The splendid new line of Wolfenstein first-person shooters from MachineGames will continue next year with Wolfenstein: Youngblood, a cooperative game starring BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters. It’s set in 1980, see, 19 years after Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Would you be surprised to hear that the twins are also very keen on shooting Nazis? Meet ’em in the game’s announcement trailer. Read the rest of this entry »
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus‘s story-led DLC to date has been big – well, medium – on character but low on novelty, recycling chunks of the main game into vignettes starring new characters with borrowed Blazcowiz powers. I’ve looked at three out of four of ’em, and wound up wearing my ‘disappointed, but not bitterly so’ face, much like the one I sported when taken to the legendarily underwhelming Flintstones theme park on a US holiday in the early 90s. The final chunk of the season pass DLC lands today, and, like before, tells a new micro-tale from the wider Wolfenverse, this time with a pulpy war comics vibe.
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RPS Feature Wot I Think: The Freedom Chronicles
Note – this piece presumes familiarity with Wolfenstein 2’s entire plot, and as such contains some spoilers, though no specific character fates are discussed.
Out this week is part two of ‘The Freedom Chronicles’, a triptych of story-led DLC for last year’s pretty decent singleplayer shooter Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, giving us a pretty clear sense of what’s on offer from the season pass. (You can buy the episodes separately, but it ends up being 30% more expensive if you end up getting all of ’em that way). To whit, is it worth forking out for? In short: ehhhhhhhh.
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RPS Feature Tool of destruction
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a shooter that often feels at odds with its own protagonist, the worn-out vanilla action hero who is somehow the heart of a neurodiverse, multi-ethnic cast of socialist firebrands, civil rights campaigners, pacifists, lapsed jazz maestros and rabid UFO chasers. At first glance, it has a lot to say in spite of BJ Blazkowicz rather than through him, its levels and intermissions thick with references to feminist activism and race rights movements that risk being swallowed up in the bloodshed. Many of the allusions are very timely, for all the retro silliness of Wolfenstein’s Nazis – it’s hard not to draw a line between in-game propaganda about the “cancerous” press and Donald Trump’s frequent denunciations of the US media, for example.
MachineGames has downplayed these parallels in conversation, but Bethesda’s marketing teams have latched onto them rather opportunistically, going so far as to parody Trump’s infamous #MakeAmericaGreatAgain slogan on social media and subtweet his defence of rightwing marchers following the murder of Heather Heyer. Ultimately, however, The New Colossus offers no straightforward rejection of the bigotry Trump and his followers have tacitly and not-so-tacitly endorsed. Rather, the game’s achievement is to show how BJ’s story of white heroism risks echoing that chauvinism, and how it and toxic social archetypes at large may become instruments of resistance. With spoilers right up to the final moments, let’s look at how all that holds together.
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus has been out for nearly two months, which means it’s Wolfentime for the first proper episode of DLC. Episode 1 of The Freedom Chronicles launched overnight, and follows the exploits of Gunslinger Joe. He’s a former American football quarterback who’s mad at the Nazis for making him play proper football, which seems like a pretty tame origin story by Wolfenstein standards.
RPS Feature When Wolf tried to be predictable...
Seeing as Steam reviews are not entirely fairly arguing that the recent Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is too perfunctory a sequel, let’s look back to a time when that really did happen. The Old Blood, a game that straddled the line between sequel and expansion pack to the excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order, was the very model of going through the motions. Paradoxically, it was also an attempt to give fans exactly what they wanted. Read the rest of this entry »
The prophecies were true – demos are back. This time it’s Nazi-bludgeoning romp Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus that’s offering a morsel of its shoots and boots (we’ve mentioned it before, but here’s a reminder). The demo only lets you play through the first level, so it really is a teeny tiny taste. “Should you choose to upgrade to the full version of the game,” enthuses this faceless Bethesda announcement, “all of your save data will carry over.” Right so. Read the rest of this entry »
Rejoice FPS fans, for Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is now down to just £20 / $25 to celebrate the day of sales, deals and discounts that is Black Friday. Whether your preferred digital merchant is Amazon US, Steam, Green Man Gaming, Games Planet or Fanatical (other digital game retailers are available), now is definitely the time to buy if you haven’t got the game already.
Also mourn, FPS fans, since such sweeping discounts so close after release most likely means none of these games have been selling well. Read the rest of this entry »
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is, for better or worse, very much BJ Blazkowicz’s story, and outside a few shocking shots of the wider world, isn’t entirely interested in showing us how Nazi rule in the 1960s affects the individual lives of others. We already knew that story-based DLC was on its way, but now we have dates on the four-part season pass that aims to make fascist-occupied America more than the tale of one man and his special submarine friends.
Say hullo to Joseph Stallion, Jessica Valiant and their chum who must be eternally resentful that he did not also win the amazingly ridiculous surname lottery, Gerald Wilkins. Joseph Stallion! Good lord.
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What created some of the stranger sounds in the Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus soundtrack? Big sonic sculptures of glass and sheet metal, composer Martin Stig Andersen explains over on Gamasutra. He got to play with the creations of French brothers François and Bernard Baschet, delightfully odd beasts largely played by rubbing crystal rods with wetted hands and amplified through big metal horns, and explains the process as well as how he combined those sounds with other musical elements. The post has many good pictures and things to listen to. Oh, and you might remember Anderson for recording Inside’s music through an actual human skull.
RPS Feature Absolute discretion
It’s taking me a long, long time to play through Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. The reason for that is because I’m playing it as a stealth game – a claim about a Wolfenstein game that would have sounded absurd a couple of years ago, but is now taken for granted as a result of 2014’s The New Order offering a limited sneaky-stabby path. Both of the latter-day Wolfs are designed primarily to be played as spray’n’play mass murder sims, and they’ve got a ton of wonderful toys with which to achieve that, but, for my part, I’ve been there, done that far too many times, and so the idea of treating W2TNC’s missions as a quieter, tenser, almost puzzle-like affair is far more appealing.
Thing is, Wolf 2’s stealth is all kinds of messed up. There are entirely legitimate reasons to despise it. Me, though? I can’t resist it.
It’s Bash-the-Fash Friday in the corridors of RPS today. Some of us are celebrating by playing Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which is out now in case you didn’t notice. Our Adam liked the dystopian shooter , enough to say it was “a hair’s breadth away from being one of my favourite singleplayer action games of all time”. Crikey. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Colossal
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.
With us living in the age of ‘games as service’, there’s been a bit of hand-wringing about the death of single-player games. Of course, there are still plenty of single-player games in development, and in the case of Machine Games’ Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, the studio say they’ve made a concerted effort to not let anything detract from that solo experience.
Popular nazi-killer B.J. Blazkowicz will be back to his old shooty-shooty ways this Friday with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Today publisher Bethesda have taken a break from their piggy-backing marketing long enough to post the PC system requirements along with details of uncapped framerates and aspect ratios. Here they are.
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Though Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus [official site] will not launch until next Friday, October 27th, the launch trailer has arrived today to stake a claim on the next fortnight. As you’d expect, the trailer is full of Nazis being murdered and oh, I guess Hitler is back now too – in non-mecha form. Presumably he gets his face shot off later. Watch: Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Footage from and thoughts about The New Order sequel
In the surprisingly, refreshingly excellent 2014 shooter reboot-o-sequel Wolfenstein: The New Order, it was the eyes that captivated me. The sad, aged eyes of BJ Blazkowicz, a war-weary he-man forced to take up arms yet again – tirelessly heroic, sure, but those windows to his haunted soul revealed his longing for an end to all this suffering. I could not look away from those eyes, even as he battled Mecha-Nazis and Moon-Nazis and Soul-Transplanted Ultra-Nazis and whatever else this unrepentantly preposterous game threw at him.
In Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus [official site], a sequel which continues the alt-history, steampunk Nazi occupation of America tale, it’s BJ’s sports jacket that I can’t stop staring at.
You can now watch almost an hour of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, if you’d like, across three newly-released gameplay videos. One shows BJ ‘Sad Eyes’ Blazkowicz murdering a great many Nazis from his wheelchair, as our Adam already told you about in his E3 preview. Another wanders through the city of Roswell, where Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members rule (until ‘Puppy Dog’ Blazkowicz starts murdering). Lastly, you can watch him blast through a boss battle and ride away in style. That’s a lot of action before thine very own eyes, if you’re happy to spoil surprises and watch it now. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature A world worth fighting for
The early stages of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus [official site] show the same blood, guts and heart that were key to the first game’s success. Described by Bethesda’s Pete Hines as “fucking bananas”, it’s a game of extremes, but it’s the care that it shows for its characters and setting that stand out as unique in the field of alt-history Nazi war-shooters. Alongside the silliness, the gore and the pulp fiction roots, there’s a core concern for humanity and its loss.
Good morning! While we were all sleeping (and Adam was fighting terrible conference wifi), Bethesda’s press conference happen. With came announcements of new games, including Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus [official site]. There’s an 8 minute trailer below, which includes live action sequences, cutscene vignettes and lots and lots of killing Nazis and robots and robot Nazis. Read the rest of this entry »
