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Wolfenstein: The New Order PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One, PC, Bethesda, cert: 18, out now(Observer (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) To make a Wolfenstein game in today's landscape of varied first-person shooters is to embrace a pulp simplicity that the genre has by and large abandoned. It's also, to a lesser extent, an acknowledgement of brand awareness and the evergreen moral certainty that accompanies shooting Nazis, although in both cases it's not something that can be done with a straight face or much hope of sophistication. What Wolfenstein offers instead is a blood-splashed grimace and thunderous hardware. The closest it gets to nuance is an alternate-history storyline that sees the Nazis winning the second world war - not so we might better ponder our own culture, as with Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle, but to give us a new reason for hating the Nazis all over again. All of which is meaty fun, but littered with cliches of plotting, dialogue and mechanics. Despite the name there's nothing new here, just an urgent blast of movement and fire - in other words, a decent refit of the original Wolfenstein 3D for today's tech. Nathan Ditum (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] |