Wolfenstein: The New Order

MachineGames' 2014 revival is set in 1960 in a world where the Nazis won, and it takes both halves of that premise seriously. The shooting is deliberately old-fashioned - health packs, no regeneration, dual-wielding almost everything, and a level design that gives you cover and flanking routes rather than corridors - and it has a stealth layer built around silently removing commanders who otherwise call endless reinforcements. What surprised people was the writing. B.J. Blazkowicz gets an interior monologue, the resistance characters are given real relationships, and the depiction of an occupied Europe is genuinely uncomfortable rather than pulpy, including a sequence in a labour camp that the game refuses to make triumphant. There is a choice in the prologue that changes which of two characters is with you for the entire game. It also contains a moon level. The follow-up, The New Colossus, is more uneven; this one is the tightest first-person campaign of its console generation.