Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017)
To start off, The New Colossus's main menu is plain black text on a white background. After a long loading time you're treated to an opening that will instantly wipe any smile off your face with depictions of domestic abuse, racist tirades, dog-shooting, and life-threatening surgery. First-time players will get the impression that Wolfenstein II is a game that takes itself very seriously (but that'll soon change). Five months after TNO B.J. Blazkowicz awakens from a coma crippled from his wounds sustained during the previous game's finale. The resistance has headquartered itself on the U-boat commandeered in the previous game and after expelling some pesky Nazi boarders they decide to sail to the USA to foment rebellion against the German occupation there. The main villain this time around is Frau Engel who somehow went from failed camp commandant in Croatia to minister of pretty much everything in the US. And yet apart from killing her, you accomplish surprisingly little during this game's story – although it does set up what will probably be a really awesome third game.
A lot of the plot also concerns Blazkowicz learning to deal with his troubled childhood and his own mortality. This is manifested by your limited health in the game's first half: only 50 points maximum. While this does make narrative sense it frustratingly makes the first several levels noticeably more difficult than expected, even going so far as forcing the player to adopt more cautious cover-based tactics. Combine this with B.J.'s poor decisions, rattled state of mind, fabulous eyelashes, and his emotional dependence on women and you get a protagonist who's rather frail by FPS standards. Thankfully this changes in the game's second half: BJ receives a new upgradeable body after surviving decapitation – don't ask – giving the player access to new abilities and further exploration.
The stealth sections of previous games return in overabundance; kill-the-commanders-first areas appear one after the other which is really unfortunate because I found this game's stealth to be more finicky than before. Enemies seem to spot you quicker and from a greater distance; half the time I'm found out I don't even know who spotted me. Multiple stealth areas have two commanders and these parts always place the second commander as obnoxiously far away from your starting position as possible. But once the shooting starts you've got plenty of options at your disposal. Not only is every weapon upgradeable but you can now dual wield almost any combination of weapons through the use of two clunky selection wheels that I tried to avoid using whenever possible. At least dual wielding doesn't slow you down any more and with the right weapons (shotguns, upgraded assault rifles) it turns you into an unstoppable juggernaut. Ammo is now picked up simply by walking over it – a welcome improvement – but armour still sometimes needs to be picked up manually (sometimes, at least). Melee is mostly unchanged, the only difference being that instead of a knife B.J. has started using a hatchet guaranteed to separate limbs from badguy bodies. Regardless of your methods, no enemy in The New Colossus simply falls down dead in one piece. Each kill results in plentiful gibs and buckets of blood splashing everywhere with all the subtlety of Machine Games' political views (more on that later).
While the gunplay remains alright the same can't be said of the level design. While the locations look great thanks to the new id Tech 6 engine, they have no variety at all. Save for the one level where you're walking through a small town's main street, every mission in this game can be described either as a sci-fi/industrial complex or a ruined city. That's it. The only thing keeping the levels from all blending together is the memory of how awful they were to play! This is due to two reasons: the aforementioned difficulty and their excessive length. Area 51 made me despair, Ausmerzer part 2 had me grinding my teeth, and the level on Venus was about the closest thing to digital misery that I've experienced. The only saving grace is that you're able to simply run through some of these overly-long levels without even fighting the enemies, something I found myself doing frequently. In short, TNC's missions make me want to puke and there's not a single one that I look forward to replaying.
This game's hub level, the submarine, isn't as frustrating but equally as perplexing. Like the resistance headquarters in TNO, the submarine is where you'll go to explore, read stuff, eavesdrop on other characters, etc. It scarcely resembles the sub seen in the previous game, with wide open areas, individual suites, and cavernous rooms that more closely parallel an aircraft carrier. And once you learn of the shenanigans and drama that go on here, this place will start to remind you of a trailer park.
You can chalk that up to the game's writing, which could have seriously used another edit or two. Idiot logic abounds. The resistance – the hope of all free men – routinely sends out pregnant and intoxicated soldiers to carry out dangerous missions, barely knows how to sail a submarine, gets really drunk the night before an important mission, and apparently never cared to check and see if there were any remaining Germans hiding on board the boat when they first captured it five months earlier.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the game's humour is downright embarrassing. The jokes are lowbrow and crude, reminiscent of a stoner comedy. There's “jokes” of people getting high, people throwing up, and people having sex in unexpected places. On the sub alone we get not one, not two, but three instances of somebody stinking up a bathroom. There's also numerous WTF moments where the game jumps the shark. One example is this cutscene late in the game in which you see a screaming topless pregnant woman drenched in blood while firing two submachine guns, a scene that's so over-the-top ridiculous that I'm sure it was reverse-engineered just to create this insane visual.
The game's interminable cinematics – which take up several hours of the game's length – suffer as a result. As mentioned earlier the story of The New Colossus deals with some heavy stuff but the serious moments keep getting interrupted and subverted by the stupid humour and cutscenes that try jamming too many different story elements together. The tone and pacing of any given moment is a total crapshoot.
And lastly I have to mention the political overtones. The game tries very hard to make some connection between Nazism and US culture, as if to say that there's something about Americans or white people in general that might make them receptive to national socialism (even though half the US citizen NPCs you encounter clearly detest the new regime). When you notice the year this game was released it's not hard to see what they're really trying to get at – let's just say it rhymes with zonald gump. Female characters keep telling male characters how much they suck, communists are portrayed as freedom-loving heroes, and the badguys are always referred to as “Nazis” and nothing else. Never do you hear the words kraut, jerry, boche, or hun (more common names for Hitler's foot soldiers), and the only time you'll hear the word German is in reference to the language, not the nationality. When you consider all this in combination with the excessive gore you wind up with a game that takes self-righteous gratification in its simplistic portrayal of society, race relations, and occupation politics. Was this game written by a collective of Twitter addicts? Unlike some gamers I'm OK with having political themes in video games but don't make them so ham-fisted and one-sided that it becomes a nuisance.
There are plenty of other things I could complain about – the lacklustre collectibles, the obnoxious music, unlikeable characters – but I think I've made my case clear. Wolfenstein II was a huge disappointment. When it rigidly sticks to just letting you shoot badguys it's a fine game, but the problem is that you've got to wade through an unfair challenge, awful level design, a nonsensical story, sanctimonious politics, and dumbass humour in order to reach the fun parts. Just like TNO, TNC has alternate timelines but no way am I playing this thing again! I'll just watch the alternate cutscenes on YouTube.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood (2019)
The warning signs were there; gamers did not take kindly to Youngblood. I read the negative reviews and I saw the disenchanted YouTubers. I saw the 2.6 (out of 10) user score on Metacritic. And yet I played the game anyways and I must confess I actually kind of liked it. Maybe I was intrigued by the game's unique design or maybe it's because it compared favourably to the offensively joyless slog that came immediately before it. Either way my time spent with Youngblood was overall positive. Here's why.
Youngblood takes place in 1980. The USA has been liberated, Blazkowicz has killed Hitler -- unceremoniously, and offscreen as well -- and the Third Reich's domain now only covers Europe (again, this is probably being saved for Wolfenstein III). B.J. has disappeared from his Mesquite, Texas, home leaving behind Anya and their twin daughters Soph and Jess. The girls, along with Grace's daughter Abby, get word that he may have travelled to Neu-Paris to help the resistance there and so the three of them follow BJ's trail and lend their aid to liberate the city of lights.
The most immediate difference this game has to previous titles is that for the first time you're not playing as B.J. Blazkowicz, you play as either Jess (the stealthier sharpshooter type) or Soph (the in-your-face-brawler type). Since neither are seasoned killers like their dad, they need to learn effective soldiering as evidenced by the skills tree you'll progress through. Some of these skills you unlock are quite helpful such as the ones which allow collectibles to appear on your mini map or allow you to deal damage to foes by simply charging into them. However it can feel a bit clumsy at the start to not have basic skills such as the ability to dual wield. But on the plus-side, your character wears the power suit throughout the whole game, allowing you to double-jump, ground pound, and even go invisible for a few seconds.
But the one aspect of the Blazkowicz twins that stole everyone's attention was their personalities. On one hand they've got a down-to-earth folksiness to them reminiscent of their homeland, and on the other hand they're a couple of naive and sometimes crass teenagers. The banter between them seems really genuine for teenage siblings, full of awkward nerdiness and spunk yet occasionally ruminating on the current state of their world. Flashing a friendly hand gesture to the other sister will grant a “pep” bonus – such as increased health or armour – which triggers lines like “hell yeah, dude” or “you're slayin' it!” I can see how Jess and Soph might be grating for some players but the low-hanging fruit of Beavis and Butthead comparisons are unfair. To me the “terror twins” are endearingly dorky, truly one of Youngblood's highlights.
The gunplay has also been refined. To my recollection, there's only two weapons that can be dual-wielded which makes weapon switching faster and less complicated. The weapons are even more modular than before; you can customize the stock, receiver, muzzle, sights, and magazine using upgrades from different brands which can grant different bonuses. You can even apply different skins to your weapons – though it's a shame that the best skins are hidden behind paywalls. These upgrades are purchased using money which can be found throughout the game's world and attained using the series' most convenient pickup system yet. Money must be picked up manually but the pickup button's range is generous enough, and as for health, ammo, and armour all you have to do is walk over it. Amazing, isn't it? It took four tries but Machine Games finally got it right.
As mentioned earlier the game is set in the early 1980's because what isn't these days? I think retro 80's culture is more popular today than it was in the 80's! At least Youngblood doesn't beat you over the head with neon pink bikinis and Lamborghinis. Still, the game throws in some great understated synth-driven music and the collectibles are delightfully retro: 3.5 inch disks, 3D glasses, cassette tapes, and UVK (i.e. VHS) tapes. The vibe is more restrained and European in character which makes sense given the setting – there might be as much French and German spoken in this game as there is English, not to mention there isn't as much current-day political pandering this time around. (Although the readables do contain a Donald Trump joke because of course they do, haha haha, those never get old.)
But enough about the positives, let's get to the gripes. Aside from the new player characters Youngblood's other uniqueness is its structure and flow: it's an open world game. The ultimate objective is to get inside Lab X where B.J. is supposedly holed up but in order to enter it the Blazkowicz sisters need to infiltrate and deactivate all three of the “Brother” Towers' defence systems. Theoretically one could try tackling these levels right away but without any weapons upgrades and additional skills your chances aren't that great. So you've got to level yourself up by completing quests and incidental side missions. This gives rise to two problems; firstly, for most of the game there isn't much story going on. In fact, there isn't really a villain until the last level. What's worse, this makes the game repetitive and this isn't helped by the fact that the world you have to play in is pretty small. Giving players multiple paths to approach combat situations doesn't change the fact that they're going to be fighting enemies in the same exact locations again and again. You also don't have a map so getting lost can happen from time to time. Additionally, every level takes place on foot so there's not much variety to be found. After the first hour or two you'll have already experienced pretty much all this game has to offer aside from the more advanced skills and weapons upgrades.
The reason for this monotony comes from the fact that Wolfenstein: Youngblood was going after the “live services” trend that was popular late last decade in which non-linear games were made with repetitive gameplay loops in order to get players playing online day after day after day. Games of this genre – like Anthem and Fallout 76 – tend to be lifeless and boring and while Youngblood isn't nearly as bad as those games it's easy to spot their influence. Like other live service shooters, this one has bullet-sponge enemies with health bars above their heads, bugs and glitches, microtransactions, and gameplay boosters. But on the plus side it does have coop and can be purchased at a discount by the second player (the “buddy pass”). One could argue that since it's a spinoff and not a main game in the series Youngblood's unique game design is acceptable. But does it make the game fun? That's the real concern.
Personally I think this game is alright. This latest Wolfenstein game has its share of strengths as well as some weaknesses; it avoided the problems that plagued The New Colossus but its design was neither inspired nor captivating. As stated earlier I enjoyed my time with it but once the end credits rolled I felt no desire to replay it and I probably won't for some time. If nothing else, at least they didn't make any of those uninspired French surrender jokes.
So that's the Machine Games Wolfenstein saga. We've seen some ups and some downs. I'm eager to see what Wolfenstein III will be like but I also appreciate the developers' willingness to take a chance with the two spinoff games. Hopefully this series is one that can get back in the saddle and blow us all away like it's done before.
