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Over the last 10 years or so, the FPS market has become saturated with bland, stale single player campaigns, developed as an afterthought behind the money-spinning multiplayer portion. It’s a trend, however, that has been bucked almost single-handedly by Bethesda over recent years, as they continue to publish critically acclaimed single player focused games. Stretching back to Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, released in 2014, they have gone on to publish titles such as Dishonored, Prey, and Doom, all of which received huge praise across the board, with their focus and attention on creating a complete, fleshed out single player experience being a particular reason for their reverence. That brings us to Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, which carries on this Bethesda trend, bringing one of the best single player FPS stories of the past couple of years.
The story of The New Colossus is a classic revenge tale. The first hour of the game sets up BJ Blazkowicz as a broken man at his weakest ebb. We see him as a child, being physically and mentally abused by his father, then in the present day we see him tormented by Frau Engel, the blonde haired, blue eyed antagonist. Both scenes are harrowing, with the former being a graphic, distressing depiction of domestic abuse, whilst the latter is a gratuitously violent execution scene, with Engel mentally torturing you in your crippled state once she has mutilated your comrades. This first hour serves to disempower the player, to make you feel weak, hopeless. Once BJ has regained his ability to fight back, he has all the motivation he needs, and is on a one man mission to put an end to Engel. The proceeding levels see you strolling through a Nazi indoctrinated Rozwell holding a nuclear bomb, storming to the top of the Empire State Building in a post-nuclear Manhattan, riding through war-torn New Orleans on a fire-breathing Nazi robot dog, auditioning for a movie in front of Hitler on Venus, all culminating in an assault on the Nazi warship, destroying everyone and everything in your path.
The story has these great stages, those over the top moments that stand out in the memory. But what really elevates the storytelling is the quality of the writing and the voice acting, bringing the characters to life. All of the main characters you encounter are written in a very rounded way, they all feel distinct in the way their personality shines through, their little quirks, the way they interact with each other. There is a real romance, a love and lust between BJ and Anya, and the way BJ talks about his unborn twins is touching and beautiful, even upsetting when his internal dialogue sees him struggling with the thought that he may not live long enough to hold his children in his arms. Walking around Eva’s Hammer, you get listen in on characters as they converse with each other. Some of my favourite moments were those that you can stumble upon just by taking your time to wander the corridors, like the crazy conspiracy theorist Super Spesh seeing a working toilet for the first time in years, causing him to get choked up, overwhelmed with emotion and elation. The villain, Frau Engel, is a particular highlight in both writing and acting, a genuinely terrifying, unprediactable and psychopathic woman, who haunts you at every turn until her dying moments. From the moment she brings down the axe on Caroline’s neck in the opening hour, to shoving a smoking hot gun barrel in your mouth, all the way through to her own demise, she induced hate and vengefulness. A mention must be given also to BJ’s father, a hateful, racist bigot who abuses BJ as a child. He doesn’t get much screen time in comparison with most other characters, but both of his scenes making him utterly detestable, evoking sympathy for both BJ and his Mother, who both suffered for so long at the hands of this tyrant. MachineGames have clearly got a lot of writing talent, and were very particular in picking their voice actors. Their diligence in this department has paid off in spades, resulting in a story that I could really get invested in from start to finish, and I am looking forward to playing the prequel and the inevitable sequel to get the full story arc of this great cast of characters.
As well as having great characters to follow through the story, the world that these characters inhabit is so rich in detail. No expense was spared when it came to designing environments, and it’s this attention to detail that brings the story together, with the particular highlight being the hub area of the game, the resistance headquarters, Eva’s Hammer. You’re allowed and encouraged to explore the submarine between being jetted out to various mission locations, and there is plenty to see and experience. Each character has their own room aboard Eva’s Hammer, and they’re all decorated attentively, conveying so much about the character that dwells there. BJ and Anna’s room is homely, with their big bed taking centre stage in the room adorned with blankets, whilst Anna has an arts and crafts station in the corner, a ‘Sewing For Kids’ book being particularly prescient in the wake of their unborn twins. Visiting Bombate’s room, he greets you from the comfort of a leather highback chair, surrounded by fine red drapes and surrealist paintings. Wyatt’s room is a tribute to his motherland of America, the stars and stripes adorning the walls, guitar riffs wailing. Max’s room is full of crayons, colourful drawings, toys hung from the ceilings. Every aspect of these characters has been thought of, and distilled into a small, yet densely packed room that conveys so much personality. There’s more to Eva’s Hammer too, in the conversations that these characters can be found engaging in with each other. The group’s braniac Set losing a game of chess to the infantile Max and throwing the board across the room in a fit of rage, Super Spesh breaking down in tears of joy at the sight of working toilet for the first time in years, a developing love triangle arousing gossip from all corners of the submarine. These are all little world building points that the player can completely bypass and just move from mission to mission, but they add so much value and character to the world of The New Colossus for those players who are willing to explore and want to immerse themselves in the characters and the world they inhabit. It’s worth taking your time to explore Eva’s Hammer at any opportunity, as you never know what you might find, and it’s always worth it once you do.
Once you’ve taken in the sights of Eva’s Hammer, it’s time to get to the meat and potatoes of what Wolfenstein always has and always will be about; killing Nazis. The way in which you approach this task however, is up to you, with stealth and brash aggression being the options on the table. As you move through the level, you will come across commanders, a type of enemy that will raise the alarm and bring reinforcements if they become aware of your presence. The natural way, and the way the game seemingly wants you to tackle these foes is by stealthy means, as to not make your task more difficult than it needs be, thinning the heard one by one, slowly and methodically. However, I found is that stealth isn’t a rewarding, or even particularly viable means of accomplishing your task. The level design of the majority of maps isn’t conducive to sneaking around undetected. There are some vents that you can crawl through to move into some interesting, advantageous decisions, and there is an upgrade you can choose in the late game that opens up some more crawling options, but that’s about where the possibilities end. There is no element of verticality to work with, and the combat arenas take place in wide open spaces with minimal options for traversing them undetected besides slowly crouching from cover to cover. It results in a slow, frustrating experience if you have your heart set on a stealthy playthrough, or the situation devolves into a shootout anyway, with no real way to hide away again other than reloading your save. Besides stealth takedowns, throwing axes and silenced small arms, there is a limited stealth toolset at your disposal that rewards interesting decision making and an experimental approach to encounters, meaning stealthily playing through The New Colossus is a very slow and repetitive experience.
Once I’d decided to sideline any notion of stealth, the game really came into it’s own. Those wide open spaces turn from unmanageable stealth sections into sprinting lanes, encouraging you to move at breakneck speeds, running and gunning, raining hellfire upon Nazi after Nazi after Nazi. Standing still in Wolfenstein 2 is suicide, and whilst there is cover that you can duck behind, it’s not there to hunker down and set up shop behind, it’s there for you to catch your breath, to reload, before rushing out into the fray once more. Particularly in the first half of the game, where your health is capped at half for plot reasons, you just have to keep moving, searching for health and armour pickups, all whilst nailing your shots and stemming the flow of enemies rushing to claim the head of BJ ‘Terror Billy’ Blazkowicz. Those commander sequences turned from careful and considered stealth sections into a race against the clock, once the commanders heard the sound of gunfire it was a mad dash to find them, mowing through everything I could kill and evading the rest, killing them before they had chance to call in the troops. The best combat sequences are when the game throws everything at you, particularly in the late game. When it’s just you against huge dual rocket wielding robots, mechanical hellhounds, turrets and streams of grunts, all locked in a big, open arena with a fucking pounding soundtrack, it’s hard not to throw a wry, devilish smile in anticipation at the devastation that’s about to occur.
What did surprise me about The New Colossus was the lack of interesting weapons. Early in the game you get a bog standard pistol, soon followed by a submachine gun, which is followed again by an assault rifle. Each of these weapons essentially renders the it’s predecessor obsolete, once you have the assault rifle there’s no looking back unless you run out of ammo. Once I progressed further and found the shotgun, I had found the gun combo I would complete the game with, ammo permitting, dual wielding a shotgun for chewing threw Nazi’s who were foolish enough to get up in my grill, and an assault rifle for those moments where I needed to keep my distance from melee focused enemies. These two weapons do feel powerful, the rapid bark of the shotgun in particular is a joy of both sight and sound, and they play off each other really well in terms of giving the player the optimal strategic output, but I think it’s an indication that the weapon selection is too limited that these guns were my go to choice for the majority of the game. All of the weapons are upgradable, with standard options such as extended magazines and quicker reloads, and some more interesting options offering alternate firing modes that change up the way weapons behave, making for even more versatility in a dual wielding combo. There are also some heavy weapons such as the laser cannon and the huge grenade launcher that drop from the bigger enemies in the game. Picking these up gives you incredible firepower that’ll decimate anyone who even looks at you funny, but they do slow you down enough that you’ll get lit up yourself if you’re not careful about enemies flanking you. It’s an interesting trade-off, making them very situational and best used in small bursts. Further in the game, a couple of explosive weapons make their way into your regular arsenal, which are great fun to use and particularly good at dealing with the huge mechs you’ll tangle with a couple of times throughout, and I would have loved to use them more often, but there are a couple of design choices surrounding gunplay that make it frustrating and impractical.
The weapon selection is on a radial wheel, and requires you to individually select the weapon you desire in each hand by hovering over the desired option for half a second. Doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re dodging fire from all around you, trying to stay alive, and you’re having to fumble through these menus to select the weapon you want to use to tackle this specific situation, and then you have to go back into the same menu to select the other hand, all while the game is still moving at full speed and enemies are bearing down on you, it’s a fool’s errand. I would have liked to experience the different weapons more, and had the option to change up my tactics as the situation developed and different enemies entered the fray, but 100% of the time I would persist with the weapons I had in my hands at the time, simply because I couldn’t be arsed to engage with the terrible weapon selection system. Another gripe that frustrated me throughout was the pickup system. You have to manually pick up ammo, health, armour, everything. This is another system that if you engage with it during combat, it slows the action down to a crawl as you try to find that sweet spot, looking at the ground instead of at the horde of Nazi’s, until that big old prompt pops up to let you know that you can finally pick up those bullets. Factor in special weapons that you pickup with the same key, and this means that you can’t just sprint around mashing E, knowing you’ll pick up everything you need. It’s a simple problem, but it’s massively frustrating in the way it affects the flow of combat. Regularly I would run out of ammo for my weapon of choice, meaning I had to either suck it up and go along with whatever the game put in my hands next, or I had to fumble around on the floor, looking for some bullets amidst the heaping mass of corpses. In a game where there is no inventory management system, I can’t see a reason for not automatically picking up everything. Between those two grievances, combat felt that little bit more clunky than it needed to be, brushing up abrasively against the fast flowing combat. If they were solved then you would be left with a much more dynamic combat system, that encourages players to think outside the box and experiment with their tools.
Besides the clunky weapon wheel, and a couple of minor graphical bugs aside, The New Colossus is a technically impressive game. Playing on PC, the game ran as smooth as butter and looked gorgeous on ultra settings, with the consistent framerate being of particular importance in a fast paced FPS. The animations are fantastic, particularly shining in scripted sequences, where the team has clearly put a lot of effort into crafting bespoke animations for each scene, resulting in some fantastic visuals to match the character that the writing and voice acting bring to the table. The facial animations in really hold up to scrutiny too, which allows them to have characters such as Frau Engel get right up in your face, making you feel uncomfortable in a way that I’ve never experienced before in other games where the facial animation is lifeless and laughable when you give it a closer inspection.
The soundtrack of Wolfenstein 2 is fantastic, a shining example of how to hit all the right notes at the right time. It’s moody, dark, and sinister throughout, but plays around within those confines. Exploring post apocalyptic New York sounds spacey and vacant, like the city is long dead. War ravaged New Orleans sounds tense and atmospheric, putting you on a knife edge as you walk around the fire-lit streets, watching over your shoulder. The huge battle arenas have the soundtrack swelling to a thunderous, heart-pounding explosion of guitar riffs and bass pedals, encouraging you to match that tempo with your movements. One of the most conscious moments I had when playing the game was the first encounter with the huge mechanical Nazi robots, an enemy that I took one look at and decided not to fuck with, choosing to sneak by in an effort to preserve my life, but when the soundtrack kicked in, the most heavy, blood-pumping metal you’ve ever heard, I thought to myself “I can’t just sneak past when this song is playing”. I turned around, slow-mo walked out to meet the Nazi megazord motherfucker, and threw down with everything I had, until I emerged triumphant from the exploding battlefield I left in my wake. That, for me, is the moment that defined Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. The one time that the soundtrack really failed to hit it’s mark was in the end credits sequence. After the dust settles on the action, and Wyatt delivers an emotional, passionate speech about freedom and liberty, the credits roll and the soundtrack moves into a heavy metal “We’re Not Gonna Take It” screamo song, completely stomping on the sombre, poignant mood that had been established. It’s jarring, and it just doesn’t work for me, a rare misstep for the game.
This game had been on my radar for a long time, and I’m happy to be able to say that it didn’t disappoint, rather it exceeded my expectations. Since that reveal trailer at E3 earlier this year, their marketing has been everywhere, with their most prominent campaign slogan being emblazoned proudly across their Twitter page; #NoMoreNazis. Given the current political climate of the world, particularly the USA, where Alt-Right and Neo-Nazi movements have had very public demonstrations this year, the team at MachineGames chose to nail their colours to the mast. Videos of in-game Nazi’s being punched, along with statements such as “If you are a Nazi, GTFO”, “Make America Nazi-Free Again”, “Not My America”, all made for excellent viral marketing, and MachineGames really stumbled upon this campaign, with real-world politics being the perfect storm for them to ride at the time. People praised them for not shying away from the politics that their game would so clearly touch on, and they waited in anticipation to see the poignant social commentary that Wolfenstein 2 would provide us with.
Considering this marketing campaign, it’s disappointing to see how little social commentary and meaningful discussion The New Colossus engages with. The Nazi characters’ development is one dimensional, extrapolating along this one plane of evil rather than exploring some of the deeper routed causes of systemic racism and the ideologies surrounding Nazism. The game felt content with saying “Nazi’s are bad, so you should kill them all”, and leaving it at that. Walking through a Nazi indoctrinated Roswell threatened to explore how Nazism is prevalent in modern America by touching slightly on what that reality could look like were we to follow that path, and Wyatt’s final speech about liberty in the face of oppression is stirring, but the game never really lives up to what the marketing campaign intimated. It makes the marketing feel less like opportunism, and more predatory and insincere in hindsight. By the time this marketing material was released, the story would have been cemented long ago, so perhaps it’s unfair to judge them on this and months before the games’ release, the developers even hinted that the game wouldn’t be as bold in it’s social commentary as it’s Twitter account, but If ever a game had a prime opportunity to make a statement on a very real, current, political issue, MachineGames had it with Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.
It’s not a new concept, presenting the player with hordes of Nazi soldiers to mow down, and while The New Colossus doesn’t bring much innovation to this tried and tested formula, killing Nazi’s always has been, and always will be fun. Stepping into the shoes of BJ Blazkowicz once more, it’s a glorious, gratuitous murder ’em up. But it’s the story, the world and the characters of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus that will live long in the memory. Expect this game to be held up as a bastion of single player storytelling for years to come.
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