Posted on: December 28, 2020

aukje.wildenborg
Games: 42 Reviews: 21
Ultimately pointless
I'm probably not as big a fan of The New Order as some, which was a game I moderately enjoyed on my first playthrough but got really critical of beyond that. I think you'll find upon closer inspection that The New Order actually holds a lot of the same problems The New Colossus does. TNO gets a good rep but I think much of it is because it came at a good time and it hid its true nature much better than TNC was able to. A lot of identity politics, a lot of downtime, all while BJ talks about "we're here to kill some Nazis!" yet the game goes out of its way to find opportunities and reasons to NOT let you do that. I think The Old Blood is probably the best that has come out of the Wolfenstein reboot. It's a game with the best art out of the bunch, by far the best atmosphere and a straightforward story. So why am I not really talking about The New Colossus? Well. The truth is that to me, there is no point in playing any of these Wolfenstein games when you can simply go for another Doom 2016 playthrough. Doom is everything that these Wolfenstein games are not. Thoroughly playtested, creatively beautiful and coherent, and FUN. But if I had to talk about The New Colossus, I'd say that it is ultimately a frustrating shooter with poor weapon selection and some crap ideas. Fighting in a wheelchair is dumb and clunky, but also narratively, the Nazi takeover has no dramatic weight and the attempts at humor are often downright worrying. There are some bits that I genuinely thought were well done (a lot of the flashback material clearly had lots of love put into it) but they never coalesce into something impactful because the story is a directionless mess. There's a sort of staccato gameplay experience where every time the shooting gets going, it stops because of a cutscene or forced stealth segment. Again, very similar to The New Order. Every time I think of these games, I circle back to the thought that some other games just do everything way better.
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