Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus Deluxe Edition

The word Deluxe on a store page sets a specific expectation: more game, better version, obviously worth the upgrade. Here it is about half true. What you are actually buying is the standard campaign plus the Season Pass, marketed as The Freedom Chronicles: three standalone episode packs (The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe, The Diaries of Agent Silent Death, The Amazing Deeds of Captain Wilkins) along with the short Episode Zero prologue that introduces those characters. The good news, and it is genuinely good news by 2017 bundle standards, is that there is no padding in the box. No wallpaper pack. No soundtrack you will never open. No five weapon skins pretending to be content. Every component is a thing you load into and play. That matters because the base game is the reason anyone is here. MachineGames' occupied 1961 America is one of the strangest, most confident shooters of its generation, and the Steam consensus (Very Positive, sitting in the low eighties across nearly fifty thousand reviews) plus an 86 on Metacritic both land roughly where I would put it. BJ Blazkowicz kills his way through New Orleans and Roswell between long, uncomfortably quiet character scenes that most action games would never risk running. Combat leans on dual-wielding nearly anything, a hatchet for quiet work, and Da'at Yichud contraptions that gate optional routes, so a second run through the campaign is not wasted time. It is also unforgiving on higher difficulties, because your health pool is thin and any commander you fail to silence will call in reinforcements until you stop existing. The Freedom Chronicles is a different animal, and this is where the Deluxe pitch gets shaky. Each episode hands you a new protagonist with one gimmick: an ex-quarterback turned super soldier, a former OSS operative who plays quieter and rewards patience, and an aging army captain stomping around in a battle walker. They are structured as arcade missions rather than story chapters. Corridor after corridor of Nazis, environment kits recycled from the main campaign, and framing narration doing the job cutscenes did in the campaign proper. Each runs a couple of hours, less if you play aggressively. The shooting is competent and I did not resent the time, but nothing in them moves BJ's story forward or shows you a place the campaign did not already take you. If you finished the main game wanting more of what made it special, meaning the writing and the tonal whiplash and the cast, this is not that. Worth knowing too: the episodes were also sold individually, so nothing in this box is exclusive to it. You are paying for a bundle, not for a locked special tier. So the split is simple. Take the Deluxe version if you already know you enjoy MachineGames combat purely as combat, want several more hours of it after the credits, and would rather have the episodes sitting in your library than think about buying them separately later. Take the standard edition if you are here for the story, if this is your first Wolfenstein, or if you have a backlog and an honest sense of how likely you are to launch a bonus episode three weeks after finishing a campaign that already runs a dozen hours or so. Most players fall into that second group. One practical note on the package: this is PC and single-player only, with full controller support, Steam Cloud, and Remote Play on TV if you want it on the couch. There is no multiplayer mode here giving the extra content a long tail, so the episodes are the entire argument for upgrading. Judged as a package rather than as a game, this is an honest one. The extras are real levels built by the same studio, they play like the campaign at its most straightforward, and nothing about the bundle degrades the base experience. It simply is not essential, and I would rather say that plainly than let the word Deluxe do the persuading for me.

Alex · Scout Team

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