Sex is not something Wolfenstein: The New Order should be expected to depict with any degree of grace. That isn’t a knock on Machine Games, the studio behind this latest sequel to Id Software’s foundational Wolfenstein 3D. For any studio, getting digitally rendered people to knock boots in a non-laughable way is hard enough thanks to the uncanny valley—let alone capturing the sweet ugliness of real sex. Yet halfway through The New Order, when B.J. Blazkowicz hooks up with his partner, Anya, the result is a moment of surprising honesty for this decades-old shooter series. And it’s one of many such moments in an unusually good action game.
It isn’t pretty. The American soldier Blazkowicz—who was comatose as Nazis took over the world between 1946 and 1960 in the game’s fiction—and Anya, the Polish sanitarium attendant who cared for him, keep most of their clothes on. After sneaking into a side room for a respite from their fellow rebels, they lunge for the nearest surface and tear into one another. In the midst of this passion, they stop, breathe, and look at each other. “I just want to stay like this,” Blazkowicz says, sounding every bit as stupid and kind as anyone else pausing mid-coitus with someone they love. New Order has you barrel through sci-fi Nazi bases on a quest that stretches from occupied London to the moon, so there’s not a whole lot of time for tender, honest intimacies. Even when you’re sneaking up on stormtroopers in a massive prison, though, Machine Games strives to render Blazkowicz as a whole human being—at least, as human as he can be when he’s killing literally thousands of people, robots, dogs, and robot dogs.
While there’s some Grinch-style heart-growing going on, this is still a Wolfenstein game. Murder is still how you spend the bulk of your time as Blazkowicz. Opening in 1946 during a last-ditch Allied assault on the fortress of General Totenkopf (Death’s Head, if you want to get all Ilsa, She Wolf Of The SS about it), The New Order lays out its modus operandi quickly and sticks with it. You get your hands on pistols, shotguns, and machine guns, you use them to shoot Nazis, and when you aren’t shooting them, you’re sneaking around and stabbing them.
From this basic premise, Machine Games does yeoman’s work. Whether you’re organizing an escape from a Czech concentration camp or seizing a nuclear U-boat, myriad assault options present themselves. Equip two machine guns if you like and sprint in like a madman, or sniff out false walls to stealthily pick off guards one by one. New Order also offers standard “perks” that reward your sticking to a particular approach. I favored sneaking around and using a knife, and after doing that a bunch, I unlocked a perk allowing me to carry more knives. I could almost hear Blazkowicz’s dull whisper, muttering to himself like he regularly does in the game: “Huh. These knives seem to work. I should carry more knives next time.”