Game Details Developer: MachineGames

Publisher: Bethesda

Platform: Windows PC (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox One

Release Date: October 27

Rating: M for Mature

Price: $59.99

Links: Steam | Official website MachineGames: Bethesda: Windows PC (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox OneOctober 27: M for Mature: $59.99

Wolfenstein: The New Order pulled off a pretty neat trick in 2014. Spiritually, the shooting-game surprise felt like a lost gem from the late '90s era of first-person, single-player shooters, yet it had all the bombast and polish of a solid modern game. Its levels found the right balance between linear and complicated, its guns were both familiar and powerful, and its plot offered depth for those who wanted to pore through optional books and letters. At the same time, it was ham-fisted enough for anyone who just wanted to violently kill a crap-ton of Nazis.

Nobody saw such quality coming from Wolfenstein, a series that had always lagged behind its more technologically advanced sibling Doom. So what happens when a game that surprised everyone gets its own sequel?

The bottom-line gist of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is easy to sum up: more of the same. The game's underlying 3D engine has gotten a new coat of paint, and the world has expanded with more characters and lunacy, but this by-the-books sequel will neither disappoint fans of the original nor convert anybody unmoved by the 2014 game. And if you're showing up to this year's Wolfenstein party because, for whatever reason, you have an itch to shoot guns at virtual Nazis as of late, be ready for some issues and pacing problems on your way through a solid Nazi-stomping quest.

T-minus six hours





























An opening "Previously on Wolfenstein" video recaps the prior game's alternate-history insanity: America lost World War II while your character, an American super-soldier named BJ Blazkowicz, was in a coma. He woke to a robo-Nazi revolution, which he managed to disrupt by way of brute, gun-toting force. That didn't stop Nazi Germany from spreading its influence across the United States, however, and this time, he's on a mission to liberate his American brothers and sisters on their own soil by any means necessary.

There's also the issue of BJ's body, which was all but ruined by his world-saving efforts at the end of Wolfenstein 1. Wolfenstein 2, then, opens with a dramatic "battle-in-a-wheelchair" sequence that forces players to contend with interesting limitations: how quickly they move and turn, what surfaces they can and cannot roll on, and limited health. This is the stuff of sequel gold: combining familiar, bombastic combat with a full-blown nuke on major series expectations. I love this level.

The rest of Wolfenstein 2 plays a lot more like the first game, however, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. You wield a standard FPS arsenal of knife, pistol, machine gun, scoped rifle, shotgun, grenade launcher, and energy "rockets"—though BJ cranks this arsenal up a bit with two perks. First, he can dual-wield any equipped weapon—because what's cooler than one German-engineered super-shotgun with a quick-rotating barrel? Two of them! And second, he can pick up the massive weapons left behind by the German Empire's robotic soldiers, ranging from focused energy lasers to fire bombs to ammo-chewing super-guns.

The wheelchair goes away for the rest of the game, and you're instead always running around in some sort of robotic armor body. Eventually, your bionic body can be upgraded with a trio of options (either a bull-rush charge attack, a body-contorting super-crawl, or a pair of extendable legs), and these add a mix of combat and movement upgrades. You can only choose one at a pivotal point in the game, with the others being hidden for further upgrading later.

As BJ gets his legs and tears through the world of Wolfenstein 2, the journey starts surprisingly slowly for its first five or six hours. For starters, the game's weapons start out feeling quite mealy-mouthed. Between the sound design, the animation, and the hard-to-see visual impact of how your bullet sprays land on enemies, there's just something off about the punch of the combat. It takes a while to fully upgrade your arsenal, and by the time that happens, you'll have a lot more kick to your guns, from a booming magnum to a shrapnel-spewing shotgun—and by then, more super-weapons drop from enemies as well.

The first few missions also choke players into way too many claustrophobic tunnels and sewers, with only a few brief teases of more open warehouse corridors and outdoor scenes. These all-too-similar levels drag on until that six-hour mark, at which point the game's more epic and open levels finally become available. And, gosh, these are some cool first-person shooting levels. The dilapidated, fire-scorched remnants of New Orleans and a zany outer-space Nazi outpost are standout highlights.

Part of the reason is that these and other later levels come with a delicious amount of path choice. You can opt for stealth by sneaking through levels, using silent knife throws and melee takedowns, or you can go into an area guns blazing, and it's easy to swap from one extreme to another throughout a given level. But be warned: Wolfenstein 2 has some pretty stupid AI, so you'll likely abuse the old '90s tactic of save-and-reload when a given level spams bad guys for no good reason in certain halls and paths.

Daddy issues















All of this happens, by the way, in a game whose cutscenes are among the most unnecessarily gruesome I've seen in some time. You're ordered in the game's opening to aim and shoot a big, booming shotgun at something very innocent, and soon after, you bear witness to a disturbing decapitation. Minutes later, you're out there with a gun that feels way punier than anything in those scenes.

The other issue with the game's pacing is that the plot needs about 10 hours to make up its danged thematic mind. Wolfenstein 2 teeters between dark and disturbing at one moment, then schlocky and B-movie the next. BJ obsesses over what he thinks is his impending death and digs into some dark memories about his upbringing and father. These themes come up again and again and again thanks to BJ's in-combat narration. All the while, nearly every ally and combatant he meets is a nut job straight out of a '70s exploitation film, made up entirely of cliches and stereotypes. As a result, more than a few cutscenes drag on and on with bizarre rants and BJ's own illogical responses to them.

Once the game finally slices off the darker end of its plot, the writers embrace a schlocky, it's-dumb-but-that's-OK action-movie pastiche. This is right around the time Wolfenstein 2 just becomes more fun to play, and that means over half of this 18-hour romp through alternate-history 1960s America is worth recommending. It's still a shame that the uneven tone gets in the way of a clear "hero versus Nazis" theme. The game's sadistic head villain, Frau Engel and a couple of famous-Nazi cameos make abundantly clear that Nazis suck—and these performances are easily the best in the game—but in the beat-to-beat combat, everybody you're mowing down feels either like a mindless robot or a boring bureaucrat.





I've been asked by more than a few friends if I've enjoyed "mowing down Nazis" while testing the game, and honestly, that's not how the game plays out. The plot certainly brings up Nazis' rotten and poisonous spiels about racial and ethnic purity, but these moments play out more intensely during the "BJ versus his father" subplot, and BJ's dad never figures into the actual gameplay. So you're still a good-guy Army super-soldier telling Hitler to get bent, just not as brazenly as I would have liked.

In great news, everything you do in the game looks tremendous thanks to MachineGames' use of the idTech6 engine, which is an upgrade from the last game's idTech5. I tested the entire game on a souped-up PC and had the game cranking at max settings in 4K with zero hitches in framerate or responsiveness, and this was in spite of the game throwing up all manner of gorgeous particle, shadow, and lighting effects. The incredible effects of 2016's Doom engine look even better in Wolfenstein 2's open-aired, giant-city battlegrounds. I was less impressed by the sound design, however; in addition to my weapon complaints, I found that spatial audio effects were incredibly hard to read and that enemy voices, attacks, and other alerts did a bad job selling which direction players generally need to aim their guns during a frantic firefight. (I even strapped on my best headphones just to be sure I wasn't missing something, and I still struggled to notice solid sound-effect design in the game's more frantic moments.)

You'd be forgiven for getting a few hours into Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus and rolling your eyes—and your mouse—all the way to an "uninstall" prompt. Uneven levels, confusing plots, unclear character motivations, and overlong cutscenes all work to ruin your starting efforts in the game. But if you're hungry for a solid solo shooter with a lot of combat and traversal strategies at your disposal along with epic level designs, you're probably a good candidate for being fine with the opening chunks and having your jaw truly drop by the time you reach the best bits.

The good:

In the game's best levels, MachineGames once again proves itself one of the best FPS combat-mission designers in the biz.

You have a lot of choices in weaponry, tactics, and paths, and the results are mighty satisfying.

Lengthy campaign reaches 15 hours if you rush; more than that if you dilly-dally; and still more if you rack up the game's huge load of side missions.

idTech6 is one of the most gorgeous and efficient PC gaming engines in recent memory, and it really shines here.

The bad:

Can you get through the first six uneven hours?

Issues with weapons and sound design reduce the game's bombastic impact.

Thematic wonkiness doesn't help players really lock into the thrill of mowing down Nazis.

The ugly:

Nazis. Nazis are ugly. Wolfenstein 2 lets you virtually mow them down.

Verdict: Fans of the predecessor should snap this up ASAP. More casual shooter fans should tread cautiously.