Through the course of TNO you will storm a Wehrmact fortress, break into an SS prison, level a forced labour camp, hijack a nuclear-equipped submarine, shoot down a skyscraper-sized walking death machine and even raise hell in a god-damn Nazi moon base. It’s your job to turn their fate around and personally strike at the heart of Germania.Īnd strike you do. A handscrabble resistance (as always) has taken up residence in the sewers of Berlin, but without arms, transport or manpower their hopes are fraying fast, along with their tempers as they stew over their lost comrades in a claustrophobic bunker. The only front left is in Africa, and even that’s receding fast, fought by mechanical monstrosities like the Panzerhund – an enormous robotic canine that shreds and gores infantry with its terrifying steel jaws. Manhattan is a smoking, radioactive crater. By the year 1960, London is under martial law. Here’s the gist: in 1944, the Nazis discover a mysterious advanced technology and use it to promptly conquer the world.

Ultimately, there’s a fun – if limited – game underneath, comprising some impressive set pieces and frenetic firefights – but as a unified whole it’s a bit messy. It laments the tragedy of war, but then there’s times when it looks a lot like a Nazi torture simulator.

It tells me serious, sentimental war story, but then throws me dual-wielded shotguns like a level of Quake. It presents itself Doom-style ‘neo-retro’ FPS, but it plays like a cover-based shooter. The New Order’s tone is all over the place – it’s a game that really doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it necessary? For sure it’s fun as a kind of power fantasy, but I’ve an unease aching in my stomach and a feeling of wrongness I don’t want to peer into too hard.

Now I’m trudging through the ashen rain with a heavy metal riff building in my ears, a Jewish Technology Wizard riding on my back whilst I cut through soldiers’ bodies with my oversized minigun and blast them into quivering lumps with an infinitely-replenishing rocket launcher. I’ve scrambled out of a cart of emaciated, mutilated bodies – eyes cut out – and wrought revenge on my captors with vivid, pornographic violence. I’ve seen men beaten, starved, murdered and eviscerated. I’m piloting an armed robot through a fictional concentration camp.

Wolfenstein the new order soldiers