Wolfenstein: The New Order is an action-adventure and first-person shooter video game played from a first-person perspective. To progress through the story, players battle enemies throughout levels. The game utilizes a health system in which players' health is divided into separate sections that regenerate; if an entire section is lost, players must use a health pack to replenish the missing health.
Players use melee attacks, firearms, and explosives to fight enemies, and may run, jump, and occasionally swim to navigate through the locations. Melee attacks can be used to silently take down enemies without being detected. Alternatively, players can ambush enemies, which often results in an intense firefight between the two parties.
A cover system can be used in combat as assistance against enemies. Players have the ability to lean around, over, and under cover, which can be used as a tactical advantage during shootouts and stealth levels. The game gives players a wide variety of weapon options; they can be found on the ground, retrieved from dead enemies, or removed from their stationary position and carried around. Weapon ammunition must be manually retrieved from the ground or from dead enemies. Players have access to a weapon inventory, which allows them to carry as many weapons as they find. With some of these weapons, players have the ability to dual wield, giving them an advantage over enemies by dealing twice as much damage. Players can also customize weapons through the use of upgrades; for example, a rocket launcher can be attached to the side of an assault rifle, and a laser cannon can be transformed into a wire cutting tool.
Plot
Three years after the destruction of the Black Sun portal, the Nazis have deployed advanced technologies, enabling them to turn the tide against the Allies. At dawn on 16 July 1946, U.S. special forces operative Captain William "B.J." Blazkowicz (Brian Bloom), accompanied by pilot Fergus Reid (Gideon Emery) and Private Probst Wyatt III (A.J. Trauth), take part in a massive Allied air raid against a fortress and weapons laboratory run by his nemesis, General Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse (Dwight Schultz). The three are captured and brought to a human experimentation laboratory where Deathshead forces Blazkowicz to choose who he will gruesomely kill, Fergus or Wyatt, before leaving Blazkowicz and the survivor to die in the laboratory's emergency incinerator. They escape the laboratory, but Blazkowicz suffers a critical head injury during the escape, rendering him unconscious and putting him in a coma. He is brought to a psychiatric asylum in Poland, where he remains in a vegetative state for 14 years from which he is unable to awaken. He is cared for by the asylum's head nurse Anya Oliwa (Alicja Bachleda) and her parents, who run the facility under the Nazi regime. Blazkowicz watches as Anya's parents are regularly forced to hand patients over to Nazi authorities, who deem them Untermenschen for their mental disabilities and take them to General Strasse for unknown experimentation.
In 1960, fourteen years after Blazkowicz's admission, the Nazis ordered that the asylum is to be shut down, killing all the patients and executing Anya's family when they resist. Blazkowicz awakens from his vegetative state as he is about to be executed, killing the extermination squad and escaping the asylum with Anya. Blazkowicz and Anya drive to her grandparents' farm, where they inform him that the Nazis won the war by forcing the United States to surrender in 1948 and that the members of the ensuing Resistance were captured. Blazkowicz interrogates a captured officer from the asylum (he was hidden in the trunk of a car), learning that the top members of the Resistance are imprisoned in Berlin before brutally executing him with a chainsaw. Anya's grandparents smuggle her and Blazkowicz through a checkpoint in Stettin before they travel to Berlin. During the train ride, Blazkowicz and Anya enter into a romantic relationship. When they arrive, Anya helps Blazkowicz break into the prison, where he rescues the person he spared fourteen years prior (Fergus or Wyatt) and finds that the Resistance movement is a revived Kreisau Circle led by Caroline Becker (Bonita Friedericy), who was left paralyzed due to her injuries at Isenstadt.
The Resistance execute an attack on a Nazi research facility in London, bombing their base of operations, stealing secret documents and prototype stealth helicopters. The documents reveal the Nazis are relying on reverse-engineered technology derived from an ancient organization known as Da'at Yichud, which created such inventions as energy weapons, computer AIs, and super concrete; however, it is also revealed that someone is tampering with the super concrete's formula, making it susceptible to mold deterioration. The Resistance discover a match with Da'at Yichud member Set Roth (Mark Ivanir), who is imprisoned in a forced labor camp. Blazkowicz agrees to go undercover inside the camp and meets Set, who tells him that the Nazis have been using technology made by him and other Jewish scientists to mass-produce and control robots, and offers to help the Resistance in return for the destruction of the labor camp. Blazkowicz finds a battery for a device that controls the camp robots, which he and Set then use to destroy the camp and rescue prisoners.
