izigame.me

It's my 88th review on Steam, and in honor of that being one of the two most important digits in Nazi numerology, I figured that the game I reviewed had to be one where you can stomp Adolf Hitler's head until he dies.
Unfortunately, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus isn't the blindside reboot that its predecessor Wolfenstein: The New Order is, nor the love letter to retro gaming that prequel Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is. It's the beginning of a downward trend that continued in Youngblood, but New Colossus still has high points that outnumber its low points. To dig into why I'm only mildly positive on this title, let's examine New Colossus as a sequel to New Order, as a work of exploitation fiction, and as a work of earnest political commentary.

New Colossus as a sequel to New Order

On the face of it, New Colossus excels as a sequel, albeit it's a 'more of what you love' kind of sequel. In his endless battle against the Nazis of this dystopian alternate timeline, protagonist William "BJ" Blazkowicz uses the exact same arsenal of weapons he used in New Order and Old Blood to fight the exact same roster of enemies that he fought in New Order and Old Blood, albeit both BJ and the enemies are equipped with a few minor new gimmicks to shake things up a little. The wheel is not reinvented here: instead, MachineGames really focuses on what makes a Wolfenstein-Reboot combat encounter work, and they've polished the retro-corridor-shooter game loop of their franchise to a spit-shine here. Compared to combat encounters in the prior two games, encounters here are more varied, shooting galleries flow better, and the fights are both more fun and more challenging (with those two often informing each other).
However, I'd mentioned that the game is a "retro corridor shooter," like the entire franchise before it, and that belies one of its greatest problems: level diversity. You see, the plot of the game concerns BJ returning to an occupied America to help liberate it from the Nazi oppressors, but for the sake of the gameplay loop, this America -- one of the largest nations on Earth, with incredible open spaces and biome diversity -- needs to be an America comprised exclusively of corridors. Therefore, the game fails to fully explore what a post-nuclear Manhattan wasteland looks like, because the Manhattan levels are spent in the corridors of its subway system. The game fails to explore what a Nazi-occupied New Mexico looks like, because after five minutes of walking a single city block of Roswell, BJ must descend into a military base to shoot through those corridors. A guerrilla uprising in New Orleans is perceived near-entirely from -- you guessed it -- the corridors of its sewer system. For a sequel that promised extremely evocative, Man in the High Castle-esque imagery of a Nazi-occupied America, the game actually has very few artistically memorable combat arenas.
Doom could get away with this because its Mars base setting is simply a convenient location for video game violence to occur, but it's a weird match for this Wolfenstein reboot-sequel, which clearly has cinematic aspirations.

New Colossus as a Grindhouse Movie

...Which brings us nicely into the weird push-and-pull at the core of this sequel, which seems to demand to be taken seriously as a commentary on fascism and white supremacy, while also being a very intentional homage to grindhouse cinema.
To be clear, all of the MachineGames Wolfensteins aspire to be exploitation fiction. Wolfenstein: the New Order owes a great debt to Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds and classic works of Nazi exploitation like Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS: movies that make titillation of the violence of the Nazi regime. Old Blood embraced the 1930s serial mood, placing itself squarely in the canon of contemporary Nazi-fightin' genre tributes like Hellboy and Indiana Jones. By contrast, this game's 1960s counterculture setting -- albeit an alt-history one that pits iconic American counterculture figures like the Black Panthers and Hippies against the Nazis -- pulls liberally from the canon of blaxploitation, drugsploitation, sexploitation, and more, and these aren't all easy marriages with the Nazi-exploitation genre that the prior two games embodied.
It's hard to articulate, but The New Colossus is the first game in the series to feel sleazy, in a way that MachineGames was clearly deliberately shooting for but which sometimes steps over the boundaries of good taste in a way that feels edgy for edginess' sake. Be it black panthers shooting Nazis while crowing about these jive-ass Nazi crackers, or a recurring subplot about how pregnancy hormones are causing BJ's wife Anya to experience sexual pleasure when she shoots Nazis (ultimately culminating in a Shoot Em' Up style sex-scene-that-is-also-a-gunfight where she multiple-orgasms after pulping seven men with a grenade) the tone of the story feels gratuitous in a way that dulls, rather than sharpens, the edge of its commentary.

New Colossus as a Work of Commentary

This is a problem because Wolfenstein doesn't exist in a cultural vacuum, especially not New Colossus. Let's not mince words about it: New Colossus is the first post-Charlottesville Wolfenstein title, and the game's marketers played that for everything it was worth to draw deliberate parallels between its in-game sci-fi Nazis and the ugly, resurgent, and suddenly mainstream American white nationalist movement. Wolfenstein: The New Colossus intentionally inserted itself in a national dialogue, knowing that like Keurig and Nike before them, they could poke the nest of the very worst Americans by making a big dumb show about this game being about Strong Black People Killing Whitey. Predictably, the most fragile egos on the internet came screaming and blubbering to give the game months of free publicity.
I'm, of course, burying the lede here: the obvious question that follows is "so, it's a work of political commentary, right?"
The answer is that no, it really isn't. The most revolutionary that New Colossus ever gets is tepidly pointing out that white and especially German-descended Americans actually broadly supported the Nazis and that resistance against fascist regimes has always historically come first from communists and minorities, which the game milks for cheap horror; in the Roswell level that is our only encounter with "ordinary" white Americans, they are mewling Nazi toadies, given no characterization beyond "abominably racist."
It's commentary, certainly, but it's facile commentary, and sits poorly with the fact that the story also demands that we see the liberation of these cartoonish bigots as laudable, or even something that they'd want. The finale, where our multiracial, communist hero team go on television and wake up America with a rousing call-to-action, feels unearned because we have seen only bigotry and ugliness, not an America that desires or deserves to be liberated.

TL;DR

The New Colossus is the Wolfenstein for our times: a big, bombastic, flashy work of genre fiction that often threatens to have a point beyond just being rip-roaring violent fun, but which then trips over its own dick trying to make it. New Colossus enjoys a much-debated spot in the contemporary Gamer Culture Wars that it absolutely is neither good nor bad enough to deserve. At once ambitious and complacent, filmic and gamey, too political but yet not political, it defines the "mid," 7/10 first-person shooter. A good on-sale title.