Wolfenstein: The New Order Is Free On Epic

Monday, this month’s Prime Gaming games were revealed, and grandad Pac-Man is being wheeled out again. Tuesday, there was a showcase of robots fighting and another top-down adventure game is coming to the Switch, as will another Star Wars game. Wednesday, this month’s Game Pass games were revealed, the remaster for Destroy All Humans 2 got a release date, fans of what Square Enix keeps pushing out got more of it, and My Little Moo Cow will catch these hooves soon. Thursday, another Prison Architect expansion was announced.

Swiftly moving on to the Epic Games Store mystery this week, we have Wolfenstein: The New Order. The first game in the second reboot of the one-man army against Nazis, the highly acclaimed New Order was something of a renaissance of the “Doom-clone,” aptly followed up two years later by Doom (2016). Set in a slightly further fetched dystopia than Philip K. Dick’s alternate history of post-World War II, B.J. persists as resistance groups resume the fight in a slightly gothic hellscape. I cannot fault New Order one tiny bit for how fantastic it feels to play and its setting, it is everything a fan could ever want.

That said, having played both games in this Wolfenstein reboot, I have to say that you should never play either of them on a console. Now is the time to pick up the first game in the series since it is free on PC. It is the proper place for the naively named Doom-clone with all those shiny 1080p destroyed castles, industrial Nazi museums, and at one point each, the bottom of the ocean in a submarine and the moon. I’m not saying that because of some joke on the “PC master-race” while talking about the murder of Nazis, I’m saying that because the field of view on consoles is very small.

On PC you can at least turn the field of view up to 100 (I’d like more, but I’ll take it), and you can push it to a proper frame rate. That said, PC options are strange with New Order, as you don’t get (last I checked) an independent anisotropic filtering or several other options that are common among PC ports of triple-A titles of any shade. Beyond my contempt for the console ports of both games, this saga of Wolfenstein is fantastic. You’re dual-wielding assault riffles and skating along as you clear the heads off of Nazis with alt-history techno-babble weapons, what more could you ask for?

With decent characters, dialogue, and plot all skipping merrily hand-in-hand with the gameplay, Wolfenstein: The New Order was something special in the haze of dull brown cover shooters of the time. The only disagreement I have with it beyond the console ports and their terrible field of view is the health system leading to the blazing alarms and health dropping like me to my knees anytime someone offers ice cream and pizza. The truth is, I’ve spent the last week playing Sniper Elite 5 and circumcizing Nazis with high-speed shrapnel. I am all in for a big dumb beautiful Nazi killing machine, such as B.J. Blazkowicz and Wolfenstein‘s arcade gameplay.

All this week, you can pick up Wolfenstein: The New Order on the Epic Games Store until the 9th. Obviously, with the mystery game continuing for one more week alongside the concurrent sale, I’m unable to say what is coming next from the Epic Games Store, though one could assume it would be something fairly big. The last two weeks have been triple-A releases of the last few years (even if one is a remaster), so who knows? I might be talking about the Far Cry 5, No Man’s Sky, or Fallout 4 for all I know next week.