Wolfenstein: The New Order review: machine gun

On one side, there's Wolfenstein, id Software's oldest franchise, which came before Doom to define an era of first-person shooters. On the other side is new developer Machine Games. Composed of veterans of the studio Starbreeze, responsible for 2004's sleeper hit The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and 2007's The Darkness, their games are known for strong narratives and effective characterization.

The result is a game at the mercies of both old-school blast-em-up first-person shooters and the storytelling ambitions of its new stewards. It shouldn't work. Numerous other shooters have tried and failed.

But Wolfenstein: The New Order doesn't fail. Its bizarre love triangle of traditional shooter elements, sci-fi pulp and believable human angle becomes something much more than its origins would suggest.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a direct sequel to 2009's Wolfenstein, which followed 2002's Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The series has established a fully alternate timeline of World War II: Using ancient technology powered by occult energy, the Nazi war machine has gained a seemingly insurmountable edge and set the Allies to heel.

The New Order opens in the sky over a German castle in 1946, as series mainstay B.J. Blazkowicz leads a last-ditch mission to take down Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse. Last seen crawling from the wreckage of a zeppelin in Wolfenstein, Deathshead is the Reich's lead scientist and strategist of its dark plans for the world. The Allies believe that with Deathshead gone, Germany's war machine will falter.

The mission fails.

During an attempted escape, Blazkowicz is rendered a comatose John Doe for more than a decade. He finally regains consciousness in a Polish asylum to a waking nightmare: The war is over. The Nazis have won. The world — and more — is theirs. With some unlikely allies, Blazkowicz sets out to find the resistance and save what's left.

This combination of old ideas and new hooks seems mismatched, but I was taken aback by how well it all worked together. As a stealth-inclined player, I was happy to learn that I had the space and equipment to focus on that more often than not. And when I was forced to engage in direct combat, I still had everything I needed to get the job done. The New Order finds a reasonable balance between presenting enemies that don't feel like fodder without getting in the way of its own narrative momentum and world-building.

Except for the boss fights.

Where I enjoyed the combat flexibility The New Order presented me elsewhere, its larger "event" battles were often retrograde to its momentum. I enjoyed a couple of them, and in one, I even felt smart. But these are mostly trial-and-error collections of death followed by another try, and were easily the primary source of frustration in the game.

Despite that issue, Machine Games roots its often arcade-like missions within its world thanks to the strength of its fiction and, even more so, its characters. The body count is comically high, but it's all punctuated by desperation — when the Nazis rule the world, what does a few dozen dead troops mean? The fight for hope, to maintain it amidst a nightmare, is everywhere.

There are multiple, complicated relationships at play. These aren't standard hoo-rah cheerleaders, either — there's a real sense of pain and loss, confusion and struggle depicted by the resistance Blazkowicz becomes involved in. And despite some corny ideas here and there and some laugh-out-loud moments, I found myself emotionally invested in The New Order's cast. They make the almost Bond-ian plot that skips across Europe and beyond feel urgent and necessary.