Wolfenstein: The New Older continues with its trend of not being like most shooters, as it expands upon what you can do with your character. The addition of being able to lie down so that you can shoot enemy feet from through the crack of a door comes in handy several times, especially if you play on harder difficulties and try to sneak around for most of it. We know that COD or the Battlefield games allow you to go prone, though in single player we don’t recall with certainty you being able to use prone in an urban setting to shoot at someone through the crack of the bottom of the door. Let us know if we were wrong. This also allows you to peer out from ‘cover’, either peaking above it, to the left or to the right. We know games have done this for a while, yet there are countless more modern shooters that seems to just ignore this, forcing you to physically move out of ‘cover’ to look out to see if it is safe.
The Cover system, be it as it may, is poorly explained, if at all. We’re not sure if cover is considered anything we are hiding behind and peer out from behind using that lean left/right we just mentioned, or if it has to be certain physical cover like boxes. This is important to know as there is a perk that you can unlock that requires you to kill a certain amount of Nazis from cover. Not that we needed to know every time if we’re in cover, but we never found the game explained what it constitutes as ‘cover’ for at least getting kills for the perk. There is some destructible cover or items, usually wooden boxes that can be destroyed using anything from hitting it to shooting it, or thin metal plating that can be cut through using energy or high powered weapons. A good amount of times a ‘random’ box can be broken with some sort of reward found inside of it (ammo, armour, health), making it worth wild to break all of them whenever you see them.
There are times where you will need to use the energy weapon you are given to solve small puzzles, such as cutting through a chain fence, or perhaps cutting the chain that holds shut a vent you need to get through. It is nice that this sort of puzzle solving was added in as it pushes away from the standard ‘Go Here, Do this’ that most mainstream shooters seem to heavily lean on for once again several years.
An aspect of realism we would have liked to have seen is that you do not seem to have to worry about ‘breathing’ underwater. Diving into the water we were under at times for several minutes without resurfacing, with no indication that we were drowning or going to drown as there were never any animations showing we were, or any health loss either. With all they did with other parts of the game we would have really enjoyed seeing that you had to manage how long you could spend underwater, especially when it came to a mission where you are in a small submersible and the NPC guiding you on the radio tells you not to be out of it for too long otherwise you could drown.
