Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus - set in Nazi occupied America

[CruduxCruo]

http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-dept...lfenstein-ii-creative-director-jens-matthies/

Q: The KKK and Nazi’s are sensitive subjects regardless of the political climate. What’s being done to make sure these elements are impactful and not just trivializing.

That’s a good question.We decided early on that we didn’t want to, sort of, ‘cartoonify’ Nazis or Nazi ideology. That wasn’t the approach we wanted to take. We wanted to take the subject matter really seriously. Even though it’s on this grandiose scale, and the game is not realistic, that’s not what we’re after. We wanted something that felt truthful and that took these themes seriously, and we worked very hard on that. So we feel confident in what we’re doing.

these fucking people

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Are these people even for real?

 

[Utgard-Loki]

i think hitler mentioned two meter tall cyborg dogs in his second book.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Q: The KKK and Nazi’s are sensitive subjects...

Nazi's

 

[HoboForEternity]

SJWs and nazis are literally the 2 sides of the same coin it is ironic both sides are too blind to notice it.

People are idiots circa 500,000 BC to 2017 AD

 

[polo]

Spoiler

Das rite
It's all whitey's fault.

 

[Rev]

WTF is this shit?
I liked TNO a lot, I expected something similar and had good hopes when they announced it, but everything they're showing seem downright retarded, with the top being new Anya who jumps and do action stunts even if she's like at her 8th month of pregnancy, judging by the size of her belly.
Why, MachineGames, why?

 

[vonAchdorf]

Why, MachineGames, why?

Their inner Swede got the better of them.

 

[Great Deceiver]

They got infected with the Swedish brain-eating virus of :incloosive:

 

[Metro]

This shit is beyond comprehension.

 

[RapineDel]

Can they not just cut the shit and make a competent shooter with level design emulating 3D Realms' shooters?

 

[DeepOcean]

http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-dept...lfenstein-ii-creative-director-jens-matthies/

Q: The KKK and Nazi’s are sensitive subjects regardless of the political climate. What’s being done to make sure these elements are impactful and not just trivializing.

That’s a good question.We decided early on that we didn’t want to, sort of, ‘cartoonify’ Nazis or Nazi ideology. That wasn’t the approach we wanted to take. We wanted to take the subject matter really seriously. Even though it’s on this grandiose scale, and the game is not realistic, that’s not what we’re after. We wanted something that felt truthful and that took these themes seriously, and we worked very hard on that. So we feel confident in what we’re doing.

these fucking people

WHY THE FUCK WEREN'T YOU SERIOUS ABOUT MAKING A FUCKING GOOD SHOOTER FIRST, YOU SWEDISH FAGS?!
Dear God, those Dear Esther "Muh story." pretentious fags are ruining everything.

 

[DeepOcean]

Hope this sell less than Evil Within 2.

 

[DeepOcean]

“The only way we can create these super immersive narrative experiences is if we can solely focus on the single-player."

For fucks sake, we don't wanna super immersive narrative experiences, you imbecile, how about a good shooter instead?

 

[Callisto]

cool. looks like a tarantino comedy.

Can't stand Tarantino's work .

 

[HansDampf]

He says it's good. No mention of cringy cutscenes.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/10/26/wolfenstein-2-the-new-colossus-review-pc/

Earlier, I said Wolfenstein 2 is a hair’s breadth away from being one of my favourite singleplayer action games of all time. The hair seems to have become much thicker as I think back

lol mainstream reviewers

Wot I Think: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus
Adam Smith on October 26th, 2017 at 3:53 pm.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus does not pull its punches. Early in the game a returning villain asks, “is this what a hero looks like?” She’s mocking and threatening a wounded, degraded and broken woman. She’s about to execute that woman.

Wolfenstein’s answer is a defiant “yes”. Its heroes don’t look like any one thing because they are many and they are diverse. They are survivors and fighters and thinkers, black, white, American Jewish, British, German, male, female, disabled, disfigured and powerful. They’re also flawed – sometimes too angry, sometimes too selfish, sometimes too afraid to face up to reality – but they are the kind of people you’d want in your corner if the world went wrong.

They’re also the game’s greatest asset and its most potent weapons.

This is, remember, a game about shooting hundreds of people, so for its greatest weapons to be its characters is not necessarily the best news. Usually, if I’m playing a first-person shooter, I’m going to complain about all the times the story got in the way of the action. Cutscenes as clumsy punctuation. With Wolfenstein 2, I occasionally wanted to blunder through corridors and rooms packed with Nazis (and Nazi robots and Nazi zombies and other things) as quickly as possible so I could get back to base and catch up with my pals.

There was a point when I met with another member of the resistance out in the field – the field being a small American town – and realised I wanted to be playing as him rather than as Blazkowicz. He’d infiltrated the town and was working undercover; Blazkowicz only arrives when it’s time for the shooting to start. It’s a sign of how much I wanted to explore the world and to spend time with the characters that I was craving some sort of Mass Effect RPG rather than a straight shooter, but tied up in that is a complaint about the shooting. It’s a mild complaint, but an important one.

Wolfenstein 2 is spectacular, grotesque, cathartic, beautiful, horrible and shocking. It is all of those things regularly and effectively throughout the campaign, but too much of the actual environments where gunplay takes place are variations on corridors and rooms. The most impressive parts of the world and story often frame the action rather than informing it. You might be fighting on an impossible machine, or in an incredible setting, but the flow of combat remains the same, defined by the walls and obstacles in any given room, no matter where it might be.

After the opening sections, which lean a little too heavily on machinery and ruins, there’s plenty of environmental variety but, perhaps fittingly given its roots, Wolfenstein is still a corridor shooter for the most part. That’s fine, and it’s mostly a very good shooter with a couple of caveats that I’ll get to in a second, but I am left with the feeling that The New Colossus is a hair’s breadth away from being one of my favourite singleplayer action games of all time because so much of my time was spent looking down the sight of a gun.

It’d help if it weren’t quite so unforgiving. I’m not talking about difficulty – which can be changed at any time and has seven settings – but rather the flexibility it allows in approaching each scenario. As in the first game, though much more often, a map will often have several officers in play. You can track them down via their radio signals, and it’s possible to sneak toward them, stealth-killing enemies en route.

One mistake and the alarm is raised though, and the officers call for reinforcements, and suddenly all is chaos and mayhem. Maybe I’m crap at sneaking, but I barely managed to stay hidden for much longer than the first encounter with an enemy in any area. Crouch, squat-walk, axe to the back of the knee, neck-snap, ALARM ALARM.

From there, I usually make a bee-line to the officer so I can stem the flow of reinforcements, and that involves lots of tense weapon-switching, grenade-lobbing and contraption-flinging. These contraptions are new. They provide another method of clearing rooms and corridors, added to the pile of other approaches already available, including the use of multiple weapons (now upgradeable in ways that give them specialisations), stealth, temporary heavy weapons snatched from dead super-soldiers, dual-wielding and crunching melee attacks. For me, the apparent flexibility led to diminishing returns the more I diverged from running and shooting. It’s solid running and shooting, and occasionally it feels just right when I’m pinging helmets off with headshots. But it’s a whole lot of sound and fury bolted onto a story and setting that are so adept at varying their volume and tone.

The whole game is spinning a lot of plates, though perhaps it’s more like juggling chainsaws. From the opening scenes, it’s brutal in both its language and its depiction of violence. Domestic abuse, virulent racism, innocents harmed and murdered. That it then spins off into grindhouse grit and slapstick comedy, before pinballing into melancholy, dread, romance and sentimentality is absurd. I found it to be brilliantly absurd, and laughed, cringed and cried (yes, I cried while playing a Wolfenstein game; 2017 is weird), but be prepared for some real horrors alongside all of the imagined ones.

Even the imagined horrors aren’t too far from reality, of course, and one of the questions I was asking myself going into the game was about its place in today’s world. The marketing hasn’t shied away from drawing parallels with the politics and language of today, and I was half-convinced the game would pull its punches in that regard, if nowhere else. It doesn’t. It shoves its fist right through the skull of questions around white privilege, machismo, racism, feminism and a whole lot more. You’re getting all that and toilet humour too.

What impressed me is that these things are presented as ugly facts and we see, repeatedly, that bullets and bombs are not enough to fix them. Even when the fight turns in their favour, the resistance know that burning the Reich out of the USA, or even off the face of the planet, is one part of a battle that has been raging for centuries.

The entire cast are wonderful, with even my least favourites having at least a couple of great scenes or lines, but Blazkowicz and Anya are the heart of the story. He is broken and thinks his body will fail him entirely soon, she is pregnant, carrying their child. It could easily become a tale of fighting for the next generation, taking hope from what is to come next, but Anya doesn’t allow Blazkowicz to give up on now. Given that the game makes clear he could well be a man in need of a strong father figure, it’s surely intentional that our hero learns more from the women around him than from the men. In Sister Grace, Anya and other members of the resistance, Wolfenstein 2 is home to some beautifully take-no-bullshit women.

And it’s at its best when it’s letting those characters rage and weep and love one another. Just as I found the more ordinary moments of violence the most chilling, demonstrating the banality of evil rather than theatrical alt-reality super-villainy, it’s the quieter scenes that I reckon are the boldest. A black woman leading a resistance group through hell and breastfeeding her baby daughter while she’s plotting the downfall of the Nazi regime and deconstructing the use of ‘balls’ as a synonym for bravery? That’s something I’ve never seen in a game or anywhere else, and as an image and a statement of what this game is all about it’s worth a thousand battles against enormous ubermachines.

I just wish the action were as bold. It’s good, occasionally great, but there are enough small things that bother me that when I do replay (and I will), it’ll be to see more details of the world and collect the hidden things rather than to enjoy any particular setpieces or fights again. Those small things relate to the environments not supporting stealth approaches as much as I might like, damage to Blazkowicz often feeling inconsequential right up until he drops down dead (totally at odds with enemies, who really look like they feel the impact of every blow), and a sense of repetition before the credits rolled. There are exceptional things as well, such as the best enemy barks I’ve heard since Half Life 2 convinced me it had great AI, and flying drones that are somehow brilliant to fight rather than annoying as heck.

It took me twelve hours, though your timing will vary depending how much you want to collect and how tricky you find some of the tougher fights. I actually spent a fair bit of time hunting collectibles; they’re fun things like cards of Reich celebs or records, as well as notes and diaries – they add detail to the world and it’s a world that makes me crave all of its details. For replayability’s sake, there’s even an entire separate timeline to play, which will be familiar to people returning from the first game. You can make the choice again at the beginning here, rather than having to import a save. It swaps out one character for another and does the same with a couple of weapons.

Earlier, I said Wolfenstein 2 is a hair’s breadth away from being one of my favourite singleplayer action games of all time. The hair seems to have become much thicker as I think back, but the truth is that if there were even a handful of first-person shooters this strange and spectacular released in any given year, I’d barely find time to play anything else. In a week that has seen speculation about the future of this type of big budget singleplayer game, for all its flaws, this is a reminder of how powerful and vital they can be.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is out tomorrow for Windows, and is available via Steam for £39.99.

 

[fantadomat]

The game is already on the torrents.:D

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I'm prolly gonna pick this up in a year with all the DLC out and 50% off. Are the cutscenes at least skippable?

Edit: 75% off

Edit: Fuck it. Youtube LP.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/wolfenstein-2-the-new-colossus-review/

WOLFENSTEIN 2: THE NEW COLOSSUS REVIEW

During one cutscene in Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, a pretty serious conversation between BJ Blazkowicz and his wife Anya on their U-boat base is interrupted by someone who's just finished using the toilet. That's the tone of the game encapsulated, really: moments of sincerity punctuated by the silliest of jokes.

Like with The New Order, this is a fun wrapping for a first-person shooter where you kill many Nazis. This time Blazkowicz and his friends have gone to the Nazi-occupied USA, with the intention of teaming up with a few other resistance groups and starting a revolution. Meanwhile, Frau Engel, the unhinged villain from the first game, is on a relentless and bloody hunt for BJ. Your journey takes you to places like Manhattan, Roswell and New Orleans, where you can see the various ways in which the Nazis have imposed their rule, before shooting them all in the face.

I won't say too much about the specifics of the settings in Wolfenstein 2, just because I've avoided everything about The New Colossus since its E3 reveal and enjoyed the surprise of discovering them. Most of the time you'll find yourself shooting Nazis in nondescript corridors anyway, though.

One of the most memorable parts of the story is exploring a disturbing, alternate reality Roswell during a Nazi parade while Blazkowicz is disguised as a firefighter. Members of the KKK are casually walking the streets. One woman tries to kiss up to a Nazi officer, and ends up committing a faux pas that gets her reported, while one newspaper seller thinks he knows the truth about who BJ really is. The ambience of it reminded me of exploring Columbia during the opening of BioShock Infinite, or indeed Rapture in Burial At Sea: it's just world-building and triggering NPC conversations, really, but the detail and atmosphere is extraordinary.

Sadly, it's the only sequence of its kind in the game, and I think a few more populated areas like this would've helped make its setting feel even more real. Your home base is expanded this time, though, which compensates: after every mission, all of your supporting characters will have new things to say, and some will offer (mostly dull, actually) little sidequests to take on. If you enjoyed the tense Frau Engel train sequence in The New Order, too, you'll be pleased to know there are a bunch more like it in The New Colossus that I found just as effective.

Battle sprawls
As with the first game, you can optionally sneak around and take out all the enemies in a given area instead of going weapons free, and killing an officer will prevent further reinforcements from turning up if you're caught. The difference here is that the environments are a lot larger, and there's usually more than one way to get around, even if it's just the classic games thing of moving through a couple of vents. I managed to take out a chunk of the officers stealthily, but it definitely feels harder to do that with the scope of environments and the amount of people who can spot you within them. That's not an issue, though, because The New Colossus still has some of the best guns in any FPS game, and using them is always more fun than any of Wolfenstein's stealth interactions, despite BJ having a lovely hatchet melee takedown move.

The shotgun is the standout for me, as it was in the first game. This time it's got three rotating barrels, and with the game's weapon upgrades found dotted around the world, you can make it fire from all three at once, as well as adding ricochet damage that lights up the environment. These aren't as transformational or exciting as Doom 2016's gun mods, but they still give you the feeling that your arsenal is evolving across the game. Another one I like is the nailgun upgrade for the submachine gun, which downgrades it to single fire but also makes your bullets deadlier. Combined with the suppressor, it's a pretty useful gun for quietly downing multiple enemies before they can open fire and an officer sets the alarm off.

I feel like the armoury could've been a bit wackier, though: a few of the heavier guns let you fire strong laser beams and blobs of flames, and even a black hole-like orange gravitational blast. Since you can't move very fast while carrying them, though, more often than not they just make you a slow-moving target. It might've been more fun if these guns were a permanent part of your arsenal and didn't slow you down, especially as later enemies include robot dogs, mechs and robots that can blink around the environment.

At the start of The New Colossus, you can pick which timeline you followed in the first game, whether polite American pal Wyatt or Glaswegian pilot Fergus survived. I picked Fergus like I did in the first game, and your choice grants you use of a certain weapon: a fire-based Dieselkraftwerk if it's Wyatt, and a Laserkraftwerk in the case of Fergus, which can vapourise enemies. Who you saved also changes certain cutscenes throughout the game, which is a nice touch, even though I found Fergus's wacky adventures with his misbehaving mechanical arm and constant disagreements with resistance leader Grace Walker to be a bit much after a while.

New to Machinegames' Wolfenstein are contraptions, a set of abilities that BJ can acquire from the halfway point of The New Colossus. One's focused on stealth, quieting your footsteps and letting you sneak through tiny spaces. Another gives you a height boost to reach better tactical areas, while the other lets you kill enemies by ramming into them. You initially choose one, and are later given optional sidequests to pick up the others. Having tried all three, being able to turn BJ into a battering ram who can gib officers by barging into them is by far the best. In these later levels, too, you can reach new areas by running through certain types of walls, which feels badass. I wish they were in the game from the start, though. By the time you acquire a contraption, you're slightly too close to the end of the story to really get the most use out of it.

There are some optional asides on top of the story, though, if you want to go back and have more fun with your growing suite of toys. Killing officers gets you enigma codes, which you can then use to unlock extra missions that take you back to previous level locations, where you're tasked with killing high-ranking Nazi officers while dealing with a slightly tougher range of enemies. I did a bunch of these, and they're a nice extra for those who want more from the game after the credits. It took me 14 hours to finish The New Colossus, while taking the time to explore environments properly and do extra missions, and depending on the difficulty, methodology and the type of player you are, I imagine it would take most people 11-16 hours. I recommend quicksaving as much as possible—the checkpointing isn't terribly generous, and firefights can go on for a while. The game's two medium difficulty settings, for experienced and casual players, are well-judged depending on the kind of challenge you're after.

The variety of levels is still impressive, although it didn't dazzle me as much as The New Order did in that regard. I think the game peaks just under halfway through with Area 52, which features some large, multi-storey hangars that are particularly fun to clear out, as well as a moving train section where you're emptying out tight corridors of Nazis with a shotgun. If, like me, you were wondering how Machinegames would top the whole Nazis-on-the-moon scenario in the first game, you'll enjoy how the developer answered that, even if I found the level in question to be a slog compared to some of the earlier ones. The final chapter, meanwhile, features a battle with a couple of larger enemies that I just found arduous. I was ready for it to be over by the end.

The developers take the time to expand on BJ Blazkowicz's background, which yields mixed results. The game generally has a wider tonal range than the original, touching upon racism and abuse, but it doesn't really dwell on those subjects long enough to have anything to say about them. I don't expect tons of thematic depth from a game with Wolfenstein in the title, obviously, but as it stands, they just feel like extra details to ensure the player knows the world around them is harrowing—and they didn't really register any emotional impact on me as a player either way, mainly because they feel half-explored.

I've got a few other gripes, too. Climbing and jumping over bits of the environment is a pain in The New Colossus, and it feels like picking up items could be a bit slicker than it is. There's some mild texture pop-in, as well, most noticeably around your U-boat base, where your allies' little rooms are lovingly stuffed with details that reveal more about them.

I'm still won over by Wolfenstein 2's variety and gunplay, though, and even if it doesn't feel as fresh to me as The New Order did in 2014, I love the escalating firefights that play out in its various mini sandboxes. I appreciate that you can find singleplayer games like this in 2017, where there's so much attention paid to details like characterisation, sound design and facial animation, on top of how wonderful the guns feel. The New Colossus is fun and funny—a decent successor that's not just more of the same.

THE VERDICT
81

WOLFENSTEIN 2: THE NEW COLOSSUS
The New Colossus is a fun and frantic FPS, even if it doesn't feel quite as fresh as The New Order did.

 

[adrix89]

How the fuck can you ruin a simple thing as killing Nazis in a game?

It should be unruinable, we were a laughing at the marketing stunt before, after all we are killing nazis, we were always killing nazis, we were killing nazis since we were in diapers.

Yet degeneracy always finds a way.

 

[Astral Rag]

I just read the following mind-boggling comment below PC Gamer's 8/10 review:

Was zum eigentlichen Fick??

 

[dragonul09]

Some folks say it's a 6-7 hour game if you don't wander around like a retard, so without cutscenes it would be a 5 hour game. 60 bucks for 5 hours of derpling around with a gun, no way jose

 

[Alienman]

Clearly the Citizen Kane of video-games.

 

[toro]

Edit: It seems the game was written by an BLM activist.