Wolfenstein: The New Order

A great reimagining of the series, delivering a fun experience to shooter fans, while bringing a good story and some solid mechanics that feel fresh but still know the roots of the franchise.

While the story never reaches the level of Bioshock or Portal 2, Wolfenstein: The New Order is a great experience both narratively and gameplay-wise, and has way more heart than it has any right to.

Wolfenstein is a masterpiece of its genre. It does good shooting men. But it's more than that, it's an effortlessly melancholy adventure that doesn't drown in its own bombast. It's like finding out that a superstar footballer is a poet, or finding your dog pressing flowers. It's a game with hidden depths that you're invited to explore, but ones that never overshadow the thing it's best at...Which is shooting all the men so that all their blood comes out.

To put it briefly: The New Order deserves a sequel. And to make sure this dream comes true, I can do only one thing: convince you to buy the new Wolfensten game. Perhaps great trailers boosted expectations too high, perhaps fanatical Return to Castle Wolfenstein players won't be as amazed, as I am, but I'm sure of this: all FPS fans will have a great time and after finishing the game they'll want more.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is one of the most enjoyable shooters you can find these days. It is not groundbreaking, it does not reinvent the wheel, but it successfully combines "old-school" gameplay with elements from modern-day shooters.

A bizarre mix of serious topics and Tarantino-esque ultra-violence. For the first half the fast and furious shoot-outs are about as entertaining as first person shooters can get. Unfortunately, once the nazi-ranks start to fill up with bullet-sponge-y robots and cyborgs, the game quickly starts to lose it's appeal. Wolfenstein goes from being as fun as Doom to being as tedious as Doom 3. What a shame! [June 2014]

The best Wolfenstein so far. Interesting places, remarkable characters, drama, humor and a story that should make some Hollywood blockbusters feel ashamed.

Overall, a solid action shooter by MachineGames.

Small nitpicks aside, Wolfenstein: The New Order is a fantastic game.

This is still the most fun I've had with a singleplayer shooter since Bulletstorm, and the most substantially well-realised setting for a shooter campaign since Metro 2033. Its writing, music and environmental art all achieve far more than you might expect from the game about a preternaturally durable testicle with a revenge fetish and a gun in each hand. In a genre that is often overtaken by derivative or exploitative games, it's a pleasant surprise—a reminder of a time when a shooter's singleplayer campaign was the main event. A time when these games were made with attention to detail, care, and a bit of love.

If you've enjoyed shooters of old, you'll love how freshly packaged this one is.

An incredibly tight, good looking single player experience, the anti-CoD if you will. [July 2014, p.50]

Wolfenstein: The New Order is an electric veg-o-matic of FPS gaming bits and pieces set thrown into the hopper and set for puree. It lacks some stuff that we’re sort of gotten used to seeing in our FPS games these days and adds, a thousand collectable widgets aside, not much that we haven’t seen elsewhere before.

The New Order is a lackluster shooter with detrimental game mechanics. If it wasn't for its focus in storytelling, it would be just another classic that failed to return.

Who was expecting such a big Wolfenstein return four years after the previous title? Not many, but MachineGames has developed a very good shooter with mixed gameplay (shoot&stealth), an interesting plot and great characters.

A well-made shooter that successfully reinvents the Wolfenstein formula with bloody action, lots of atmosphere and surprisingly solid stealth mechanics. The story features interesting characters and a high quality presentation, but the game becomes too erratic and ridiculous towards the end.

The game is both a celebration of the Wolfenstein series and what feels like a fitting send-off for it. The New Order could be the last hurrah of William "BJ" Blazkowicz, an outing which, for all its excess and bombast, is far from mindless.

With an essential early-game choice that makes it worth playing through twice, the story at the center of Wolfenstein: The New Order props up its competent -- but mostly unremarkable -- shooting.

Ultimately, Wolfenstein: The New Order is at once a triumph of storytelling while a failure of story structure.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is not as good as previous works of these ex-Starbreeze devs, and it is not as good as No One Lives Forever, which it clearly draws a lot of inspiration from. While not an instant classic, it is still a fun, almost nostalgic romp.

A solid and surprising well-written shooter that should easily please fans of the genre. It doesn't do too much more than that, but that's not really a complaint.