Phantasm's review of Wolfenstein: The New Order | Backloggd (2025)

“A Nazi ain’t got no humanity. They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hating, mass murdering maniac, and they need to be dee-stroyed. That’s why any and every sumbitch we find wearing a Nazi uniform… they’re gonna die.” - 1st Lieutenant Aldo Raine, Inglourious Basterds

As a huge fan of iD Software’s DOOM games, I never got into its parent franchise Wolfenstein, as I felt like I wouldn’t really enjoy Wolfenstein 3D all that much. It’s a game that precedes the original 1993 DOOM and seems very primitive and repetitive as a result. I had heard great things about the Machine Games reboot of the series though, and since current world events at the time of writing this have put me in a Nazi killing mood, I figured what better way of appeasing that urge than to finally try a Wolfenstein game. Wolfenstein: The New Order is overall, a very fun and frantic cover shooter with some truly great concepts for its gameplay and story, as well as an absolutely mesmerizing sense of scale to its setting that makes each level extremely immersive to play through. That being said though, despite having such great concepts, I don’t feel they’re seen to their full potential, and certain aspects of the game are executed in clumsy ways that drag the overall experience down.

The New Order stars series protagonist Captain William “B.J.” Blazkowicz in an alternate history where, during World War II, the Nazis had access to futuristic technology that allowed them to turn the tides of the war overwhelmingly in their favor. This technology included massive, mass-slaughtering robot monstrosities that take the forms of laser minigun wielding cyborgs, heavily armored robot dogs with jaws that can easily snap bones in half, and gigantic laser cannon wielding mechas. After a last ditch effort in 1946 by the Allied Forces to shift the momentum of the war in their favor fails, Blazkowicz ends up in a vegetative state as a result of an explosion that causes shrapnel to impact his brain. He winds up in a mental asylum for fourteen years until 1960, when he finally comes to after witnessing Nazi soldiers round up the remaining patients of the asylum and put the staff to death. After rescuing the main nurse, Anya Oliwa, the two manage to flee from the asylum. Despite having finally awoken from his comatose state after so many years, Blazkowicz finds himself in the middle of his worst possible nightmare: a world where the Nazis have won the war, and now control everything. Refusing to accept this world he has woken into, he joins up with a group of resistance fighters to take the world back from the Nazis and their ideology of hate, no matter how hopeless their efforts may seem in the face of their overwhelming control.

The game is a cover shooter that has you infiltrating locations important to the Nazi regime in order to sabotage or do damage to their means of controlling the populace. You progress through a series of linear levels, while battling squads of Nazi soldiers and the automated robot killing machines that supplement their ranks. While you start off each level with a knife and (once acquired) a laser weapon known as the Laserkraftwerk, you have to procure all additional firearms by finding them throughout the level, whether that means you take them off the bodies of dead Nazi scum, or by simply finding them in gun cases or somewhere lying around. These levels can be approached in either a guns blazing fashion, where you engage in shootouts with every squad of Nazis you find, or in a stealthy fashion, where you try and make your way through levels without being seen.

While I’ve played a number of FPS games in my time, I’m not especially familiar with too many cover shooters or military shooters in the vein of Call of Duty or Battlefield. Personally, I really enjoyed The New Order’s FPS combat. It was very satisfying mowing down hoards of Nazis in this game. It has a pretty standard arsenal of weapons for an FPS game, but there are two things that make the arsenal unique: the first is that B.J. can dual-wield any weapon as long as he finds two of them at some point in a level. This allows you to unleash double the firepower, but it does hinder B.J.’s movement speed a tad. While it does seem a little silly watching him wield two shotguns at once, in practice, it feels so, so good watching Nazi bastards fall at your feet while blasting away with them, so I certainly don’t mind. The other aspect that makes the arsenal unique is that almost every gun has an alternate fire mode that allows them to shoot a different type of ammunition. Assault rifles can shoot rockets, shotguns can shoot ricocheting shrapnel, marksman rifles can shoot lasers, etc. I really love this, since it keeps your arsenal small and easy to remember, while also providing you with additional options to combat enemies with. Certain enemy types are more vulnerable to certain ammo types, and I really enjoy having to quickly decide which weapon to use and when depending on the situation and what I’m going up against. It’s the exact kind of decision making I love in FPS games.

The Laserkraftwerk is an exception to the standard arsenal of weapons you have. This laser weapon can alternate between a mode that allows you to cut holes in fences and metal containers, and a mode that turns it into a powerful laser gun. It requires a battery charge to function, and there are plenty of stations all throughout levels where you can quickly charge the weapon. I like how immersive it can feel using it to cut holes into fences, but at the same time, it’s a tad gimmicky and not something especially mind blowing or memorable. I mainly prefer its use as a laser gun against armored enemies, since they take less damage from bullets.

Right from the start, you can notice that the game’s difficulty is rather inconsistent. After playing through the first couple of levels, I found the game’s “BRING ‘EM ON” difficulty (which is considered Normal) to be too easy, so I bumped it up to “I AM DEATH INCARNATE” (the game’s Hard difficulty). I found this difficulty to be mostly fine, but there were definitely instances where it felt like I’d have to play extremely lame or else I’d get immediately erased from existence. This happened most frequently when it came to the armored enemies, which feel like they soak up waaaaaay more damage than they should at times. The armored enemies with the shrapnel shotguns in particular really pissed me off, because those bastards seemed to always oneshot you regardless of health.

While you can always go for a guns blazing approach to making your way through these levels, the game does encourage you to alternate between that and taking a stealthy approach. In my experience, trying to play stealthily is pointless. I don’t know if it’s because I was playing on the game’s Hard difficulty, but I found it to be almost impossible to not get caught. If you do get caught, then every single enemy in the game knows where you are at all times, no matter what. You can try and run out of their line of sight, but they will all just run towards your location, regardless of where you go, even if they never spotted you in the first place. It’s pretty frustrating, and I gave up on stealth tactics about halfway through the game as a result.

While there aren’t too many boss fights, the ones that are here are all pretty lame. That’s because the game doesn’t make it clear what you need to do in order to be able to take them down. One fight involves a lot of trial and error while you wait for an NPC to tell you the steps to defeating the boss. You can do these steps at any time, but you’re not going to know that until after you wait for the NPC to tell you what you need to do (or you just look it up), which feels like a waste of time. The final boss in particular is especially clunky, and a huge let down. It’s very confusing trying to figure out what to do, and the second phase in particular is just a complete mess. It's hard to go into detail without spoiling it, but essentially, the longer the boss fight goes on for, the harder it gets for you to kill it, so you need to kill it in a super quick and cheap fashion, making it an unsatisfying finale. The final boss ends the game on a very sour and disappointing note that honestly left me a little salty upon finishing it.

I think what is by far the best aspect of the game is its sense of scale. The game’s opening segment is one of the best openings I’ve played through in a video game, especially if you don’t know what you’ll be going up against. It does such an excellent job setting you up for the things you’ll encounter throughout the game. I’m not especially familiar with the Wolfenstein franchise, so I went into this thinking it’d be a World War II game with some occasional science fiction stuff. I was absolutely not expecting robot dogs the size of cars, or Gundam-sized mechas complete with laser cannons. Everything about the game’s scale feels very over-the-top in the best kind of way, with huge setpieces and out-of-this-world locations you raid during your missions to topple the Nazi rule.

The story is solid, though like the difficulty, it feels a tad inconsistent. In conjunction with the final boss, it ends on a pretty bitter note that altogether left me feeling irritated towards its conclusion. The story has some truly fantastic ideas, but at the same time, I feel like the game doesn’t push those ideas far enough. B.J. in particular is not just your typical action hero, he’s shown struggling with severe mental health issues, including high functioning depression and PTSD. During the first level, you’re given the choice to rescue one of two supporting characters, and the character you don’t choose will end up being executed. Later on, whichever character you choose to save ends up suffering from extreme survivor’s guilt, and has a truly excellent cutscene where they blow up at B.J. in anger over choosing to rescue them. However, this plot point is never resolved in a satisfying way. I do like that the game isn’t afraid to show these aspects of its characters, and how the war has affected them, including the mental health and personal issues other characters in the game deal with, but it really doesn’t feel like it follows through on these topics.

It goes without saying that Nazis are evil wastes of oxygen that do not deserve life. Still, I feel like I have to stress how good of a job The New Order does in making sure not to humanize any Nazi character in any way, shape, or form. Their personalities and behavior fuels your urge to see them completely and utterly eviscerated in the most painful ways imaginable. You’ll come face to face with a Nazi that has completely groomed a cadet three times younger than her, to the point where he’s practically brainwashed, and be forced to watch the two of them perform sexual acts with each other. There’s also the main antagonist of the game, whose rants regarding genetic superiority utterly infuriated me and made me want to get to the end of the game as fast as possible so that I could watch him die. Machine Games' approach to the Nazis was truly excellent. They made them feel like real people you are meant to hate, as opposed to over the top supervillains. There is nothing charming, appealing, or redeeming about these characters whatsoever, and that’s exactly how Nazis should be handled.

The game looks pretty great. I really loved the art direction, and how the game doesn’t quite go for a completely realistic look. It’s more like a blend of realism with some exaggerated comic book-like aspects to the design of various characters. I also really loved the design of the environments, as well as the attention to detail with the architecture and the way the game’s world looks. Everything feels like a totalitarian nightmare. Buildings look wrong, like they shouldn’t be there. It really sells the idea of a world taken over by the Nazi regime. Unfortunately, the audio mixing for the music is horrendous. The game allegedly has a great soundtrack, but the music is completely drowned out in gameplay and I barely got to hear any of it at all. It sucks because this soundtrack was composed by Mick Gordon, and I’m a very big fan of his work on the DOOM games and the 2016 reboot of Killer Instinct. There’s no option to adjust the volume of the music in the options either. All you can do is just… turn it off completely, and it feels like it already is turned off by default. The game uses pre-rendered cutscenes, and these cutscenes are animated and directed phenomenally well. However, they can feel… jarring, especially when the game immediately goes from gameplay to cutscenes without much of a transition. I think it would’ve been better for the story to be told in-engine as opposed to through these cutscenes.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is so close to greatness for me. It has so much that makes it an incredibly strong experience, such as its immensely satisfying FPS combat, the mindblowing scale of its setting, its fantastic set pieces that are still surprising to this day, and certain aspects of its story, which were truly excellent. Sadly, its inconsistent difficulty, poor implementation of stealth, terrible boss fights, feeble handling of certain themes of its story, and utterly unsatisfying finale kept me from enjoying it as much as I really wanted to. The New Order is still a very good time, but I’m hoping that the rest of the titles in the franchise made by Machine Games improve upon its core structure. It’s not hard to see the areas where The New Order could be a lot better, and if they could just polish those areas where things are rough around the edges, they’d have a truly outstanding FPS on their hands.

Phantasm's review of Wolfenstein: The New Order | Backloggd (2025)
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