Wolfenstein II The New Colossus (XB1X)

This one takes ages to get going. The initial hours had me thinking that this was a step back from the previous two games, with dull levels and lesser game play. But it got way better after finishing off the early Submarine and flying fortress level. By the end I rate the game about on par with The New Order and The Old Blood.

The story is just as silly as earlier games, and is told by longer cut scenes this time. Although I normally don't like lengthy cut scenes, at least they only come at the end of levels and never during actual game play. I'll take long occasional cut scenes at story milestones over continuous micro cut scenes like in Resident Evil 6- that actually interrupt you when you're doing stuff.

The biggest single change this time is a controversial one. Most people will like it, but I don't- the introduction of save anywhere/anytime. I know PC gamers love it, and I save scummed my way through all the old 90's classics back in the day. Now though, I think nothing destroys the flow of a good game more than bringing up a save/load screen every 10 paces. Machinegames had the game balance just about spot on with their check pointing in The New Order. It provided chunks of challenges to overcome in a fair way and you could bump the difficulty way up if it was too easy. In The New Colossus, to balance out being able to save anywhere you now fight through wave upon wave of lengthy fights where you're expected to save mid battle to get through. So you soon find yourself savescumming. Savescumming is not skill, anyone can do it on any difficulty if you just have patience. I despise it, especially in games like this that have stealth elements.
How easy and pointless would Super Mario Bros be if you could save at anytime? How easy would Dark Souls be? To achieve tension and fear you need to have the potential to lose something tangible- like progress or time, so when you fuck up and die you REALLY feel it, you then start to treat the game almost like something is really at stake. Anyway that's my rant on the topic. What I'm saying is that some of the tension from the big fights in the previous games is now gone and so is some of the sense of achievement with it. But most people will just happily save their way through the game every 10 paces and love it.

Technically the game is amazing. It runs at 2160p mostly except for very demanding scenes where it tends to drop to around 2000p. It looks stunning to be honest. It is mostly locked to 60fps, but early on i did notice frame time spikes when blowing open crates with the Laserkraftwerk- caused by the mass of particles and the hard v-sync. So I turned on freesync and that cleared those right up. Freesync (XB1X supports AMD Freesync 2) on a console is a game changer, especially now that the coming HDMI 2.1 ready TV's are looking to bring freesync game modes with them. For now though, my monitor has freesync on it's HDMI 2.0 port, and it's working like a charm.