Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

I came into The New Colossus expecting a competent follow-up to The New Order and walked away genuinely surprised by how much MachineGames was willing to bet on a single-player, linear shooter in 2017. No multiplayer, no battle pass, no loot boxes - just B.J. Blazkowicz, an alternate-history 1961 America under Nazi occupation, and a campaign that wants to punch you in the gut as often as it lets you punch back. On the shooting side, this is the real deal. The id Tech 6 engine keeps the framerate rock solid even when the screen fills with laser fire and explosions, and the gunplay has the kind of meaty, responsive feedback that reminds you why this genre existed before battle royales took over. Dual-wielding any combination of weapons is the headline mechanical addition - yes, you can run two shotguns - and it feels exactly as ridiculous as that sounds, in a good way. The play-style perk system lets you shape BJ toward stealth kills, weapon proficiency, or brute-force damage absorption depending on how you approach encounters, and roughly halfway through the campaign you gain access to three movement contraptions: one lets you crawl through tight spaces silently, another lets you shoulder-charge through thin walls and tackle enemies to the ground. Those gadgets do real work keeping the back half of the campaign from going stale. The stealth option exists and is functional but, honestly, MachineGames spent most of their design budget on the gun side of the equation - do not come here expecting Dishonored. Where the game earns its 86 Metacritic and Very Positive Steam rating is the story and character work. The U-boat hub (Eva's Hammer) gives the cast - Black Panthers, resistance fighters, Sigrun the defected Nazi daughter - room to breathe between missions in a way almost no shooter bothers to do. The cutscene direction is genuinely impressive, balancing moments of pure gonzo absurdity against some of the ugliest, most direct depictions of fascism and racism in mainstream games. Frau Engel is one of the better antagonists the genre has produced. The prologue choice between two allies creates minor story divergences across the whole campaign, and the enigma code side system - hunting commanders, cracking codes, tracking down high-value targets - adds post-story content that gives completionists a reason to stay. The criticisms that landed then still land now. Level design is the consistent weak point: too many corridors, too many arenas that look interchangeable, and a handful of later locations that feel like they needed another iteration pass. The opening act is deliberately slow - BJ is broken, wheelchair-bound, and the game leans into that heavily before the tempo shifts around the New York section. Some players will tap out before it clicks. The Freedom Chronicles DLC packs received mixed-to-poor reception for recycled environments and thin stories, so treat the base game as the product you are buying. On the PC side, at launch there were driver-specific stability issues on certain GPU configurations, though these are long patched. If your shooters of choice have been purely multiplayer for the last few years, The New Colossus is a good reminder of what a focused, authored single-player FPS looks like when a studio commits completely to one. It is not the tightest game mechanically - DOOM (2016) holds that crown in the same publisher family - but it has more to say and more characters worth caring about. Roughly 12-15 hours on a first playthrough at a normal difficulty, longer if you hunt enigma codes and Uber-Kommandos.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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