Wolfenstein : The New Order (EN)

Here is an analysis of Wolfenstein, a game set in an alternative future where the Nazis would have won the Second World War.

The first opus of the license, Wolfenstein 3D, paved the way for all other FPS and even according to some created the genre. The one I'm going to talk about and analyze, Wolfenstein: The New Order was released in 2014 and was developed by Bethesda, a world-famous studio, and Machine Games, a Swedish studio.

The lifelong hero of the license, soldier Blazkowicz, must save the world after the Nazi victory in this dystopia set in the 1960s. The game begins in 1946, however, while World War II is still not over: the Allies are technologically outdated and on the verge of defeat, Germany soon found a way to make atomic bombs and Japan did not have to endure Hiroshima and Nagasaki (a bit like in Philip K. Dick's novel The Master of the High Castle, which also depicts a world where the Nazis won World War II and the Japanese have complete control of Asia). This setting only lasts the time of a mission to eliminate "the butcher", a doctor clearly inspired by Mengele, which will have to fail and end badly for the hero who will find himself in an asylum for fourteen years being spoon-fed by his future girlfriend, one of the nurses of the Polish asylum.

There is a fairly long ellipse, the United States has surrendered and all of Europe is under the Nazi power and influence, in fact the rest of the world too.

"The thing about Nazis is that they're really stupid" - Wyatt, Blazkowitz's comrade.

Wolfenstein is basically a classic FPS, which doesn't reinvent the genre, but whose levels alternate between different ways of playing: infiltration, to eliminate officers who are harder to fight and avoid them calling for reinforcements, or running into the heap roughly, one weapon in each hand, which isn't necessarily very complicated since the enemies' AI is a bit of a mess. Generally speaking, this game is not very complicated in principle. The levels are linear, the hero's choices are limited beyond these two approaches.

Contrary to recent FPSs, life points are never recovered automatically, you have to look for life kits, perhaps for a more important immersion and an additional level of difficulty. To evoke another fundamental difference with video games of the same genre and era, there is no multiplayer mode! No online games with your friends in Wolfenstein, which can be explained by the slightly limited content of the ideological message and all the swastika decorations. To compensate for this absence, the game's life span is quite long, about fifteen hours.

The game brings to life his very unrealistic dystopia, the kind that outrages half the planet and whose protagonists and elements of the story are a maximum caricature. Everything goes through there, robot dogs (some of normal size and other giants [and terrifying]), Nazi troops with different ranks and different uniforms depending on where they are found, giant demolition robots, the butcher doctor, an SS woman in charge of a concentration camp and her toy-boy twice as young, prison escapes assisted by huge robotic armatures, mystical underwater temples, Nazis on the moon... Even the hero takes over most of the tropes of the superman capable of doing anything: the bravery of the American soldier so dear to Call of Duty is portrayed here in an extreme, parodic manner. Likewise, with regard to the limitless madness and cruelty of the Nazis, she is in this game humorously portrayed (even if it is never clearly stated) and none of the characters really take themselves seriously.

It is therefore a very silly game, but with a touching side that really wants to show the horrors of war, the preciousness of the links between humans, the unparalleled cruelty of the Third Reich, the value and the heavy price of self-sacrifice. A game that wants to make you cry even though we have just seen one man shoot down an enemy army on a chain and survive fifty-eight rockets in the face. Brutality and brilliance, stupidity and a sense of detail intertwine here very strangely.

Under these circumstances, it's complicated to take Wolfenstein seriously. But even if the game borders on the ridiculous most of the time, it includes moving moments and still tries to propose a balance between degenerate action and human moments. In one of the last levels, for example, the hero's love-interest reads parts of her diary written during the war, explaining how, on her scale and using her charms, she managed to resist against the Nazis and still end up killing them : The borderline between the absurd "the Nazi loves his mother, I understood this when I poisoned him and saw him dying calling his mother for help" and the human drama "I must have an abortion at all costs, I don't want this Nazi child" (and it can be mentioned that what is put forward at that time is also the lack of a solution for all the women who were raped during the war and the ban on abortions in Poland) is still very fine.

The scenery is full, the vehicles to be used are very varied, the hero has a kind of soldering iron that sends back balls of energy and it evolves throughout the game. Towards the beginning of the game, the hero faces a strange moral dilemma imposed by the butcher: should he decide to kill his old friend or the young recruit? Either one or the other will stay on the hero's team by modifying a few details of the scenario.

There are also (and this is one of the only games about WWII with Call of Duty: WW2 to have dared to include this often problematic and delicate element within its scenario) concentration camps that are not only mentioned but also visitable and an integral part of the gameplay. In the case of Wolfenstein, it's a bit complicated: the naughty tone remains present even in this part of the scenario.

Sometimes there are slight attempts at self-reflection on the nature of the FPS hero. Many, even a lot of things happen in this game in an obvious attempt to position itself as a full-fledged single-player FPS, compared to the multiplayer that's over-present on modern consoles. At this level, it looks a lot like an old-school shooter who wouldn't really try to integrate the narrative sequences with the rest of the gameplay: after a full hour of action you get a very detailed scene of non-player characters talking in the kitchen about the resistance base or at moments of action using advanced graphics and allowing you to do actions impossible to achieve by controlling the character.

The secondary characters all have different personalities, although their attitude towards the hero often changes as a result of events and conversations beyond our control. On this point, the game often looks more like an interactive movie than a video game.

For the combat phases, the game is equally thoughtful and absurd, and up to its last act, it usually offers the choice between total carnage and a simple stealth approach. Guns in silent mode, knives thrown and macabre slaughter allow for slower but quieter progression, and it is possible to try to eliminate commanders first, so that there is no one to call for reinforcements. The difficulty also depends, therefore, on how the player approaches the gameplay itself.

There is an upgrade system, in which bonus abilities and upgrades must be unlocked by achieving specific goals, such as silently stabbing 20 men and 5 dogs or killing 5 men with their own grenades. According to most players, this prevents the shooting of hundreds of Nazis from becoming boring in the long run. In the same vein, players have criticized the infiltration mode for not being very relevant, since the arsenal of weapons allows you to navigate through the different levels just as well: "Dual wield shotguns, eviscerate people with a weaponised arc welder or burn a supersoldier's iron face with a laser sniper rifle is much more fun than the stealth mode! "A player of Wolfenstein.

The final stages of the game, particularly impressive because of the number of enemies to kill, but it makes the player feel overpowered, like a "god of war" as some critics say: there is a fine line between heroism and despair in this endless wave of enemies. At least, unlike Call of Duty and its pavlovian reflexes, this game requires a minimum of reflection.

In spite of the "absolute dictatorship" side, the base of the resistance fighters and the soldier in the flesh is in the middle of Berlin, next to the Reichstag, and will only be caught at the very end of the game. Moreover, although it is a game depicting an American Soldier, it is not inspired by the heightened patriotism of its peers, but by the long and interesting adventures of the BioShock genre or Japanese RPGs. There is a lot of work in building an alternative story with unbridled science fiction elements and there is the ultimate meaning of the game which is to overthrow a despotic regime.