Luitenant_Gruber Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus Review

*Warning: Spoilers* Great game but with some fundamental flaws. I thought Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus was a great game. It has a great story, beautiful graphics and intense and smooth gunplay. The story picks up right where The New Order ended. Blazkowicz is severely wounded after the battle with General Deathshead and is ready to leave this world. Then, he is rescued by the Kreisau Circle and brought back to the captured Submarine Eva’s Hammer, where he is patched up (to some extent). Then, General Engel (the sub-main villain from the first game) attacks the Hammer and you need to defend yourself and your friends while in a wheelchair. After the attack Caroline is killed and you get to burrow her special suit to be able to walk, sprint and shoot again with your still broken body. From here, a quest for revenge, sabotage, guerrilla tactics, and recruiting members for the resistance begins. It all ends when you finally burrow your hatchet deep inside the skull of your arch nemesis General Engel. The story has some intense cutscenes and plot twists that always kept me wondering what would happen next. It is storytelling at its finest. My prime example of this is when BJ is captured and his head is cut off. The twist that follows blew my mind. In the core, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a linear game in which you finish missions in chronological order. The maps are huge and offer many different paths or approaches to achieving the end goal. The game offers possibilities for stealth, Full Rambo mode or a combination of the two. Your full arsenal from the first game is back, with the addition of some new weapons. Between every mission, you return to Eva’s Hammer, the submarine and your base of operations. Here, you can search for collectibles, play Wolfenstone 3D and accept side quests in areas you have already been to. In the Hammer, you can also revisit areas which are called Districts. These come available later in the game. These bring even more content in the game with the addition of the Enigma machine, in which you hunt Übercommanders in all districts. The perk system is also back from the first game and is now a little more refined. You can replay missions by visiting Districts and level up your perks, even if the game ends. The only problem is that there is a flaw in which your perk progress is saved when you reload the game or die. This means that you can spam a certain action over and over again to fill up the progress meter. The amount of content in this game is the main reason I thought it was good. Both in terms of gameplay and overall value. You got your main story line, side quests, the Killboard, DLC, and collectibles to find. This is not a game that you rush through in a few hours if you want the full experience. The graphics in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus are stunning. This game is already eight years old but looks absolutely amazing. The smooth frame rate, the detail, the facial features and expressions, the in game cutscenes, it is a work of art. The animations are also fluent and masterfully done. When you blow the head of a Super Soldat, it tilts to the right and then falls over like a wooden plank, just epic. The only problem I have with the graphics is the fog and Sun Rays. They smear over your screen like Vaseline and in the ruin’s areas of the game, this is awful. The Sound effects are also glorious. Gunfire sounds solid and the impact of explosions and grenades is just plain awesome. The grunts and screams of the soldiers are masterfully done and the metal soundtrack that plays with big battles enhances the experience. Controls work smoothly, are easy to understand and just work perfectly. Although I really like Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, there are some very serious issues that could potentially break the game or make people stop playing. For starters, the difficulty. This game is utterly sadistic in its difficulty level. Not because people don’t like a challenge, but because of the “Mein Leben” mode. In this mode, you need to complete the game in one setting. No saves, no breaks, no ”coming back later”. If you die, you start over. This is already extremely difficult, especially the “you need to do it in one setting” part. What makes it forty times worse however, is the insane number of glitches, crashes and problems that could break your perfect Mein Leben run, as mentioned right here below. To top it off, at the beginning of the game, you only got 50 health. When an enemy soldier as much as slaps his d!ck against you, you are dead. I think the developers thought that this game was not hard enough already. For example, you got the “Super Soldat Invincibility Glitch”. With this glitch, Super Soldaten are Immortal all of the sudden. Your cursor will not be turning red, and you might as well shoot a wall. This glitch can be resolved by reloading a last save, but if you encounter this problem in Mein Leben mode, you are f*cked. You will get nuked instantly and there is nothing you can do. Then you got the frequent crashes. There is a specific crash that can happen when you pick up Star Card collectibles and want to see them in your inventory. Sometimes, this just makes the game crash. Other times you get the “Could not write dump” error and the game shuts down. Yet again, when you are in a serious Mein Leben run, this could crush all fun and motivation to try again. Lastly, my personal biggest issue of them all: “Getting more stuck than a Stepsister in a washing machine” behind tiny ledges. You need to enter a million doors in this game, every door has a little edge between the door post and the floor behind it, in this game, you almost always get stuck behind them and need to wobble back and forth to eventually go over it. This can f*ck up your stealth run or get you cornered instantly. The absolute worst scenario is in the Gunslinger Joe DLC when there are forty million doors and pathways with this kind of ledge. The stairs in this game behave exactly the same way. It was absolutely infuriating and cost me at least three Mein Leben tries. Although I think the flaws can be considered game breaking, my overall opinion and experience with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is very positive. The solid story, beautiful graphics, enormous amount of content, high paced action and overall design, makes it a worthy successor from the first game and I would still recommend it.