues with graphics card. My friend has a powerful rig as well but barely run the thing even on low and his CPU, GPU, RAM, meet a lot more than recommended. Also the menu mouse sensitivity is all over the place. But thats a minor issue.
Pros:
Very solid run and gun mechanics, you feel like a bad ass, different guns with alt fire, you fight futuristic nazis in all different types of environments even the goddamn moon, its a very long game about 8 hours plus it has replayability if you are a completionist to try and get all the perks, see a little different story (there is one multiple branch choice in the beginning of the game), you can explore levels for secrets, nice to see a game almost embrace the older run and gun mechanics of the olden day,
Cons:
While it has solid run and gun mechanics the game punishes you for using them and prefers you stealth it, have to press "E" for everything which is annoying mid fire fight, the game tries to be campy and super serious at the same time, perk system is a waste, puzzles while not that half-assed just feel meh, you are made of paper and will die a lot, you get a low amount of ammo, The Id engine just doesn't look that great on PC especially the pop-ins, some enemies take far too much to kill, trying to find ammo mid fight isn't fun.
Overall:
Overall I did enjoy this game a lot. I just wish it was more run and gun and not sneaky bj knifing commanders in the back and then maybe some run and gun action. It just feels like they couldn't decide on what the game is suppose to be and just tried to have best of both worlds and it just doesn't work.