I've beaten
and was seriously dissapointed.
I was really excited about Wolfenstein The New Order. It looked gorgeous, it was made by the developers of the fantastic The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and it was hailed by journos and fans alike as an unapolegtic tribute to ~old school shooter~ tropes. While TNO does make some skin-deep concessions to its heritage (being able to hold more than 2 weapons, finite [albeit partially-regenerating] health and no accuracy penalty if you don't use ironsights), it's otherwise very much a modern shooter, what's with its abundance of scripted events, linear levels, emphasis on shooting from cover, upgrade trees, and lenghty walk and talk segments. While I don't think those elements are *inherently* bad (beside the forced story stuff that is), I feel TNO doesn't do this stuff all that well.
The shooting is pretty underwhelming. BJ moves fairly slow and the feedback from getting it is weak, so it's very easy for an enemy to sneak up on you and empty your health reserves before you realize it. The result is that the most efficient strategy is to camp and take leaning potshots from cover, as trying to run and gun on anything above the easiest difficulty will get you killed, especially as most of the enemy types are damage sponges. The weapon roster is stock as it can be: the weapons at your disposals are a knife, a semi-automatic pistol, an assault riffle that can be upgraded with the obligatory rocket shot later in the game, an automatic shotgun, a sniper rifle that can double as another assault ri fle later in the game, and a laser cutter thing, the one vaguely creative gun in the game and one that it conspires to make you use as much as possible. You can dual wield all of them and find various upgrades (such as a silencer for the pistol or bouncing shells for the shotgun) but none of them feel particularly fun to use, and the game often has you lose your entire arsenal between chapters, which makes your work in scavenging ressources feel wasted.
Speaking of ressources, TNO has this dumb mechanic where you need to mash the E key to pick up items. While this makes sense to an extent for mission-critical items and health pickups (as you can pick up extra health and temporily "supercharge" it beyond your baseline level), there was no need to extend this mechanic to ammo collection. It doesn't make the game more immersive, challenging, or interesting, it's just unnecessary tedium
TNO features an upgrade system where you can get various attributes by accomplishing various challenges, such as killing X number of enemy commanders without being detected or killing X number of enemies with an assault riffle, divided among various trees. I guess the idea was to have the upgrade system naturally reward your preferred play style, but it runs into the two majors problems this sort of upgrade system causes which is that 1) a lot of the upgrades you get (particularly the ammo-related ones) feel like they should be there from the start and that 2) you feel forced to do the challenges even if they're not what you'd naturally do.
The narrative is the most praised aspect of the game, and it's not bad at all. The writing tries really hard (and succeeds) at making William "B.J" Blazkowicz a nuanced and three-dimensional character, as well as showing just how repugnant the Nazi ideology is. On the other hand, I couldn't fully get into it because I found a lot of the side characters irritating and underdeveloped.
A big problem that doesn't have to do with game design is that TNO simply doesn't play nice with modern AMD cards. There are various folder tweaks documented online that alleviate the framerate hiccup and frequent crashes (which I never experieced during my playthrough) but the game still chugs on busy-ish sequences on a GPU (RX 580) that really should be able to run the game at the highest settings without breaking a sweat. So yeah, keep that in mind.
I didn't dislike The New Order at first, but the deeper I got into the game, the more it frustrated me. If you want modern-ish Nazi killing fun times, I'd sonner recommend the underrated Medal of Honor Airborne or Raven Software's underloved 2009 Wolfenstein game (but that one is no longer buyable digitallly). I guess Machine Games' take on Wolfenstein just isn't for me.
