Reviews
‘Wolfenstein: The New Order’ Review: Death With Depth
Written by Vikki Blake, @_vixx
This review is late.
I hate being late.
The lateness wasn’t anything to do with the difficulty, or the content, or anything like that. I didn’t take offence at the gore or the narrative or any of the things deliberately constructed to gross you out (the more gross the better, amirite?).
The problem was, despite the many good (and bad) FPSs I voluntarily subject myself to on a weekly basis, this game made me sick. Like: SICK sick. Motion sickness hit me so often – and so badly – it’s taken me three times as long to plough through the campaign than usual. So take this as a friendly warning: if you’re occasionally motion-sick, this game just might make you barf. And if you’re regularly afflicted – well, don’t even try it. Seriously.
Anyway. Now we’re here, let’s get on with the frickin’ review.
In the polished world of AAA shooters, it’s tempting to gloss over the realities of war.
The cyclical debate of video-game violence often drags out a FPS or two at which to wag a disappointed finger, and a casual glance the Top 20 game chart in any store is all you need to see, right there in its day-glo glory, our industry’s obsession with the glamorousness of war.
When we pepper wave after wave of enemies with bullets in the repetitious humdrum of everyday shooters, as limbs fly through the air and blood splatters the earth, it’s easy to forget what we’re actually doing: mowing, maiming and murdering every day folk, usually fighting at the behest of governments.
Which is exactly what’s happening in Wolfenstein: The New Order. At least at face value, anyhow.
It’s 1946. The Second World War is presented in it’s true technicolour and terrifying glory. You play once again as BJ Blazkowicz, a US military sergeant tasked in taking out General Strasse (affectionately nicknamed “Deathhead”) and as you just might anticipate, not all goes entirely as planned …
Forced into a dead-end – and then a horrifying decision that pushes your storyline down one of two scenarios – you’re knocked cold. When you finally come to it’s 1960, and the world is a very different place from the flower-power ‘60s as we once knew them. In fact, everything’s different; in this reality, the Nazis won the war … and we’re all paying the price.
It’s here where the game takes time – and some pride, I would think – in setting the tone of the tale and exemplifying the horror of life inside enemy lines. Institutionalised and incommunicative, Blazkowicz can do nothing when the neighbourhood Nazis come callin’ and raze the place – and all inhabitants within it – to the ground.
It’s brutal and it’s bloody but it’s oh-so effective.
Blazkowicz escapes – just – with nurse and eventual love interest Anya at his side, taking refuge with the latter’s grandparents. As is usually the case, our protagonist swears revenge through clenched teeth and bloodless lips and we’re off, shooting everything and anything stupid enough to fall into the path between us and the captured Resistance party we’ve sworn to liberate.
Does this push the boundaries of interactive storytelling? Well. No – not really. But whilst the dialogue is a smidge cheesy and predictable, and the narrative falls just on the wrong side of cliched, the attention to detail – which includes not just the visual environments but also a surprisingly rich backstory too – weaves an effortless brilliance through an otherwise been-there-done-that experience.
There’ll be Wolfenstein touches that you’ll remember from games gone by; pick’n’switch weaponry, degradable (but plentiful) armour, power-ups and health packs scattered along the way. When you’re not battling soldiers you’re battling weird-ass robot wolf mech things, and when you’re not doing that you’re mostly likely taking out towers, tanks and/or helicopters.
It’s formulaic and lacks some originality, but don’t confuse that with being a bad thing; they say variety is the spice of life, and when it comes to Wolfenstein: The New Order, they’re not wrong. There’s just enough here to keep the gameplay from becoming stale – although you might occasionally find that the pacing stutters to a stop if/when you stop to scour around for ammo or armour.
The AI responses well, and whilst it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of combatants, take heart that there’s plenty of space and resource around you – just use the environments creatively and shift position often (and carefully). The cover mechanic responses just as it should, and there’s a veritable smorgasbord of weapons from which to choose – keep an eye on the ground for discarded guns and experiment to your heart’s content.
Interestingly, you can also take a more stealthy approach. No, it’s not quite the full Metal Gear-Solid-esque stealth experience, but it’s a perfectly competent alternative to otherwise bursting in, all guns blazing. And for those of you seeking a more cerebral experience, be sure to sweep your surroundings thoroughly; there’s many nuggets of story-mining gold secreted along the way. Keep your eyes open so you don’t accidentally slip past a hidden code or document that might add flesh to that narrative bone.
The Final Word: Whilst Wolfenstein: The New Order might not be the most thought-provoking title you’ll ever play, write it off as a generic shooter and you’ll be doing it a disservice: there’s a depth here seldom touched by your everyday shooter.
Don’t get me wrong – you can push on through in a hail of bullets and be none the worse off for it. But this is a story that deserves to be told.
Yes, it’s repetitive and whilst it occasionally suggests that your options are wide and varied, it’s essentially an shoot-em-up on-rails experience – but that’s not necessarily always a bad thing, is it?
Books
‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ Book Review: Paul Tremblay’s Primal Scream Against the AI Push
Read enough Paul Tremblay novels and one word comes to dominate your thinking around his fiction: “Daring.”
Whether he’s playing with traditional novelistic forms, holding conversations with characters across time, or pushing his stories to their bleakest and strangest possible conclusions (if they have concrete conclusions at all, Tremblay is a daring novelist, never playing it safe for his audience or himself. The author of A Head Full of Ghosts, Horror Movie, and more is always pushing for something in his fiction, digging into the core of an issue until he finds its bloody, beating heart.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, Tremblay’s latest novel, is no different. From the title alone you might surmise certain things about the narrative, from its Philip K. Dick influence to its sci-fi-horror premise, and you’d be right. But Tremblay always pushes beyond those initial assumptions, and here we get not just a gripping sci-fi-horror showcase, but something much stranger and more profound: An exploration of what it means to be human, fragile bodies and all, in the age of AI.
Julia, Tremblay’s protagonist, is in a strange place when the novel begins. A former gaming streamer who’s retreated from her digital spotlight, she’s in search of a new direction in life, and she finds one in the last place she might expect. Julia’s mother, who runs a California tech behemoth, has a job offer for her daughter, an unprecedented one. It seems that the company has introduced proprietary new technology into the body of a brain-dead man, and now they need to see what this tech can do. Julia’s job? Using her gaming skills to take this human vegetable (Julia calls him “Bernie” because of Weekend at Bernie’s) from one side of the country to another, using a stealthy controller purpose-built for the experience.
This is a wonderfully ghoulish premise on which to build a novel, and Tremblay makes full use of its nightmare fuel. As Julia comes to grips with the implications of what she’s about to do, and what she might discover while doing it, the author punctuates her journey with trips into the mad mindscape of Bernie himself, a dark reflection of our own world populated with half-remembered moments and images and hallucinations. As simple exercises in writing craft, they recall Philip K. Dick at his best, building the same sense of overwhelm and wonder so present in his work, but Tremblay’s after something else as well, and it’s purpose-built for this moment.
The novel builds deliberate juxtapositions with Bernie’s half-remembered life and Julia’s ongoing one, sending them barreling at each other from opposite ends of consciousness. Julia’s brain functions as only her brain can, a mass of pop culture references and dreams and memories she both cherishes and would rather forget. Bernie’s world is one of shadows, but also one of constantly shifting perspective, as the tech in his head remakes him. He’s not just a passenger in his own body, but an unwilling participant in a Frankenstein-ing of human and machine. It’s not the first time an author has attempted such a thing, but through Tremblay’s evocative, visceral prose, it’s one of the most effective, and it hits on something vital that Tremblay says in a way that only he can.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a thumping sci-fi yarn, a journey into new frontiers through untested technology with vast implications for the future of the world, and if Tremblay had only explored that genre, he’d have done well. When the horror elements creep in, though, Tremblay’s work raises endless questions over what exactly we are sacrificing when we let machines get so close not just to our flesh, but to our consciousness, even when, medically speaking, that consciousness is gone.
Tremblay breaks this sacrifice down in terrifying detail, sometimes quite literally breaking down the basic flow of prose in Bernie’s head until he’s been hijacked by words and phrases and shapes that he doesn’t understand. Along the way, Tremblay gets almost metafictional with his probing of this hybrid consciousness, asking us to question not just where the story will go, but who gets to be in control when the narrative becomes a runaway train.
All of this makes Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep the most ambitious book of Paul Tremblay’s career, which is really saying something. His daring, his boldness, and his ability to mine the unspeakable are on full display, and they work together to deliver one of the year’s most unnerving genre books.
Tremblay’s at the peak of his powers with this one.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep hits shelves on June 30.
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