Shock and gore in the first hour of Wolfenstein: The New Order

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...r1-610x343.jpgIf it was MachineGames’ intention to leave players feeling twitchy and vaguely nauseous after their first encounter with Wolfenstein: The New Order, then congratulations are in order.Subtlety is in short supply during its first hour, in which we infiltrate a Nazi stronghold, discover an underground lab-cum-torture chamber, take down a mech, seal the gory fate of a comrade and end up escaping, guns ablaze, from the asylum which has housed our incapacitated hero for the past 14 years. It doesn’t matter that he has been wheelchair-bound and barely conscious for all those years; pure adrenaline snaps our protagonist, BJ Blazkowicz, out of his woozy, helpless state after bearing witness to several grisly murders. Within minutes, you’ve turned from victim to gun-toting badass.The New Order’s romp through alternative history imagines that the Nazis not only won the war, but went on to develop mechs to help their cause. It is precisely as brazen and silly as all of that sounds, but this has sharper edges than similarly over-the-top shooters like Borderlands or Blood Dragon. In the game’s cutscenes and in antagonist Dr. Deathshed, MachineGames has transplanted a queasy brand of medical horror into its action-heavy shooter.Scene-setting doesn’t really need to be this graphic, surely. The blood spilled on The New Order’s battlegrounds is barely noticeable as you unload clip after clip into enemies from a distance, but it’s a different matter when the pace eases off and we get up close in the game’s early cutscenes. We’ve stumbled across gruesome experiments-gone-wrong in plenty of games before, but The New Order tops that pedestrian discovery quickly. After seeing a comrade’s head pop at the mercy of a mech, Dr. Deathshed arrives to slice out another’s eye, and you’re the one forced to choose who receives the grisly surgery. A little later, leading into your escape from the asylum, characters fondly introduced in sepia tones – characters nursing you back to health – are brutally murdered right in front of you. One feels MachineGames might have been aiming for Tarantino-esque splatter here, but it lacks that cartoonish sense of style and instead ends up a little distasteful.

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