Wolfenstein II: the New Colossus: Review

For months it feels like we’ve been told that, no matter how despicable their views are, we shouldn’t punch Nazis. Wolfenstein II: the New Colossus agrees, and suggests we use an axe instead.

William Joseph Blazkowicz is back in another blood soaked, fury driven adventure in the alternate 1960s that Wolfenstein: the New Order presented to us back in 2014. This time, B.J. and the Kreisau Circle group of resistance fighters take on the Nazis in the USA to start the second American Revolution.

MachineGames, 2017

I will say straight off the bat that the story is utterly fantastic. It hits the same weird-fiction sci-fi beats as the New Order did, but alongside these we get a far darker, sentimental, and heart breaking narrative. The game explores some more of B.J.’s background and childhood, and adds another layer of reasoning behind his hatred of Nazis (on top of them being, you know, Nazis). Genuinely, the first twenty minutes of the New Colossus are possibly some of the cruellest and upsetting things I’ve seen in a game; at times the violence risks overdoing it and making the player feel uncomfortable.

If you’ve played the New Order, you’ll remember the cruel choice you had to make between Fergus and Wyatt in the beginning. This choice can be made again, allowing the player to continue to experience the world with the same continuity as the previous title, which is a great thing and guarantees a replay.

Old characters return, and we are greeted with new faces too. Grace, Super Spesh, and Horton make up the leaders of two resistance groups operating out of New York and New Orleans respectively, and have some complex and rich motivations and really solid voice actors behind them. Sigrun is Frau Engel’s overweight, constantly belittled, and former Nazi turned resistance daughter, whom is actually quite an endearing character, and pleasingly not just the “fat” comic relief. Super Spesh is the closest to that moniker – he’s a conspiracy theorist who was a witness to the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. Think the Ancient Aliens guy, but with guns.

Frau Engel is the central antagonist this time around, and is totally terrifying. Her taunting cruelty along with the scars on her face, curtesy of the player in the New Order, make my skin crawl. She is the closest approximation to pure evil on Earth, because not all evil resides on Earth (wink wink)…

The team at MachineGames have a fantastic grasp of world building and once again it is on point. Fascist America is a sinister place “where the white man has claimed back what was rightfully his”, where not just Nazis but Klansmen can seen wandering the streets of small town America like nothing is amiss. The radioactive husk of New York City is haunting, and the ghetto of New Orleans is a deeply disturbing place to be. One cutscene shows B.J. ride past a destroyed US army convoy, a reminder that, at one time, Americans fought against this tyranny.

MachineGames, 2017

The story, however, ends a little abruptly and leaves a distinct “the one in the middle” taste in the mouth that you may remember from The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug. The game feels like the jumping off point for something far greater off in the future, but I would rather have had it now. There's also a few flickering lighting issues, on PS4 at least.

So let’s talk gameplay. The physical appearance of the enemies in game have been updated from the New Order, with the different classes of enemy more readily recognisable now. There’s new enemy types like the Ubersoldier, a robot that can teleport short distances and ruin your day.

But it feels that instead of just providing new challenges, the New Collossus instead chooses to pack levels with too many enemies. Most of the time there is a swarm of enemies and not enough health and armour to satisfy the player’s needs. Enemies simply spawn randomly and continue to do so until the player reaches the next checkpoint or the commander is killed. In the New Order the soldiers spawned in doorways that could be clearly identified; in the New Colossus I have genuinely seen enemies spawn at the edge of the screen, behind cover. This is a major step backwards in time to PS2 era ideas of spawning, and honestly feels a bit cheap.

Sneaking around these issues is, most of the time, not viable. Most levels do not seem to cater to the stealthier player due to lack of pathway options and an unforgiving enemy AI that locks on to B.J.’s toenails every time they slip out of cover. When the shit hits the fan, B.J. seems to be very vulnerable and quick to lose a lot of health and armour. This is the man who, after spending 14 years comatose, murdered his way across Europe, survived a concentration camp, multiple engagements with Nazi robots and General Deathshead, was freaking nuked, but now can’t deal with one Kraut holding a rifle? For the first half of the game this makes narrative sense, but not to the players sense of machismo, which the game clearly caters towards.

It feels like MachineGames wanted a gameplay pacing hybrid between the New Order’s slower, methodical yet brutal playstyle and DOOM’s full speed, kill-everything-until-it’s-dead style, and the result, for me, doesn’t quite work. The dual wielding whirlwind of mayhem is gratifying but it is more or less the only real option throughout the game. Further, the New Colossus at times seems to punish the player for needing to take a minute to find health and ammo, or pick enemies off from a distance.

MachineGames, 2017

Levels have a lot of low level clutter too, leading to the player constantly getting caught on boxes and getting murdered to death. The robot dogs, a Nazi’s best friend, return too, and are mobile versions of the same issue. Their sole purpose is to knock the player to the ground, leaving one or two seconds where the player is totally vulnerable and unable to shoot back, again causing them to be murdered to death.

There is one great thing about the levels, and that is replayability. The enigma codes return as collectables dropped by commanders, and now reveal new enemies in previous levels once decrypted. This grants the player the ability to go back and explore these locations further for collectables.

And I will say that this frustration does not permeate every level; several of the replayable missions, along with one particular level around the halfway mark of the main game, are super satisfying to play in the run and gun style, with clear pathing and predictable enemy spawns. I even managed to complete one level using mostly stealth and sneaking.

Overall Wolfenstein II hits the right beats story wise, but left me feeling like I had been promised more. I love the universe, the characters, the aesthetics, but The New Colossus doesn’t feel as though those elements are as grand as The New Order was. The gameplay is, at times, too frustrating and too much of a blur that I felt like I’d missed bits of the story and the lore. Whilst the dual-wielding bullet hose gameplay is gratifying, I wish MachineGames had paid more attention to those who like to take things slow and stealthy. A bit of a disappointment honestly, but fun nonetheless.

All images sourced from the Wolfenstein II: the New Colossus press kit.