• Wolfenstein: The New Order
  

  14 hours playtime

  27 of 50 achievements

Such a good game, and impressive in so many ways.

I was initially very dubious. The multiple technical difficulties I encountered due to owning an AMD card were very frustrating. Once those were conquered, it was on the the game, but the beginning didn’t inspire. A pretty boring intro sequence was made worse by the more egregious screen tearing I’ve ever encountered (I had to disable V-Sync to progress through the intro). For a first-person-shooter, it certainly took its time in giving me a gun. What does it think it is, Half Life?

But then I got a gun, and another, and things kept improving from there. The shooting felt great, the guns were fun, the levels varied and allowing different approaches - everything from being sneaky to running in with two guns blazing. What most impressed me was how competent the game was at things you wouldn’t typically expect in a first-person-shooter, let alone a Wolfenstein game.

For example, there was stealth, and it worked really well - sneak up on soldiers and you can take them down silently with a knife, or shoot them with a silenced pistol. With in-game rewards for stealth kills, it made not-shooting in a shooter fun, and I had a blast sneaking around levels and silently dispatching enemies one by one.

And then there’s the story - a bizarre alternate history with sci-fi elements that was surprisingly good. I never would have imagined a story about the silent meat-head of Wolfenstein being good, but the writers worked wonders, and the voice acting was great. I had several genuine laughs along the way, and grew to care for the characters.