America loves Nazis.
That might sound odd, but hear me out. Nazis exist in a state of extreme cultural
duality: they're simultaneously a symbol of profound evil, and yet the caché of
their iconography continues to captivate the like of fetishists, designers, and
weirdoes in general. Then there's
terrifying absolutist philosophy, which still enjoys global support, often,
ironically, from the very people whose attempted extermination was carried out
by the most fervent ideologues of the Third Reich during World War II. Skinheads, swastikas, knee high boots and
tight fitting pants populate the world with alarming frequency, but that's not
exactly what I'm talking about here. There
will always be strange people on the fringes of society, strange and loud
people who have extreme ideas and want to impose them on others. America's love of Nazis doesn't fall into
this category. See, we love to hate
them.
Nazis are a ubiquitous villain in American culture, to such
an extent that we can barely separate the idea of German people from
Nazis. A friend of mine came back from
Europe recently and he told me about seeing an elderly German couple sitting at
a table in Denmark. He couldn't get the
idea that this old man had once been a young man and, most likely, had been
either a Nazi or a member of the Nazi Youth.
My friend was angry as he talked about it: he was appalled by the fact
that this man, this man he didn't know, whose very Nazi-dom was mere
supposition on his part, a man who, if he had been a Nazi, or been associated
with the military of the Wermacht in any way, may or may not have been involved
in things that were considered war crimes, was walking free, seven decades
after the war ended. I tried to explain
to him that, while many people in the German military during World War II were
appalling people, many were just soldiers who, in their mind, were fighting for
their country, and the idea seemed wholly new.
The idea that someone who was once called a Nazi could be anything close
to human was alien to him.
That's the power of Nazis as villains: the very notion of
someone potentially having been a Nazi raises our hackles, makes us look at
people we don't know as monsters. It's a
strange relationship to have with most of the population of a nation, but
that's our situation. Nazi remains a
potent epithet all over the western world, invoked to describe people who range
from co-workers we disagree with to people who have different views than us
about the integration of Friends into
Netflix's digital catalog. Part of our
cultural identity as Americans is hating Nazis, an element so ingrained that
even the most flag-burny, planting-flowers-in-guns-y peacenik hippy will shake
their fist and spit in the face of someone they consider a Nazi (though people
who self-identify as Nazis complicate the matter). That raw, surging hate is powerful. It can unify disparate groups. It can encourage dialogue between parties who
would otherwise be irreconcilable. It
can be tremendously fun.
And so I arrive at the point of all this: Wolfenstein: The New Order is a shitload
of fun.
This might seem like an obvious statement. The Wolfenstein
games are synonymous with fun. They
essentially invented the First Person Shooter genre, and they've managed to
remain more or less unchanged over time, no mean feat in a world where feature
creep is constantly edging into First-Person Shooters, but they've never really
been my cup of tea. As a young man, I'd
always turn to Call of Duty for my
Nazi-killing fix, zombie and regular flavor.
But Call of Duty has become
less and less about World War II over time, and I've had to look for new places
for that delightfully addictive Nazi-killing formula. The New
Order is a fix for me, and not because it's a particularly good game, or because
it's especially well designed. It's
neither of those things. It has plenty
of issues, some of them quite basic: it relies on ill-defined stealth mechanics
that are sometimes absolutely necessary and, on other occasions, are inexplicably
inapplicable. Some of the levels are
linear and fun, and some of them are ill-designed script-fuck-fests where
completing objectives is less about playing a game and more about intuiting
what a designer wanted you to do during a particular action sequence through a
series of piquant trial-and-error suicide runs.
It also plays with emotional stakes and decision making in a way that's unintentionally
hilarious, asking you to choose between the lives of characters you barely know
within seconds of meeting them, begging you to emotionally invest yourself in
characters and then killing them off before they've said more than three
sentences. The stretches of New Order between Nazi kills are a
combination of unintentional hilarity and frustration as I try to discern just
what the designers want me to do, while pushing past the over-broad emotionality
they constantly impress on me.
But man, those Nazi killing stretches.
All the Nazi iconography in the game has been kicked up a
notch. Storm-troopers all have masks
obscuring their faces, and the only way to take them off is to shoot them in
the head, transforming their balaclava masks into red and white skull smears. Attack dogs have been made into mechanized
beasts of war, more machine than mammal.
Hell, half the enemies are giant black robots who dump bullets into the
air all over the place at me. Only a
handful of enemies have exposed faces, most of them inhuman caricatures,
scarred up, blonde and blue-eyed with mean looking faces. The first "boss" you kill has a
fucking eye-patch. A god damn
eye-patch! That's The New Order in a nutshell: every ounce of humanity has been
drained out of these Nazis. They've
created a breed of Super-Nazis, and holy shit, are they ever satisfying to
kill.
The spot-on art design is, in a sense, a saving grace: New Order's shooting play is actually a
little bit weak. Some of the guns are a
little iffy and same-y, and an attempt to combine the popular first-person
cover systems of more contemporary games with the mad-cap run and gun play of
FPS classics has gone slightly haywire, resulting in a camel of a game that
feels just a little bit off when the chips are down, a little imprecise even as
it seems to hit its target. It's not bad,
it's just not great, but you'd never know it, because killing Nazis is just so
much god damn fun.
And that's telling: killing Nazis, even moderately humanized
ones who write letters or seem upset about war, even cartoon Nazis, especially
cartoon Nazis, with their inhumanity made gross by designers, is incredibly
fun, and this game, with all its minor failings, is making me smile each time I
load it up with the raw power of its Nazi killing. Right now I'm braced on the edge of the last
mission in Dragon Age: Inquisition, trying
to mop up weekend challenges in DAI and
MWO to get my "free shit,"
and finishing up grading my Winter class, and this game, with all its
mediocrity proudly on display, still has me coming back, watching every dumb
cutscene, running down every stone hallway, dual-assault-rifles blazing as I
cut through rows of Nazis, laughing uncontrollably.
That's the power of the hate Americans have for Nazis.
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