Wolfenstein: The New Order. 11 good games whose plot is nonsense
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Remember the Carmack quote from the introduction to this essay? Apparently, the man didn't expect that there would come a time when even the Wolfenstein series, whom he help create in the early days of shooters, would make plot its main element. The New Order, a game that otherwise met with an extremely enthusiastic reception, gave us flesh-and-blood Blazkowicz, dialogues a plenty and a complex script. But don't make any mistakes: no scriptwriter at MachineGames could pretend to be the second coming of Philip K. Dick, and nothing they wrote could stand up to The Man in the High Castle.
The whole story begins really stupid – after the prologue, the main character lands in a hospital in a coma, from which he wakes up after fourteen years. That is also exactly the moment when the facility is attacked by the Nazis. What’s more, 14 years of coma go away like a dream as the protagonist murders everyone on his way without any problems just a few minutes after waking up. After that, we find ourselves on the trail of a secret Jewish organization, working hard to develop a formula for… super-concrete, then we find out that the Nazi Germany has become a world leader in manufacturing cutting-edge mechs and that the big bad has kept a brain of our friend pickled in a jar for a decade and a half, probably specifically to make the fight with us much more dramatic. What is the most interestingly, though, is that all this stupidity does not prevent us from having a good time. On the contrary, this absurd scenario fits perfectly with Blazkowicz's exaggerated tough-guy persona. I would certainly prefer this to a possible continuation with four hours of cut-scenes stuffed with redundant political dialogues, because no sane man could come up with such an idea. Right, MachineGames?