Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

Take The New Order. Take its characters, shave any nuance off, and then give them four times as much screen time without adding substance. Take the already insane premise, add nothing again, but stretch it to more ludicrous lengths. Do the same for the major story beats: Nothing new, just pump it up. Take the weariness that was a heavy sub-tone in TNO; and grow it into an all-suffusing dire bitterness and cynicism that at times breaks the fourth wall. Then take that entire fetid stew, and give it about the same time as the game play portion. But since that would be entirely too much work if we had the same amount of game as TNO, you cut half of its levels, and make the player play those twice if they complain (call it ‘optional side content’). Make the level design somewhat worse and less varied, add some jank (like cover aiming not working properly around many corners, being stuck on/in invisible level geometry, or never-fixed, easily reproducible CTDs) and minor annoyances, et voila: You, too, have created The New Colossus. TNC feels like the Evil Twin of TNO. Mean-spirited, bloviating, dull, exhausted. Shock for the sake of shock, disgust for the sake of disgust, and worse: When you think it builds something for actual effect, it may just come in with a wrecking ball to sabotage its own build-up with gross-out “humour”. What has your audience done to you, Machine Games, that you treat them so?

TNO and TOB were amazing reboots, right up there with the treatment DOOM got. Too bad they flopped it so hard with this one. Gameplay is mostly the same (very good) but everything around it is a severe downgrade. The level design, the combat encounters, the pacing, the tone of the story, are all just bad. ESPECIALLY the cutscenes. Good lord almighty in heaven, the cutscenes.

after the prequels I couldn|t wait to plaz this game. And the gameplay in itself is fun but the story is so fucking attrocius that I had to stop it because I couldn't bear another minute of this braindead drivel.

Game is not running on modern PCs. Win 11, Ryzen 9 9900X, 64GB RAM, 4070 Ti SUPEr. Game freezes on start, when you try to change anything in graphics settings. If do not change anything, game freezes on start new game.

I really loved The New Order. One of the best modern shooter experiences for me. Gameplay was superb, story captivating and there was so much innovation and so many good twists. I loved how it jumped from a period to another and then in the Old Blood back in time, I loved how weapons changed between them and I loved all the beautiful settings of all sorts. The moon! The adorable German towns and the zombies! Plus all the fun mechanics, from shooting and sliding to piloting a little sub. The fights felt really intense, especially with the ferocious and really fast mecha-dogs (London and the prison) and robot super soldiers, from those hanging from rails to the one in Wolfenstein castle. Upgrading perks was also satisfying. In short, everything was great. Compared to that, The New Colossus is a step down. I wouldn't say a disappointment, because it is still very fun, but less than it could be. Gameplay is still solid, though I miss the sliding and shooting and stealth could've been better implemented. The story is not that good. A lot of WTF moments. In the first he wakes up after years in a coma, here he changes his body... but the powersuit is not really powerful. The settings and level design are not that interesting. For this and the story I take off a star. The other star for the bugs. It's simply unacceptable to be so buggy 3.5 years after release. The game crashes every time, after an hour or so. Straight to desktop or the menu screen becomes black or the images for collectibles are not displayed. It's a real shame.