The best Wolfentein!
The best thing about The New Order is the gunplay, every gun feels different in terms of handling, shooting and reloading and they're all very satisfying to shoot with. One thing i don't like is manually picking up every item instead of just walking over them. Sure, you can just run while tapping E but it does slow down the pace of the action setpieces.
The level design is great, while it's very linear every chapter has collectibles and upgrades for your weapons which encourages exploration. What some might dislike is that most levels are designed with stealth in mind, which i like but that's not what fans expect from Wolfenstein. You are never forced to be stealthy and can go shoot up everybody but it's clearly not meant to be played this way.
The graphics hold up and look amazing every character and enemy is detailed though there are some noticeable texture pop-ins during fast movement. The game is capped at 60fps and it can't be changed no matter what you do. The sound design is awesome. Weapons and machinery all sound futuristic except for the Tesla grenades which seem to be stuck in the 1940's. The voice acting is top notch no complaints there but the overal sound is low, i'm not sure why probably an audio mix issue but i played with headphones anyway and i didn't care for the music.
The story is highly praised by fans but i'm here to tell you that it's not amazing. It starts out incredibly dark and interesting showing you the twisted world of the Nazi's that have won the war and doubled down on their belief of race superiority and inhumane treatment of others while also giving us the perspective of BJ, the protaganist, who is shocked to learn that America has surrenderd and there is pretty much no resistance left and everything just looks bleak and hopeless...
All of that falls apart halfway through when BJ gets to meet a group of resistance fighters, whose hideout is in the middle of a Nazi city mind you, and then the story just jumps around all over the place from Berlin to London to out of this world, the dark and depressing tone quickly turns into this "Yeah we're so badass, let's kill some Nazi's!" the resistance fighters also introduce more and more sci-fi fantasy stuff which really takes the believability out of the game. It's like the developers wanted to tell a serious story and then just gave up halfway through and made shit up along the way making everything more ridiculous.
None of the new characters are interesting either, they are just there for the cutscenes or to give you mundane tasks in order to advance the story. The love interest Anya is there to comfort BJ with some cringy "romantic" scenes which really weren't necessary nor realistic, BJ apparently has superhuman abilities of himself as he survived a 14 year long coma while not losing a pound of weight, muscle nor his hair and despite getting stabbed and cut a bunch of times he just turns out fine like is the guy even human anymore?
Overal it's a great game, gameplay is amazing, story not so much and might even get boring during the second half but the final chapter does pick up the slack and is worth finishing the game for. The achievements are fun and easy to obtain.
Definitely recommended!