The Nazis are effectively led by this Deathshead character, a disfigured and psychopathic stand-in for Adolf himself. You’re introduced to this alternate-reality Nazi force, a cultural shorthand for despicable shits cheekily swiped from the history books, now comically exaggerated and armed with mechanical dogs and building-sized, tripedal robotic tanks. Thusly, allied planes begin crashing into one another over and over, repeatedly forcing BJ to jump from aircraft to aircraft in exciting and largely non-interactive scenes. Things go wrong, the Nazis are unexpectedly technologically advanced and they’re winning the war. The game starts in 1946, with ridiculously hench all-American hero William ‘BJ’ Blazkowicz - a man whose name everybody says without laughing - pottering around a bomber with his allied buddies, about to launch an attack on General Deathshead’s Nazi stronghold. There are no QTEs, chapters are linear, stealth is basic and never forced, objectives are meaningful and missions feel important, and shooting the guns at the men and seeing them fall down, thanks to an arcane mixture of physics, sound, recoil and animation, just feels exceptionally satisfying. Pick up a few dozen helmets to increase your armour, eat a Nazi’s roast dinner to overdrive your health, the game is unapologetically true to its weird roots while not beholden to them. Like in Wolfenstein 3D, you can eat bowls of dogfood to regain health, but the game doesn’t congratulate itself for having made the reference. It doesn’t take itself very seriously, it’s a game that allows you to dual wield sniper rifles, but it’s keenly self-aware. It’s pulp and comic, it’s crass and ultraviolent but it plays it off with Tarantino coolness, with an understated soundtrack, affable cast and unconvoluted storyline that gives it a dark style all its own. It’s short on frills, never veering far from the fundamentals of what makes a good first-person shooter while still conveying a steady variety of new guns and new enemies and new surroundings in which to shoot those guns at those enemies.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a shooting game fan’s shooting game.

Wolfenstein the new order pc game