This game came out to critical praise. The trailers looked good. Outside of the technology problems on the PC, there’s wasn’t a lot of negative press. But then
the game was 50% off just one month after release, which isn’t something you normally see with successful games. Yes, that was a black Friday sale and
those are always a little crazy. But even so, I didn’t see any other 1-month old AAA games going on that sort of deep discount. Was this an anomaly, or was the publisher struggling to sell this game?
I have no idea, but after playing through a couple of times I can say there is definitely something off about Wolfenstein II.
[...] This isn’t an RPG. There aren’t a lot of complex leveling mechanics, branching storylines, moral choices, or philosophical conundrums for the player to puzzle over. The game throws Nazis in your way and you shoot them. This is a fairly simple game in both a narrative and mechanical sense. So why am I bothering to do a deep-dive on a linear shooter?
Basically, because I think the gaming press whiffed on this game. As of this writing, New Colossus is scoring an 88% on Metacritic. I realize that tastes vary and I’m not arguing that any individual review is wrong. If you think this game really is an 88% that’s fine. But this game is rated far above New Order and I think when you examine it closely it’s clearly inferior.
New Colossus looks and feels superficially like its immediate predecessors, and so it was given a pass. But I think it was a clear regression from the last two games and yet somehow it received greater critical praise and was nominated for many best-of-2017 lists.
The Telegraph even called it “one of this decade's best”. (Which is slanderous to a lot of other things that came out this decade, including the previous two games.)
I really liked
Wolfenstein: The New Order. It was an old-school run-n-gun shooter with just enough gritty storytelling to make it interesting and just enough camp to keep it fun. Our hero BJ Blazkowicz takes the world seriously so you don’t have to. He gives these grim monologues like he’s Max Payne, but he’s fighting cartoonish mega-Nazis in a mad alternate history where the Nazis conquered the world with super-science.
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood wasn’t quite as fun and seemed to be missing the driving spark that the previous game had. The emotional core was built around a couple of NPC lovers trying to find each other amidst the chaos. I liked it, but I only played through it once and I never really had any desire to give it another go.
Unless you rate a game based solely on the running time of its cutscenes, New Colossus is inferior to both of these games.
