Oct 26, 2017  Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus review. This sequel successfully builds on what made its predecessor great. The Colossus 2 is a very good piece of hardware that works very well but it is not yet quite ready for Window 10. This is why I gave it only 4 stars. I upgraded from the original Colossus to get 1080P. At some point during the opening moments of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, I knew that I was about to experience something unlike anything I had played before. After a much-needed recap of the events in Wolfenstein: The New Order, you find yourself reliving key moments of in the life of the.

1. Colossus 2 Review Book
2. Shadow Of The Colossus 2
3. Cold Steel Colossus 2 Review
4. Colossus 2 Water Gun Review
5. Hauppauge Colossus 2 Review

The warm sun beats down on a main street in Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, just in time for the Victory Day parade. Uniformed SS march down swastika-filled streets to thunderous applause. By the old diner, two members of the Ku Klux Klan practice their German. Everyone is white and happy. And it is so fucked up.

Wolfenstein 2 is set in world where the Nazis won World War II. In 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order, protagonist William “BJ” Blazkowicz is injured during a mission against a Nazi scientist near the end of the war and spends 14 years in a coma. He wakes up in the Nazi-conquered present of 1960and eventually strikes back at the scientist he failed to kill during the war. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus picks up right where the previous title left off, with BJ bleeding out. Awakening five months later, he continues his crusade against the Nazis, joining with resistance groups in America to start a revolution.

Weaving together scenes of rural Americana and dystopian fascism, The New Colossus’ world is nightmarish. A memorable stroll through suburban New Mexico streets features Nazis side by side with the Ku Klux Klan, while a sojourn into New York, long since irradiated from a Nazi atom bomb, is evocative and dark. The most terrifying aspect of America is just how much the populus has embraced their new overlords, spewing forth nationalist rhetoric and supplicating to the Reich. The world has fully embraced the Nazis, and it’ll take a huge kick in the teeth to knock them out of it. Which is where the gunplay comes in.

The New Colossus plays best when it is angry. While BJ is fragile and can be taken down with a few shots, he has a great deal of mobility and a diverse arsenal for killing Nazis. Machine pistols and assault rifles spew forth bullets with reckless abandon while powerful laser weapons burn enemies to skeletal dust. The New Colossus liberally hands out ammunition and plenty of foes to use it on. The gunplay shares a similar rhythm to 2016’s Doom, punctuating the shooting with gruesome melee kills, though it never quite hits the same confident stride. BJ slides, leaps, blasts, and hacks off limbs with a responsiveness that reduces Nazis into little more than bloody pinatas fit to burst at the next shotgun blast. “Terror Billy” earns his name.

1981’s Castle Wolfenstein placed an emphasis on stealth and disguise that the series has never managed to completely replicate. The New Order successfully implemented sneaking segments with diverging paths and key assassination targets. They were occasionally prone to breaking down as enemies discovered the player, but many of them could be cleared with nothing but a knife and some grit. The New Colossus keeps these segments but lacks the varied level design that helped them shine so much in The New Order. Many of the game’s spaces are claustrophobic and tight; they offer limited pathways and unpredictable enemy patrols. When everything works, stealth sequences are a brutal display of guerilla warfare but those moments are rare. Players are far more likely to stumble into an alert and trigger a massive gunfight.

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Type of Game

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Liked

Compelling setting, furious gun fights, clever writing, lots of Nazis to punch.

Disliked

Stealth segments can be clumsy, underwhelming level design, mid-game upgrades come a bit too late, somewhat perfunctory sidequests.

Release Date

October 27th

Played

Completed the main campaign in about ten hours. Immediately started a new playthrough so I could enjoy it again.

In the second half of the game, BJ gains access to numerous Nazi combat rigs that dramatically alter both gunfights and exploration. The player can choose from one of three tools, though the other two can be found in the game. Instantly deployable stilts create new angles of attack and boost players to balconies. A constriction rig allows BJ to slide into small crevices and sneak around the battlefield like a Nazi-killing Ant Man. Massive charging armor can be used to bowl enemies over like pins or bash through weak walls. The rigs dramatically change the game, expanding level exploration to match immersive sims like Deus Ex or Dishonored. The New Colossus’ levels dance a thin line between self-contained arenas and a larger open world, and the introduction of these new upgrades allow creative approaches to problems that were previously tackled with less finesse.

The New Colossus manages to get a great deal of mileage from only a few key locations thanks to a loose mission structure. While the majority of the game focuses on moving from one plot point to the next, BJ can also carry out requests for side characters in missions or at home base. By collecting Enigma Cards from downed Nazi commanders, BJ can use the base’s Enigma machine to unlock extra assassination missions. These side missions lend a grander sense of gravity the game. BJ is part of an insurgency fighting a massive occupying force, and thinning the Nazi ranks is hard work. These missions can be played at any time once the Enigma Machine is unlocked, and it’s likely only the most determined players will complete these extra tasks.

The New Colossus strikes a balance between high action pulp and self-reflection. The narrative tackles heavier thematic concerns while still finding time for cheesy dialog and offbeat humor. In spite of Bethesda’s insistence that the game in not meant as specific political commentary, The New Colossus has things to say about the nature of violence and autocratic power although this is sometimes in spite of a whiplashed presentation. The resistance is a diverse band of socialists, ex-jarheads, black liberationists and civil rights activists, exiled Jews, and anarchists banding together against the fascist regime. BJ’s all-American patriotism lives side by side with Christian liberation rhetoric and anti-capitalism. Whereas the Nazis strive for a monolith of identity and ideology, the resistance is intersectional and energetic.

There is no ignoring the context of The New Colossus’ release. Fascism and nationalist violence is on the rise across the world. As I finished The New Colossus this weekend, Nazis and other white nationalist groups marched across Tennessee. A group of them entered a Brentwood pub and attacked a biracial couple. The Nazis in The New Colossus are broad caricatures, dark armored soldiers with robotic dog-tanks and deadly laser cannons. But the underlying truth of the Nazis, the hate festering in their hearts, endures to this day. The New Colossus examines this hatred through its pulp storytelling and bloody gunplay, as well as in the toll the resistance takes on its cast. This is a game that wants to show players all the things that can be done with a hatchet and some Nazis but also wants to understand why someone would take up the hatchet to begin with.

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Nowhere is this more clear than with BJ himself. The game’s opening focuses on his broken home life in great detail. While he spends most of the game shooting Nazis, BJ also struggles to understand his past and finds just as much racism and hatred in his upbringing as within the halls of the Reich’s power. While The New Colossus has plenty of exciting gunfights, they grow bittersweet as we see the human and emotional toll the mere act of existence takes on BJ. He is trapped in a cycle, thrust into a life of violence by a cruel father and driven deeper and deeper into depravity by the unchecked cruelty of his oppressors.

In spite of this, The New Colossus is not joyless. The game balances its protagonist’s internal struggles and broader examinations of violence with some wonderful sci-fi schlock. There are psychedelic drug trips, a Frakenstein’d cat with the body of squirrel monkey, flying saucers, and more. This wackiness mixes with personal moments: birthday parties, nervously-composed love letters, and long conversations about which boy band member is the cutest. The New Colossus is violent and stark, but it also manages to be funny and human. Every new scene offers fresh surprises.

The New Colossus’ greatest trick is its malleability. At any given moment, the game transforms to provide new experiences. Gameplay ebbs and flows between stealth and action, ramping up tension with new abilities and weapons. It is an old-school action game, a tense stealth experience, and an immersive sim all at once. The story moves from pure sci-fi camp to dark and pained trauma but always manages to make each moment feel equally believable. Wolfenstein is a chameleon befitting its lineage. The Apple II games were subtle and grounded; id Software’s classic 1992 shooter was fast and bloody. The New Colossus is both of these things and more, moving from moment to moment with confidence.

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The New Colossus crafts a world that can deliver exciting action and human drama. The messy gunfights give way to something much larger. The New Colossus examines violence, resistance, and the necessity of revolution. It’s bloody and occasionally silly but never stupid or crass. It comes down firmly on the side of punching Nazis and throwing bricks, concluding that such resistance isn’t just cathartic but essential.

Everything that made Wolfenstein: The New Order an excellent single-player first-person shooter is dialed up for round two. With a cast of instantly likeable heroes and bone-chilling villains giving emotional context to its bloody uprising against high-tech Nazis, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

has come to play.It really is incredible how well this story works, considering how absurd its sci-fi version of 1961 is and how wildly the tone shifts from scene to scene. One moment it’s ultra-serious and delivering a sickening dose of venomous racism, abuse, and cold-blooded cruelty. Not that we needed another reason to want to overthrow an alternate-reality Third Reich who won World War 2 and conquered the world, but it’s hugely effective in getting the blood boiling. And yet, the next moment it’ll transition to scenes of laugh-out-loud comedy before pivoting back to BJ Blazkowicz dealing with his own mortality as he withers away from the wounds he received at the end of The New Order.

Wolfenstein 2 pulls this off without whiplash thanks to the impressive strength of its characters, who are outstandingly written and acted. Rousing scenes featuring BJ’s internal monologue, rebel leader Grace and her determined but sad eyes, and Super Spesh’s crazy conspiracy-theory rants and literal bathroom humor are all great and delivered with convincing confidence. In just a short time, each of them is given enough backstory that they’re immediately three dimensional – they’re a flawed group of people who’ve gone through a hellish war and decade-long occupation, and yet they’ve survived, rebelled, and lived their lives. That said, with so many new and interesting faces, not all of the characters from the first game have much to do – notably, Max Hess and Bombate don’t get a lot of screen time outside of a few gags.

But it’s the evil General Engel who steals the show with her absolutely gleeful sadism whenever she’s on screen. She’s unpredictable, often one step ahead, and completely without mercy, often toying with her prey for the enjoyment of it. She’s far and away the most memorably terrifying game villain since Far Cry 3’s Vaas Montenegro. On top of that, the flashbacks to BJ’s childhood and his relationship with his abusive, monstrously (but not unbelievably) racist father are also extremely unsettling. Together, these are the kinds of threats that make running around chopping off Nazi limbs with a hatchet feel like justifiable homicide.
All this goes to show that as long as you have characters who feel complex and human, you can get away with just about anything in a story. Wolfenstein 2’s roughly 14-hour campaign takes full advantage of that to execute a few wild twists and turns that made my jaw drop.

Colossus 2 Review Book

Gruesomely murdering Nazis is already extremely satisfying, but it’s made even more so thanks to the fast and smooth first-person shooting action, and the rewarding performances the enemies put on during their death scenes. Whether they’re reacting based on what body part you’ve shot, getting sliced up in one of the varied melee kill animations, or bursting into flame and vaporizing before your eyes when you rake a heavy laser weapon across the screen, it’s quite a show.There are a lot of Nazis to kill, though, so you’re also encouraged to sneak into each encounter to thin out the herd by silently taking down troopers and, more importantly, their officers – if left alive to trigger the alarm, they’ll summon reinforcements. Like The New Order, this isn’t exactly a “real” stealth game, in that enemies don’t raise an alarm when they spot a dead body (and you can’t hide corpses) and will sometimes spot you when you wouldn’t expect they could’ve, but this stealth gameplay is a good way to mix up the action and prevent every fight from beginning the same way. It’s also entirely optional; if you’d rather go in guns blazing, that works too, and it’s more of a challenge.Wolfenstein 2 makes the most of its somewhat standard-feeling assortment of weapons (there’s a pistol, SMG, machine gun, shotgun, grenade launcher, etc) by letting you mix, match, and customize them to your heart’s content. Using Wolfenstein’s existing dual-wielding system to blast away with a machine gun in each hand feels just as great as before, letting you sacrifice accuracy for doubled-up firepower that’s effective in close or mid-range combat. Dual wielding is also handy if you want to be able to quickly fire a shotgun blast if you blow your cover and the silenced pistol won’t get the job done on its own. It effectively lets you choose your own alternate fire mode. Unless, of course, you’re using one of the terrific high-powered guns salvaged from Nazi mech troopers that require both hands but often include their own built-in alt-fire mode.My biggest annoyance with dual wielding is that – without a late-game upgrade – you can’t pause the action to switch weapons. That can be a clumsy process because there’s just a single weapon wheel for both hands, and you have to select the switch hands option before you can access the left one. Good luck doing that while under fire without getting killed.
Speaking of upgrades, each weapon has three potential enhancements like scopes, extra ammo capacity, and other things that change their behavior in ways more interesting than just bumping up the damage output. Upgrade kits are rare, so the choices you make feel more important – I only had around half the possible upgrades by the time I finished (though I’m sure I missed quite a few).

Another carryover from The New Order is the perk system, which gives upgrades just for scoring kills with things like headshots or flame damage. That encourages you to mix up your playstyle, and also gives a constant stream of rewards just for “doing you.”

BJ may be a buffed-out killing machine with a suit of armor, but he’s not a tank. You’ve got to keep moving and play cautiously to stay alive, grabbing health, armor, and ammo items where you can find them (often off of Nazi corpses). That’s an area where The New Order was rightly criticized for making us push the pick-up button for every single individual item we wanted to grab, including small-value armor scraps that fall off of enemies. The New Colossus finds a much happier medium between that and the more common first-person shooter design of Hoovering up any item you even look at – here, many items can be picked up by walking directly over them with a small auto-grab radius. You’ll still be pushing the button quite a bit, but it’s not nearly as annoying as it was in the first game.
Because of BJ’s fragility (and the fact that I played through on the “Do or Die!” difficulty level, one notch above normal) I died quite a bit – often without knowing exactly what had killed me. Every time that happened I wished there were a killcam that focused on the gloating enemy who’d gotten me so that I’d know what to look out for next time.

But the only real problem I consistently had in combat is that BJ’s pretty picky about what he’ll jump over. I got killed more often than I’d like because I got stuck on invisible obstacles while trying to vault over stuff – especially in the later levels.

Shadow Of The Colossus 2

Cold Steel Colossus 2 Review

Wolfenstein 2’s linear series of levels is made up almost entirely of the kind of dreary settings you’d expect from Nazi-occupied America. The irradiated remains of New York, military facilities, and a New Orleans that’s become a walled-in ghetto are all pretty gloomy with only occasional eye-catching spectacle, but they’re dotted with details and readable bits of life in a fascist alternate reality that make exploration worthwhile. Not only that, some of this reading material humanizes the Germans you’re fighting, to some degree. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no moral question about whether a bunch of goose-stepping thugs deserve what’s coming to them, but hearing, for instance, the perspective of a family who resettled in America after the war is interesting. And every so often we hear from a relative of someone who died at the hands of the infamous “Terro-Billy” – the Nazi propagandists’ name for one William J Blazkowicz.

Colossus 2 Water Gun Review

It’s the non-combat areas in between fights that really distinguish themselves. Walking around a Nazi parade in Roswell, New Mexico and listening to SS troops chatting with Ku Klux Klansmen and finding common ground is eerie and chilling, and the detail in the windows on the main street is excellent. The same goes for the submarine that serves as a base for BJ’s rebellion, which is packed with characters and great incidental dialogue. Some of those side characters don’t look so great next to BJ and his main cast of friends, however.

This being a single-player game, it’s notable that there is some significant post-game content. Wolfenstein 2 recycles some of its maps for tough assassination missions (which must be unlocked by gathering items from dead Nazi officers) that allow you to gain some upgrades that were mutually exclusive with choices you made during the campaign. And there’s a reason to start all over, too: one of the first things you do is repeat a choice you made in The New Order to spare the life of one of two characters, which determines which one is alive in the sequel. That gives you access to a different weapon and has that person play a role in the story, and given the role that Wyatt played in my playthrough I’m interested to see how the older, more grizzled Fergus would’ve handled things.

Hauppauge Colossus 2 Review

On a technical note, after the first couple of hours Wolfenstein 2 ran beautifully for me on PC, with excellent performance and stability. I have to caveat that first couple of hours, though, because during that time it crashed consistently when I was trying to make the pre-game choice between Wyatt and Fergus, about 20 seconds into starting a new game. It was only after I quit out of just about everything running in the background that it ran successfully. Bethesda has indicated this is an Nvidia driver issue (I’m using a GTX 1080), and there are already beta drivers available that may solve the issue if you encounter it. A second Nvidia-powered PC using a GTX 980 had no issues whatsoever. Both console versions, meanwhile, have run well and without incident.