WOLfenstein ii: tHe neW COLOssus
The Alt Reich
released OUT NOW! Reviewed on PC
Also on Nintendo switch, Ps4, Xbox One Publisher Bethesda softworks
It’s 1961, America has fallen to the Nazi war machine, and BJ Blazkowicz is a broken man. Pressed back into service with a resistance cell that includes his heavily pregnant girlfriend, he’s once again shooting bad people and bad robots with ever-larger guns.
One of the best things MachineGames has done is to abandon Castle Wolfenstein itself. This game’s wider world, with missions linked through the hub level of the Eva’s Hammer submarine, easily beats a linear charge through stone architecture. Ditching the supernatural elements, replaced with terrifying biomechanical experiments, was also a good decision.
The best things about the opening chapter are the traps – microwave devices that create walls of wobbly air, exploding anyone who walks into them. Otherwise, it’s a corridor shooter with cutscenes as you run back and forth to release the Nazi flying machine that’s clamped onto your sub home.
This immediately reveals one of the issues with New Colossus: we’ve seen a lot of it before. It’s also almost completely devoid of shades of grey. The bad guys are bad and the good guys are good, even when they’re dealing with their personal demons.
There’s a nice parallel set-up between BJ’s white supremacist father and the racist mother figure antagonist – in fact, race issues permeate the entire game, and are only occasionally dealt with in a heavy-handed manner. And there’s a thoughtful intermingling of Americana with Nazi symbols/ beliefs. It’s a solid, believable world. What we don’t see are any steps forward in first-person shooting. Some things even go backwards, with the divergent timeline/weapons idea from the first game re-introduced in a flashback rather than woven into a new place. The vent-crawling is straight out of Deus Ex and, while there are some new weapons, the best is a simple hatchet.
Still, Wolfenstein has great guns and fantastic baddies to use them on. All weapons can be upgraded, heavy armament can be collected from downed foes and ammo is plentiful. Environments are a little corridor-heavy, but a destroyed New York has a frozen beauty.
As good a single-player FPS as anyone’s put out this year, its main problem may prove to be that it’s a sequel. The New Order was a fresh reinvention of a classic series, full of ideas. Despite taking those ideas and running with them, The New Colossus feels a little stale in comparison. Ian Evenden