Minor spoilers follow.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus picks up after the events of The New Order. The Nazi menace has subjugated not only Europe, but also the United States.
The entire world is now under mecha-fascist rule and only one man can turn the tide: B.J. Blazkowicz, who comes to be called 'Terror Billy' over the course of the game.
Like The New Order, The Old Colossus mixes over-the-top shooting, larger-than-life characters and crazy technology to give us a run-and-gun shooter that's plenty violent and lots of fun. It's a solid sequel, in some ways even surpassing its excellent predecessor. In other ways, however, the game falls short, lacking some of the things that wowed us about the first game and its expansion, The Old Blood.
In The New Colossus, we start out with Blazkowicz confined to a wheelchair, nearing what he believes will be his death. He and Anya have a child on the way, which makes this all the more bitter. I don't want to talk too much about the specifics of the story beyond the broad strokes, however, since this is something best experienced in the game yourself. Suffice to say, there's a great cast of zany characters that you start with and meet along the way, and the game's many cut-scenes are filled with melodrama, humor, and horrific violence. Blazkowicz has some frightening backstory revealed, as well, though the scenes with his father left me feeling slightly unsatisfied, as though a piece of that story was left out.
You begin the game in the wheelchair with just 50% health. Soon you'll find yourself in a special mech suit that raises your maximum armor to 200, but you'll remain at 50 health for over half the game (not counting side missions and enigma quests and the like.) For a good 5 to 6 hours you'll be at half health, and when you finally do up the maximum to 100, your maximum armor goes down to 100 as well. This was an aggravating decision on the part of MachineGames. During the first wheelchair mission, I could see this making sense, but I wish that health had returned to normal sooner.
This is partly because at 50 health, any time your health goes higher than 50 it immediately begins to deplete, which in turn leads to you having to pick up a lot of health packs. So, so many health packs.
B.J. will automatically pick up some items, but not if you're at the maximum. So for hours you'll be spamming the "E" key (on PC) to pick up health packs just to stay above 50, not to mention armor packs and ammunition galore. I've learned something about myself as a gamer in the past few years, and it's that I very much dislike having to constantly pick things up. Ammo is often bad enough, but adding in so many health packs is a recipe for tedium. Tedium is not what I'm after in a game.
I've wrestled with the concept of health packs and a non-regenerating health bar versus the more modern regenerating health and shield bar we've seen in games like Halo and Call of Duty. On the one hand, I can see how health packs are more "realistic." You need to heal up, and that requires bandages, medicine, and so forth. On the other hand, who shrugs off burns and bullet holes this way? Realism goes out the window the moment we play any kind of game like this.
Meanwhile, regenerating health has the distinct advantage of not being quite so tedious. You simply duck into cover, wait a little while, and pop back out. The justification here would be that you weren't actually shot, just rattled, and if you hadn't ducked for cover you would have gotten shot for real and killed. Both systems are abstract, obviously, so it really comes down to what's the best fit for a game and what's the most fun.
I didn't mind health packs in The New Order as much because you had the 100 maximum, and because it was somewhat novel. There hadn't been a ton of shooters with health packs in recent years, so it was kind of cool to see that mechanic come back. But I'm over it now. I'd love to play this game with the option of fully recoverable health and zero health packs. I'd keep shields as pick-ups, but get rid of all the tiny ones like helmets and such. Every shield pick-up should be a vest that grants you 100 shield, especially since it depletes so quickly. Then all you've got left is ammo to pick up (and grenades and recharges, etc.) which makes this all much less tedious.
Health system aside, the gunplay in The New Colossus is excellent. I've replayed some of The New Order just in case I was wearing rosy-tinted glasses, and I have to say I think they're incredibly similar but The New Colossus might be just a tiny bit smoother.
Yes, guns start out a bit anemic at first, and the sound design leaves something to be desired, but by the time you have a shotgun with triple-firing shells you'll be tearing through Nazis like butter. You'll have plenty of weapons (including temporary heavy weapons) to choose from by the game's closing credits, with plenty of optional upgrades to make each weapon deadlier and more fun to use. And you don't have to carry just two at a time---gloriously, you can carry them all at once and just cycle through them with ease.
Actually, the difficulty is a little uneven throughout because the game is really hard at first on the normal difficulty setting, but pretty easy one setting down. But by the time you get your health back up to 100, a full and upgraded arsenal, and the cool gadgets they introduce later into the game, you'll probably need to raise the difficulty to still feel challenged.
Difficulty isn't the only uneven aspect of the game.
The pacing and tone are also kind of wonky. The game is incredibly serious at times, which is in keeping with The New Order, but it quickly devolves into campy, zany fun. It can be outrageously funny at times (like when one character discovers an actual working toilet and toilet-paper.) It can also be a little maudlin, which is how I described the first game at the time. Blazkowicz's inner monologue can be a bit heavy-handed and silly. And the cut-scenes can drag on, leaving someone like me, with my increasingly short attention span, bored and impatient to get back to the action. To each their own, of course, but I think the game would have benefited from fewer, briefer cut-scenes, with more story taking place off-camera during the levels.
Which brings us to level design. There are some pretty cool levels in The New Colossus, but they never felt as open or interesting or well put-together as The New Order's. Stealth is less viable as well, which is a shame. And while there are open-ended levels especially in the back-end of the game, too often I felt funneled through with less player agency than before.
Meanwhile, too many of these levels take place in cramped buildings, U-Boat interiors and other tight areas. I wanted more of occupied America, but you only really get a couple levels that deal with the resistance, or with Nazi-occupied US towns. This was disappointing. There was so much potential to really explore what Nazi occupied America would look like and we get far too little of that. What we do get is fantastic and fascinating, but for most of the game I felt like I was playing in oddly similar environments going through oddly repetitive motions.
Still, in other ways the game has certainly improved. Melee is way more fun now, having taken a big page out of the new DOOM's playbook. And the graphics are quite a lot better, with some really gorgeous levels and great character design. I've heard some complain about poor textures, but mostly I thought the game was a nice, if not very dramatic, improvement over The New Order. More outdoor levels like the one where you run into the KKK in "small town America" would have been nice, as I think they'd show off the game's prettier side a bit more than all the cramped spaces.
There's generally a lot more story, too, so you get more of the great writing and voice-acting that have defined this rebooted series. That makes up, to some degree at least, for the pacing issues. And the story is pretty zany, with an amazing Hitler scene and even a Nazi space base. Good stuff.
All told, I really liked The New Colossus, even though I found the level design disappointing. It's entirely single-player so you won't miss out on any multiplayer action if you wait for a sale, but if you're looking for a really fun solo shooter, you could do much worse. If you liked The New Order, you'll like this, too. If you didn't...well, this probably isn't going to change your mind.
I give the game a Buy on my Buy/Hold/Sell scale, but with a caveat. The holidays are almost upon us, and I'm pretty sure we'll see at least a small discount during one of the incoming sales (either retail or on Steam or both.) The game is certainly worth full retail price, but there's so much out right now, waiting for a bargain won't hurt.
It took me about ten hours to complete the main game, but there's quite a bit of side content still left for me to do, and I'll probably play through it again and make a different choice at the beginning to see how that changes the story. That's at least 20 hours of game time in a quality single-player shooter, so don't expect buyer's remorse either way.
Finally, many gamers experienced some major performance issues with this game on PC. I only had one problem, however. The game froze up between the end of a mission and the following scene, forcing me to ultimately restart my machine. I only had to retrace my steps for about two minutes so it wasn't a big deal. Other than that, I've had no issues either before or after the patch. (I run an Intel i7-6700k processor with an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU.)
The Good: A terrific story filled with great characters who are well written and acted. Excellent gunplay and plenty of challenge.
The Bad: Tedious health packs and other pickups slow down play. The first half of the game can be frustrating. Pacing is problematic.
The Ugly: It's incredibly violent and there's some very disturbing scenes, but that's what you'd expect from a game about taking down evil Nazi bastards.
TL;DR: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a great follow-up to The New Order, though it falls short in level design and stealth. It's well worth your time and money if you love single-player games, but it wouldn't kill you to wait for a sale.
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One, later Nintendo Switch
Developer: MachineGames
Publisher: Bethesda
Release Date: Oct. 27, 2017
Price: $59.99
Score: 8/10
