The New Order is also linked to Starbreeze's early work by a thick vein of priapic silliness. BJ's shotgun-slinging has the same uncritical hyper-macho swagger that informed The Darkness's deadly tentacle weapons and, er, the entirety of Vin Diesel's career. When the industrial metal soundtrack kicks in and there are Nazis to be shotgunned, there's a lot of uncritical hyper-macho fun to be had.
The New Order's newer, smarter ideas resonate a little strangely in this context. Blazkowicz now has an upgradeable laser weapon that can be switched between man-blasting and scenery-cutting fire modes. The latter is used to find secrets and solve environmental puzzles, and a bit of clever engineering means it slices away at the world in relationship to the movement of your cursor.
Want to retrieve some ammo from a crate? You only need to cut a hole big enough for BJ to snatch it through. Want to make a hole in a chain-link fence, but bored with squares? Carve yourself an amusing willy-shaped entryway!
The laser also facilitates stealth. It's possible to crouch behind cover, slice out a gun-hole and then take pot shots through it with one of your other weapons. This is something that I've never done in a shooter before, and it's nice to be surprised.
The only issue is the dissonance – the change in pace doesn't quite work, and the high difficulty level of the build I played meant that I felt pushed into playing cautiously despite the wide array of options presented to me.
I came away from The New Order far more interested in it than I was going in, but it's got a way to go in the six months before release. Pace and feedback both need work, particularly the transition from mindless corridor blasting to meticulous set-piece battles. It's also majorly juvenile, and a lot will hinge on how knowingly that sense is embraced. Machine Games' Starbreeze DNA will help, but there are certainly times when The New Order plays like something a teenager might scrawl on the back of a history textbook.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course. I suspect that I would have adored it when I was 12, but I also wonder about how much the hobby has changed in the years since. Then again, this is still an industry where a grown man can casually answer a question with a remark beginning “ever since you got to kill Hitler... ”, so they'll probably be fine.
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