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. For starters, the game's weapons start out feeling quite mealy-mouthed. You can only choose one at a pivotal point in the game, with the others being hidden for further upgrading later.Īs BJ gets his legs and tears through the world of Wolfenstein 2, the journey starts surprisingly slowly for its first five or six hours. 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. The wheelchair goes away for the rest of the game, and you're instead always running around in some sort of robotic armor body. 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. 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.
The rest of Wolfenstein 2 plays a lot more like the first game, however, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. This is the stuff of sequel gold: combining familiar, bombastic combat with a full-blown nuke on major series expectations. 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. 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. 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. He woke to a robo-Nazi revolution, which he managed to disrupt by way of brute, gun-toting force. This game definitely earns its M-for-mature rating.Īn 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. 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. 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. The bottom-line gist of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is easy to sum up: more of the same. So what happens when a game that surprised everyone gets its own sequel? Nobody saw such quality coming from Wolfenstein, a series that had always lagged behind its more technologically advanced sibling Doom. At the same time, it was ham-fisted enough for anyone who just wanted to violently kill a crap-ton of Nazis. 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.
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. Wolfenstein: The New Order pulled off a pretty neat trick in 2014. Platform: Windows PC (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox One
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