So, remember what happened with my Sonic Mania review, where the game came out, and I spent
so long working on the review and procrastinating it that by the time the review was actually
finished, the game was already months old and everyone had already stopped talking about it?
Well, I did that again.
Welcome to my review of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
Now, this is a very interesting game for a multitude of reasons, and I'm hoping to
touch on that a little bit in the video, um, but also before we get started I should note
there will be a few spoilers in this video.
I'm gonna try not to spoil any of the major twists, I'm not gonna spoil the ending,
but aside from that I think everything's fair game, so this should be a fun one, so,
uh, strap right in and let's get started.
Wolfenstein II picks up right where The New Order left off.
BJ's not doing so great after the events of the last game, having taken a grenade to
the face during his confrontation with General Deathshead.
Considering that, he actually looks pretty good, in my opinion, but regardless, he is
in a pretty bad state, and interestingly, this actually informs the gameplay for much of the game.
You actually play through the first level in a wheelchair, which surprisingly controls
a lot better than you'd think.
Though of course I'm still thankful this wasn't for the whole game.
After this you'll acquire a battle suit which sustains William for the remainer of
first half of the game.
As a result of his injuries, he only has a maximum of fifty health points, but thanks
to the suit you have a maximum of 200 armour points to compensate.
This creates a kind of gameplay which places emphasis on keeping your armor high to avoid
taking too much damage, which is kind of an interesting way to change up the formula a bit.
In Wolfenstein: The New Order, there was a scene early on in the game where you're
forced to choose to save the life of one of your comrades, leading to the death of the other.
This creates an interesting problem for the sequel, due to the fact that there are two
possible timelines the story could be set in.
Wolfenstein II resolves this problem via a flashback to the choice which allows you to
select the timeline you want to play on.
I went with Wyatt's timeline, just because he's the one I ended up saving in The New Order
I may end up doing a Fergus play-through in the future, but I didn't really feel up
to playing the game twice just for this review, as the game is quite long.
So, full disclosure here, I haven't actually played that many recent first-person shooter games.
Aside from Wolfenstein: The New Order, which I played in anticipation of The New Colossus,
the newest FPS I've properly played is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
So, as you can imagine, I don't really have a very good metric for high I should set my
standards while reviewing this game.
In some ways, though, I think this could be a good thing.
I'm hoping it means I can critically examine the game on its own merits, rather than forgiving
or glossing over certain problems just because they're endemic to modern FPS games.
So, with that out of the way, let's talk about Wolfenstein II's gameplay.
Wolfenstein II is a first-person shooter.
It plays how you'd expect a first-person shooter to play.
You use the WASD keys to move around and the mouse to aim your weapon.
Much like the previous game, Wolfenstein II has a generous but not overwhelming selection
of weapons to use, which are all unlocked fairly early on.
You can switch weapons by holding the 'V' key to bring up a weapon wheel.
I found this kind of unwieldly, and as I became more familiar with the number key bindings
for each weapon, I found it much better to use those instead.
A nice touch is that one of the weapons differs depending on whether you're playing the
Fergus or Wyatt timeline.
On Fergus's timeline you get the Laserkraftwerk, which fires lasers, and on Wyatt's you instead
get the Dieselkraftwerk, which fires remotely detonatable sticky bombs.
You can also dual wield any combination of weapons.
As cool of an idea as this is, it's actually a bit awkward in practice.
You press the left mouse button to fire the weapon in your main hand, and the right mouse
button to fire the weapon in your off hand.
As a consequence of this, you can't use the secondary fire feature of your weapons
all, meaning you basically swap out the accuracy of iron sights for raw fire power.
The sticky bomb launcher actually uses the secondary fire button to detonate, so to compensate
for not being able to do this while dual wielding, the bombs will detonate automatically instead.
I didn't really dual wield much at all in my playthrough, because mashing both mouse
buttons at the same time is a chore and I didn't like how quickly it chewed up ammo.
In most situations I preferred the accuracy and efficiency of just using one weapon.
All your weapons can be upgraded with a selection of buffs and alternative fire modes with
upgrade kits you can find throughout the game.
I really liked these, and especially that they don't just make your weapons more powerful,
but even change the way you use them and give them more utility.
Being able to feel your weapons changing and becoming more powerful as you progress in
the game is very satisfying.
There are also heavy weapons you can find which slow you down a fair bit but are extremely powerful.
They drop to the ground if you unequip them, so you only get to use them until you need
to climb a ladder or something, or just get tired of being slow.
I thought this was a fun way to give you a change from your normal arsenal, and also
give you some really powerful weapons to play with without throwing off the balance of
the game too much.
So as for the combat overall, I gotta say, I really liked it.
The weapons feel powerful, and the enemies can take a hit or two but for the most part
avoid feeling like bullet sponges.
The melee takedowns you can do are pretty fun as well.
If you can get close enough to an enemy you can use your axe to brutally dispatch them.
These axes can also be thrown to take down enemies at a distance.
If you feel confident, you can even run right up to an enemy and axe 'em to death in
the middle of a firefight.
The fun of tearing through Nazis with bullets and axes is compounded by the knowledge that
every last one of them absolutely deserves it.
As much as I enjoy gleefully slaughtering digital fascists, I do have a couple complaints
regarding Wolfenstein II's gameplay.
Certain areas of the game are patrolled by Nazi commanders.
If you alert a commander to your presence with the sound of gunfire, they'll call
in extra waves of enemies you have to deal with.
If you feel like making things a bit easier on yourself, you can try sneaking through
areas by dispatching enemies silently.
This can be done with axe takedowns, or with the pistol and machine pistol if you have
their silencing upgrades.
If you can take out all the commanders in an area without being spotted, then you can
take out the rest of the enemies without reinforcements being called in.
The game does seem to encourage you to take the stealth option in these situations,
but this isn't always plausible.
A lot of areas felt genuinely impossible to get through without being noticed, especially
when there are tougher enemies present that can't be killed quickly and silently.
I feel like every stealth section ought to have a clear path you can take where you can
dispatch all the commanders without having to deal with any enemies that are bound to
start making noise before it's humanly possible to take them out.
Otherwise, it kind of defeats the purpose of even giving the player the illusion of
a stealth option to begin with.
If there's no plausible way for the player to navigate a section without bring spotted,
then the commanders are redundant, because in these situations they'll inevitably call
for reinforcements regardless of what the player does.
I feel like I should point out that I did like the stealth sections where these kinds
of powerful and noisy enemies were either absent or had an easy enough way to sneak past them.
In these parts, getting through them silently felt not only possible but also satisfying
to actually pull off.
Another big issue I had with the game was with the colission detection on parts of the maps.
The game's maps are packed with invisible walls and awkward to navigate geometry that
can be very frustrating to make sense of.
Too often it seems like there's something you can jump over or crawl under, or a ledge
you can climb up onto where things just don't work out how it feels like they should.
There were only a few specific areas where this became a serious problem, but it did
make moving around the game world a lot less fluid than it could have been.
This might just be a natural consequence of the game having such complex and realistic
terrain and geometry, but I still feel like a few tweaks here and there could make it
a lot more tolerable.
One last little peeve I had was that the directional damage indicators at the edge of the screen
were a bit too subtle and weren't obvious enough.
It took me a lot longer to figure out where damage was coming from than it should have
and I chalk a fair few of my deaths down to this problem.
So you know how I mentioned that you spend the first half of the game with only 50 max health
and 200 max armour thanks to the power armour you wear?
Well, once you get to about halfway through the game, things change up again.
Your max armour goes back down to 100 like in The New Order, but in exchange you get
a whopping 200 health points.
This isn't the only way the game changes at the halfway mark.
You'll also get a choice between three different power-ups that grant you bizzare new abilities.
The constrictor harness allows you to crawl through narrow vents that are otherwise inaccessible,
the ram shackles allow you to bust through certain obstacles, as well as stun and damage
enemies by sprinting into them, and the battle walker allows you to become much taller by
double-tapping the jump button, which allows you to access platforms that are too high
to get to otherwise.
You only get to choose one at first, though you can find the other two that you missed
after beating the main story.
I ended up going with the battle walker, as I figured it'd be useful for getting up
to tactical positions.
Plus it's probably the most unusual one so I was curious to see how well it'd work.
I was surprised at how well all three of these contraptions integrated with Wolfenstein II's gameplay.
The fact that the maps were designed around them and gave me plenty of opportunities to
use them effectively definitely helped.
Another change I really appreciated from the last Wolfenstein game is that you can now
pick up health, armour and ammo from the ground just by running over them, instead of having
to point at items and press 'E' for each one.
Though, I do wish the range for this was a tad bigger, as it can still be a bit of a
hassle running back and forth over big piles of items to make sure you got everything.
So I figure now I'll take the opportunity to talk a bit about the game's storytelling.
The plot did seem a bit all over the place at times.
Some parts were honestly a bit ridiculous, but in a strange way I can't really explain,
I feel like the at-times balls-to-the-walls plot developments actually suit the game really well.
The overall tone of the game, appropriately enough, reminds me a lot of Inglourious Basterds
in how it manages to blend dark and serious tones with absurdism and gratuitious hyper-violence.
One area where Wolfenstein II does well is the characters, a strength that carries across
from The New Order.
The resistance members you work with all have unique and distinct personalities, without
coming across as caricatured, striking that nice balance where they feel like real people.
Many have their own character arcs and relationships among themselves that really contribute to
making the resistance team feel alive.
For other characters, the game offers some insight into their personalities on the surface
level, but doesn't really dive too deep into their emotions or motivations.
This is totally justifiable of course, given that the main story can only contain so much,
but I would have liked it if the designers had taken more advantage of the video game
medium to allow more optional interaction with some of the more minor characters.
The focus is clearly on the main character William, and I liked the way they handled
him, to be honest.
You really get a fresh insight into his character via the exploration of his relationship with
his parents, and overall, he gets a lot more vulnerable moments than he did in the last game.
Irene Engel, who first appeared in The New Order, makes a return in The New Colossus
as the main antagonist, and is immediately established as a limitlessly cruel and despicable
invididual with little to no redeeming qualities.
Normally I'd be skeptical of such a seemingly one-dimensional villain, but somehow Wolfenstein II
manages to present Engel's psychopathic cruelty in an uncomfortably believable way.
Much of the enjoyment of her character comes from how easy it is to hate her, and how her
unrelenting asshattery makes the idea of finally serving up her just desserts very appealing.
Another aspect of Wolfenstein II's storytelling I appreciated was the various notes, letters,
and documents you can find lying around each map.
In these you can learn more tidbits about what's going on in Wolfenstein II's world,
such as history, recent events, and even just the lives of the ordinary people
caught up in everything.
If you're willing to go out of your way to inspect these objects, you get to read
about the perspectives of civilians, rebels, freedom fighters and even the nazis and their supporters.
If I were the kind of person to be more inclined toward sympathy for Nazis, I might even feel
a bit guilty about slaughtering them.
I mean, we are just committing senseless acts of violence against people
who disagree with us politically, after all.
Actually, this silly little tweet kind of leads into something else I wanted to explore
a bit in this video.
Some of the public reactions in the leadup to this game's release are very interesting to me.
Now, you may already know what I'm talking about, here.
For those of you not in the know, when Wolfenstein II started its official promotion campaign
on social media, a lot of people took issue with the idea of a video game
based around slaughtering nazis.
Supposedly, there's something about this particular iteration of a series of games
about murdering nazis that makes it somehow more political than all the other nazi-murdering
games that came before it.
And people are very upset about this.
Here we have Red Skull, showing his concern that the game might encourage people
to murder innocent Trump supporters.
Oh, here's another zesty one:
'No one gives a goddamn about the women of Wolfenstein.
Majority are sick of the forced female nonsense.'
Yes, what are these game designers thinking, putting those pesky women into my video games.
Women have no place in a game about militant anti-fascist resistance!
That's not realistic or reflective of reality or history at all!
'Yet again, most comments here are having a violence fetish with this game.
Wolfenstein will inspire the next mass shooting'
Good grief, didn't we leave this shit in 1999 with Columbine?
Oh look, someone even wrote an article about how they think Wolfenstein is encouraging real-world violence, on…
the Daily Stormer.
Oh my god.
'This is the face of a hero.
Join the resistance!'
'This is the face of a race traitor.
#antiwhite #WhiteGenocide'
In a pretty weird twist, some of the people
sooking about communism in their video games may actually have a point this time around.
One of the resistance fighters you work with in the game is actually described in his official
character biography as a Marxist, which you can imagine the reactions to.
Thankfully you don't have to because I have some really great ones right here.
Look, this guy even has the audacity to say what everyone's thinking!
Of course, it's the Jews who are responsible!
... Jesus Christ.
Even though, yeah, Horton is pretty clearly a commie, this isn't really as big of a
deal in the game as these gentlemen are making it out to be.
I mean, there's a scene where he argues a bit with BJ about the politics of war, and
he also seems to like hammers and sickles a fair bit, but he and his political leanings
aren't really fundamental to the story, much to my disappointment, obviously.
The dastardly Marxist propaganda in Wolfenstein II doesn't stop at our friend Horton, though.
The Black Revolutionary Front, one of the other resistance groups featured in the game,
takes some pretty clear inspiration from the Black Panther Party, which I thought was pretty damn cool.
The game even discusses how easily white capitalist America has accepted fascism in its story
somewhat through the mouthpiece of Grace, which I found to be surprisingly well done.
Of course, our friends on the other side of the political spectrum get some representation
for their ideology and leading figures too.
We even get an appearance from the Fuhrer himself, who conducts himself with all the
power and grace one would expect from such a strong and dignified leader.
His very presence commands respect, and I'm sure all of our National Socialist friends
will be very happy to know their leader is depicted in his full glory in this game.
I just want to take a moment to thank MachineGames for showing old Adolf the respect he deserves.
So, as for the game's visuals, my feelings are pretty mixed.
It's about what you'd expect from a modern 3D shooter with a realistic art style,
but not a whole lot more.
Most, but not all of the game takes place in relatively unexciting environments, like
dark gritty corridors, dark sewers and dilapidated city streets.
I'm not gonna fault the game too much for that.
Those kinds of environments are an expected result of the game's setting, after all,
and the game manages to make everything look pretty good, if a bit generic at times.
One of my favourite parts of the game, visually, was the part where you pay a visit to Roswell.
It was a nice change of pace to see a good amount of colour for once,
even if it is in a fascist dystopia.
The fact that part of the game takes place on Venus was pretty neat too – it was a
cool progression from the moon levels in The New Order.
The game ran fine on my PC at maxed-out graphics settings, but even in spite of my graphics
being set to the highest possible level, I still noticed a few things that disturbed me.
For one, the game's models and textures are pretty inconsistent in terms of quality.
Stop for a moment and take a close look at anything in the game from the objects in the
environment to the weapon in your hand and you'll notice lots of things don't look
quite as sleek as you'd expect them to, especially considering how dramatically the
maximum graphics settings hype themselves up.
Don't get me wrong, as a whole the game still looks really good, but nonetheless it
failed to meet the expectations it set for itself and left me feeling a bit underwhelmed.
I also encountered a few small but noticeable visual glitches as I played, particularly
one where certain visual effects would render as a weird black mass on my screen – but
I ain't gonna hold that one against the game, could just be hardware after all.
Wolfenstein II's soundtrack is pretty cool.
As you play the game, it transitions seamlessly from calm and ambient when things are safe,
to suspenseful when enemies around, to mechanical and aggressive during firefights.
It really suits the tone of the game, and although it didn't enamour me to the point
where I'd want to listen to it on its own, the game was definitely a better experience for having it.
Once you're done with Wolfenstein II's main story, the game also has a post-game
that involves returning to destinations you've been to as well as new ones to eliminate nazi commanders.
The enigma code items you collect through the game can be used to play a code-cracking
minigame which grants you access to the locations where the commanders are at.
There are fifteen of these missions, as well as one extra sixteenth one after you've
completed all the others.
These are all pretty standard, you just have to fight your way through the locations and
kill the target commander at the end, who'll be marked by a blue circle on your signal
to differentiate him from the other commanders you may come across.
You also get a chance to get your hands on the two contraption power-ups you missed out
on in the main story, as well as being able to complete side missions to unlock upgrades
for your contraptions, which come in the form of various passive buffs.
You can also take a crack at finding the rest of the collectibles hidden in the levels,
which take the form of gold, trading cards, concept art, toys, records, and more.
For me personally, the sheer quantity of collectible hidden items makes the idea of attempting
to 100% this game less than appealing.
Digging through each and every level looking for hundreds of more or less useless items
doesn't really appeal to me in the slightest, but I guess there must be some weirdo
out there who appreciates the opportunity.
An update to the game also added a 'combat simulation' mode, which allows you to replay
some of the levels you cleared during the main story, while competing for a high score
at the same time.
While I did appreciate the extra boost of gameplay that came from this and the commander
assassination missions, Wolfenstein II's post-game still felt barren to me.
On the Eva's Hammer U-Boat, the game's hub world, most of the main characters are
absent, and all the background dialogue that would previously change throughout the game,
is now set to the same lines and conversations on repeat.
All of the ever-changing character interactions that made the game's world feel alive are
suddenly stripped away after the main story ends, which is kind of jarring and makes the
post-game feel kind of lifeless.
It gets old very fast hearing the same conversation about comic books every time you arrive back
from an assassination mission, especially given how much these interactions changed
and varied during the main story.
So, final thoughts on Wolfenstein II.
Well, while the game did have its flaws, I thought it was a great experience – it was
a genuine pleasure to play through, and I'm looking forward very much to seeing what happens
with Wolfenstein III if that ever comes out.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and give the game four stars out of five.
And as always, uh, make sure to subscribe if you're interested in seeing what I do next.
I do have a lot of ideas floating around for games I'd like to review, other kinds of
videos I'd like to make, so if you're interested in seeing where that goes, uh,
yeah, chuck a sub if you haven't already, and I'll, uh, see you in the next video.
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