Wolfenstein: The New Colossus (2017)

(typical spoiler warning: I will be talking about endgame stuff here, mostly in terms of setting, but I will whine about the final boss so if that bothers you okay)

Hoo boy.

Most of the time, when reviewing the video games or the splatter films, I find myself with a more charitable opinion than when I was actively consuming the trash.  There are exceptions (such as fucking goddamn Kingdoms of Amalur), but despite how my reviews usually sound, critically examining a game usually reveals more positive facets to me than when I was grumbling through QTEs or an Independent Female Protagonist jiggling her tits in my face.  Obviously, this is to say that thinking through Wolfenstein: The New Colossus has led to the game rotting before my very eyes.  And no, that's not just because I keep misspelling Colossus and having to backspace every time eurrrgh why do I keep doing this.

I've played every Wolfenstein game as it's come out, and while none been exactly great, none of them really have gotten the full scorn from me.  Even the oft-maligned Wolfenstein 2009, while being a twisted mirror of everything wrong with that generation of FPS (open world!  everything has an attachment!  intrusive mobility powers!  no one can write a story!), can be pretty fun if you turn off your brain.  The most modern reboots, Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, similarly have their individual weaknesses, but they're fun and in the case of the former a pretty good example of a game's narrative structure being so strong that you barely even notice how generic the actual gameplay is.

And let's be fair here: The New Order's gameplay is really not great.  I think Super Bunnyhop wrote somewhere that the combat mostly closely resembled a county fair shooting gallery, and I can't really improve on that.  There's nothing explicitly bad in New Order, but ultimately the game starts with you sitting behind cover blasting Nazis as they pop out from bunkers and ends with you sitting behind cover blasting Nazis as they pop out from columns.  Maybe it's fanboy to say, but I can forgive the game for this because it was released in 2014, a good two years before DOOM appeared and reaffirmed my faith in the single player FPS experience.

I know what you're thinking: "oh he's going to say that because New Colossus is just like New Order but after DOOM it's a bad game now."  You're partially right, because it is certainly harder to enjoy the game play of "now some guys are coming out of THIS door better get them" after you've spent hours wrasslin' with Uncle Impy, but you're also kind of wrong!  See, if New Colossus was just a carbon copy of the previous two Wolfenstein titles, I'd be a little disappointed, but would probably just have shrugged it off and still have fun.  Here's the horrifying truth: even viewed within a vacuum, New Colossus is probably the least fun FPS experience I've had in a Wolfenstein title.

Each time I think about this, my mind reels.  How do you even do this?  The answer is, ironically, that DOOM probably had a major role in those big old backwards steps.

A big thing with New Order was that almost every combat experience is you on one side, and the baddies on an other.  I can think of only two sections in the game where, unless you're just rushing forward like an idiot, that you're ever in remote danger in being flanked.  And that's fine!  It didn't bother me when it happened in New Order, and it wouldn't have bothered me if New Colossus had just done the same thing.  But it didn't, and holy shit does it make the game suffer.  I have zero doubt Machinegames saw all those cool battlegrounds in DOOM and wanted to do that.  Here's the problem, though:

H I T S C A N

A big, big reason DOOM works so well, especially at higher difficulties, is that almost every enemy is either melee, or has projectiles with a travel time.  You'll still get hit when the entire arena is basically a nonstop death oven, but it feels fair: the brain goes, "oh i should have dodged that way shit better luck next time."  When you run into one of those arena shooter rooms in DOOM, it's a battle of wills and reflexes that's just the best feeling in the world. But getting flanked by Nazis isn't fun, because almost every enemy* is hitscan.  You will randomly have a Nazi mook inexplicably spawn behind you, and you will instantly remove half of your life.  As an aside, it doesn't help that New Colossus will helpfully notify of this damage by lightly shaking the screen and that's about it.  I'm not a massive fan of overblown, seizure-like damage indicators, but I'm also not a fan of going from full life to only realizing something is wrong when I'm slumping to the floor.

New Colossus still features a bunch of the linear shooting gallery action, but a substantially larger section of the game is now you in a room with a bunch of Nazis swarming in from every side.  On the hardest difficulty, any one of those Nazis can lay you out in about a second of concentrated fire. No one liked fighting Heavy Weapons Dudes in Doom 2, but these sections in New Colossus feels like those shitty ambush rooms where you walk in and suddenly the windows open to like 50 chaingunners surrounding you.  And just like those rooms, surviving these encounters in New Colossus is less dependent on skill and more on rote memorization and luck that the rng AI doesn't have them all immediately lock on you with perfect aim.

To put it another way, DOOM's arena gameplay felt like a rollicking jazz concert, rewarding imagination and where mistakes are simply added to the total sound experience.  New Colossus's arena gameplay feels like your elementary school piano recital: binary, simplistic, and where one wrong mistake leads to awkward silences and an urge to hold back tears.

The one boon you'll have during these garbage pail encounters is that, unlike DOOM, you won't have to worry about what the best weapon to use during fights, because there is always a single correct answer:

I cannot overstate how badly Machinegames fucked weapon balance in New Colossus.  New Order wasn't a shining beacon of weapon variety, but I still sometimes switched between the assault rifle and the sniper rifle depending on enemy distance.  Now, every weapon has three upgrades you can unlock with hidden kits found in every level.  Upgrading the assault rifle gives you:

1) A scope with ridiculous precision,
2) Functionally double ammo capacity, and
3) ARMOR PIERCING BULLETS.

Now, a big issue I had with New Order was the existence of armored enemies, which required you to use heavy ordinance to kill.  "Boy," I thought, "I wish there was a way to kill the big bads without having to expend my valuable ammo,"  I guess Machinegames has a monkey's paw in their break room, because now those big metal hunks are beaten by firing a couple of assault rifle bullets into their face.

There's just no point to using anything but the assault rifle in anything but stealth sections, which by the way have transformed from piss-easy paint by numbers cruises to exceptionally obnoxious trial and error experiences.  But it's okay to get caught, because you can just wedge yourself in a corner, take out the dual wield assault rifles, and lazily roll your fingers over the lmb and rmb as enemies walk single file into the thresher until the alarm exhausts itself.  Epic gameplay, to say the least.

Speaking of epic hey remember that Nazi occupied town everyone saw in the trailers which was a fascinating picture of American fascism cozying up to foreign control?  Good news, it's the only interesting setting in the game.  New Order wasn't exactly a fascinating explosion of colors and places, but it's fucking No Ones Lives Forever compared to the absolute vacation slide reel that is New Colossus.  I hope you like grey hallways and brown ruins, because that's you're going to slogging through.

This hits the absolute peak when (SPOILER HERE I GUESS) you finally get to go back to space, but instead of the Moon, which was the absolute best part of New Order, now it's Venus.  And guess what? Venus suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckssssssssssss.  Gone is the fun art-deco secret agent moonbase flavor, now you get a stage that feels like 80% construction railings and 20% generic grey bad guy base, with the added bonus of a "strategically placed refuelling stations for your rapidly degrading spacesuit" mechanic, because I really wanted to relive the excitement of walking the surface of Mars in Doom 3.

Do I really want to talk about the story in this game?  New Order had its share of silliness, but in general was honestly a well-written (at least by vidya standard) meditation on the nature of fascism and its corrupting, greedy, and ultimately hollow structure, in addition to the exhausting nature of fighting against such a beast (someday I'll do a blog about Bobby Bram and how his portrayal shits on any attempt by New Colossus to induce pathos).  New Colossus, by contrast, is the video game equivalent of every shrill left-wing twitter you've ever rolled your eyes at, an equal measure of zany memes that already feel dated by the end of 2017 and breathless proclamations about the EEEEEVIL that America is facing without any real grappling about what this actually means.

I understand that things feel substantially more dire at this time than they did in 2014, and it could be argued that a need for a more explosively ludicrous urgency in tone is needed, but I'm going to maintain that when all is said and done, New Order is going to be the storyline that's more relevant to what we're dealing with.  This game's obsession with being solely a metaphor to our current national situation comes to a head when you get to (MORE SPOILERS I GUESS) finally meet Hitler: they might as well have klaxons going off while "WE'RE TALKING ABOUT TRUMP HERE" flashes over and over on the screen for how subtle things get.

also they killed caroline almost immediately who was easily the best part of new order so really fuck the storyline

I should probably say that despite writing all these words about the game being bad, I don't really think it's a bad game in the traditional sense.  It's just fundamentally a big step back from the prior two Wolfenstein titles, and definitely not worth PAYING FULL PRICE FOR UNLIKE CERTAIN IDIOT REVIEWERS.  Were this blog more popular, I'd feel bad for so harshly trashing a game that might very well be the victim of bethesda pushing for a too early release date to capture the anti-trump heat wave, but instead I can just revel in this smugness and save the positivity for talking about Grim Dawn next time.

*: the only enemy i can think of that isn't hitscan are those smaller nazi android robot things that looked totally wicked in the trailers but surprise in the game they're supremely underwhelming since the nazi scientists couldn't figure out how to  make them do ninja shit and shoot at the same time, hyuck