Wolfenstein: The New Order

MachineGames

screenshots c/o Mobygames

When I was a kid, I discovered a copy of Elie Wiesel’s Night in the guest room nightstand drawer. Knowing that my mom probably wouldn’t want me to read it, I would sneak in to read a few chapters every day, initially out of curiosity, but later out of a morbid, horrified fascination. I was twelve years old. The feeling of unending dread that book gave me has lingered in my heart for thirty years; it was only when I read that book that I truly understood the depths of depravity and evil that was the Nazi regime. I’ve only had that feeling a few times since: when I read an article about the atrocities committed by the Syrian government, when I first read about the Khmer Rouge, and when I first learned about the neoreactionary movement that provides the ideological underpinnings for much of the second Trump administration.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game about the Nazis taking over the world.

Unlike more serious franchises like Call of Duty, the Wolfenstein series, going back to Wolfenstein 3D’s plots about undead mutants and the Spear of Destiny, typically has leaned heavily on pulp horror and science fiction. Nazi occultism and Nazi superscience are common themes, presenting a lighter, softer take on the war where the Nazis are comic book villains, though particularly unsympathetic ones. They’re the ultimate guilt-free acceptable target, and maybe that means World War II shooters — serious or otherwise — got a little oversaturated for a while. When The New Order was announced, the premise seemed absurd on its face: an alternate history where it’s 1960 and Nazis rule the world. In the early 2010s, the World War II shooter genre was pretty moribund — Call of Duty had all but abandoned the theme after World at War and the 2010 Medal of Honor game moved the action to the Afghan conflict. Another game spent shooting Nazis felt tired, tacky almost — Warren Spector made headlines by posting a moan about the announcement trailer, calling it a “generically dark, monochromatic…adolescent male power fantasy.” Sure, alright. I get where he’s coming from, even if he built his career on such things. But he and everyone else got it wrong: Wolfenstein: The New Order — for all its hybrid arcadey cover shooter trappings — isn’t Call of Duty, it’s not even the 2009 Wolfenstein game. It instead dared to ask a question that in 2014 very few people were willing to take seriously: what if the bad guys had won? In the relatively safe Obama years, that idea felt silly. But hindsight is easy; from our position in 2025, with all that’s happened politically in the 11 years since the game came out, it’s easy for us to say, wow, Wolfenstein: The New Order was eerily prescient; we can say, wow, Wolfenstein: The New Order is super cathartic. And yeah, it’s both of those things. Sometimes you just wanna shoot a bunch of Nazis, and sure, The New Order most certainly is a power fantasy in some ways — it’s just, I doubt the target audience is the usual demographic of casually-racist teenage boys with anger issues.

Tonally, The New Order is often serious as a heart-attack; the Nazi regime aren’t just generic authoritarians marching soldiers down the street. Under the leadership of Dr. Wilhelm “Deathshead” Strasse — a sort of Red Skull-like mad scientist villain initially introduced in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and here presented as the true leader of the Nazis (with Hitler shunted offscreen and apparently little more than a figurehead) — the Nazis have created technology leaps and bounds ahead of the Allies and used it to prolong the war through to their ultimate victory in 1948, rebuild the world in their image, and even build a colony on the moon. By 1960, the Nazis have developed technology that in the real world we’re still working on. But the cruelty continues: an asylum for the mentally handicapped or neurodivergent becomes a storehouse for experimental subjects, before ultimately being liquidated. New York City is a smouldering, radioactive ruin. Labor camps dot the globe, with plans for more on the moon. The Nazis are currently in the process of conquering Africa, though it’s slow going. This review will be filed with the other World War II shooters I’ve written, but it could just as easily be an apocalypse story — however way you slice it, this is the bad future.

In between the fantastical moonbases and secret caches of ancient technology, we’ll visit a labor camp (with the Holocaust commentary quite frank and in-your-face) and endure a tense, Tarantino-esque scene with a senior Nazi official and her pet boytoy while traveling to Berlin. The brutality, the cruelty of Nazi world domination isn’t shied away from. Newspaper and magazine clippings all over the game world reveal a world slowly complying, slowly corrupting under the Nazi jackboot, with several reporting that people were actually happier under the new regime, so long as they ignored the fact that some of their neighbors disappeared from time to time; one clipping that stood out to me late in the game revealed that England was moving away from fish and chips to sauerkraut and pretzels as its national identity grew more German-like. It’s a small thing, and in the grand scheme of all the other horrifying implications of a Nazi takeover, almost comical, very much of a piece of the game’s recurring theme of real-world 1960s-era pop culture being reframed into a Nazi perspective. But it illustrates perfectly the way the world just fucking complies with authoritarians when led to think the authoritarians hold all the cards.

But everybody forgot about B.J. Blazkowicz. Once a captain in the United States Army, he’s been out of commission for 14 years following a head injury that left him invalid and unable to speak; he wakes up into this nightmare world in 1960 and decides to do something about it. Through him, The New Order balances its dark tone, its frank presentation of the Nazis as the racial-purity-obssessed freaks they really are, with the sheer cathartic joy of mowing down dozens of Nazis. With veteran Call of Duty voice actor Brian Bloom as the voice of B.J., our hero is like a darker take on Duke Nukem, waxing poetic as he swims through cold waters or infiltrates dank prisons but also showing his wry humor — such as when he realizes the Nazis have conquered the moon, to which his reaction is “fuck you, moon.” You have access to a variety of weapons, from assault rifles to enormous combat shotguns to a laser rifle that doubles as a cutting tool. Explore the levels well enough and you’ll get all kinds of upgrades to these lethal toys. Some weapons can be dual wielded, for when you absolutely must kill every last Nazi in the room. Heavier weapons can’t be stored, but you can refill them at turrets (or recharge them at charging stations, at least the energy-based ones.) And you don’t have to go in guns blazing if you don’t want to; while Wolfenstein 3D de-emphasized it, stealth has been a part of the series going back to the late great Silas Warner’s classic Castle Wolfenstein, the true first game in the series. You can do satisfying silent takedowns of Nazi guards (with a few special ones like drowning one in his own pee as he uses the bathroom) or pop them from a distance with a silenced pistol. Kill officers before they have a chance to ring the alarm; otherwise they’ll call in reinforcements until they are dead. You can track officers’ positions as their radio communications trigger a HUD popup that tells you how far away they are. Some enemies can’t be dealt with stealthily, and combat is most certainly going to be a major part of the game — but the game’s perk system lets you decide your own playstyle and encourages multiple playthroughs, especially as there’s two separate timelines based on who you choose to sacrifice in the prologue. In between missions you can spend time with your fellow Resistance members, including Caroline Becker who returns from the 2009 game, now stuck in a wheelchair but no less a shrewd operator.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is an interesting artifact of the early 2010s. In this modern era where it feels like the worst possible people are in charge of everything, what was initially a silly idea — one that wasn’t even a common theme in most science fiction past the 1960s, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle notwithstanding — doesn’t feel so silly anymore. Either way, The New Order is a solid entry in a franchise that has always been a little uneven, completely changing the face of the series, at once deadly serious while still managing to lean hard into the schlocky tone that the series thrives on, somehow managing to balance both. If you’re looking for a solid shooter you could do worse than to join up with B.J. Blazkowicz.

-june❤

Death is like an empty space
Feel no thoughts of fear
The future cries
As mother nature sheds a tear
The world becomes a prisoner
A victim of its crime
The human race is now a race
Against time