Wolfenstein: The New Order is a weird game. Its story can't decide if it's a comedy or a drama, its characters take themselves too seriously considering they're cartoon characters, and its tone is all over the place. One minute you're mowing down Nazi robots with dual machine guns. The next, a young woman watches soldiers slaughter her innocent family.
Everything hinges on this off-putting mixture of serious and silly going somewhere. After playing the first hour, I'm hopeful that Wolfenstein can work.
It puts a great villain in place with Dr. Deathshead, a sadistic Nazi whose introduction made my skin crawl. He locks BJ Blazkowicz's squad in a room, watches as the walls close in on the Americans, and smiles. It's an eerie introduction that leads to Deathshead gouging out BJ's friends' eyes and trying to burn him alive. The escape leaves Blazkowicz comatose. It's bleak, and it gets darker.
The New Order compensates for its simplicity with excruciating difficulty.
The assassination attempt against Deathshead that makes up The New Order's prologue is, aside from its villain, unremarkable. The combat doesn't give you much freedom to deviate from its long hallways and small rooms. It is pure, concentrated Wolfenstein. Walk forward, shoot Nazis. When it takes control away from you, it starts feeling like a Nazi-skinned sequel to The Darkness.
This is a development team made up of some ex-Starbreeze team members, after all. The Darkness, however, has its supernatural signature to give the gameplay an unfamiliar hook. Wolfenstein is missing that special something, but it's getting it more right with its Darkness-influenced story beats.
The most powerful character moment, the most engaging story set piece, and the most human element in Wolfenstein's first hour happen when you're barely interacting. Blazkowicz, having mumbled a gruff speech about appreciating his caretakers at an asylum, has to sit and watch as Nazis storm in and murder them. As each gunshot rings through your room, the faded, cold-colored world springs to life in a burst of bright color. Violence brings BJ back to life, and gets him out of his chair to start stabbing and shooting again.
And then, suddenly, I'm kind of bored.
It's not that the core gameplay here is bad, it's just not exciting. Wolfenstein tries harder to tell a cooler story than expected, but at the expense of applying the same philosophy to its action. The New Order compensates for its simplicity with excruciating difficulty -- Blazkowicz can't take a lot of shots before dropping dead, and Nazis attack in huge groups. They're more aggressive than your usual enemy A.I. too. They want your blood as badly as you want theirs.
If we apply a summer movie mentality to it -- it's dumb, it's fun, sit back and relax -- Wolfenstein could be an awesome action game. But I'm of the mind that we shouldn't have to shut our brains off to enjoy something. Hopefully the brief bits of greatness in its introduction can carry it all the way.
Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.
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