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Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus


DisturbedSwan
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Started this early this morning, put in 6 hours over 2 sessions.

 

The start is possibly one of the most harrowing starts to a game I've ever endured, it's fucking horrific.

Spoiler

You're thrown right in at the deep-end going back to BJ's childhood and his step-dad/dad abusing his mum. Where it really got to me though is when the pet dog gets kicked and abused, it then cuts to black and returns with you with your hands bound, about to watch your dad/step-dad tie a wimpering dog up in front of you, he then hands you a shotgun and tasks you with killing the poor helpless mutt. Thankfully you can shoot away and miss him, but the Dad finishes the job :(


Luckily it goes back to the present day after this, with you on a U-Boat after the culmination of the first game (which I barely remembered to be honest). BJ is in a bad way, in a wheelchair and you have to wheel yourself around the U-Boat whilst killing tons of Nazis (of course) and kick them off the ship, events conspire and you have to rescue one of your team members (one of the prominent members of the squad in the first game) from a Nazi ship.

Spoiler

 

You go through the motions to get her back, she gets her head chopped off which is pretty mad, and then Herr Engel proceeds to make you kiss the severed head, which is pretty surreal, luckily her rotund daughter comes to your rescue by botching an execution, setting you and your friend free.


 

 

You naturally make your way around the U-Boat, which is your resistance base this time around, eventually making it to the US to attempt to make a dent into the Nazi scum here. I think what impresses me the most about it is just how natural it feels, none of the levels feel like game levels if that makes sense, there's no lava, ice, fire etc. level thrown in there with a questionable explanation, everything feels natural and all the levels feel like exactly where you'd need to be if you were in BJ's shoes.

 

The gameplay loop is very reminiscent of the first game and DOOM 2016 really. You pick up health, armour and collectibles whilst sneaking or shooting the fuck out of people, the guns have a good weight to them at times but the sound seems a little off, all the guns seem a little quieter than they should be to me? But maybe this is an early bug they can iron out. It has that fast pace about it that DOOM had, running around levels at breakneck speed dodging Nazis and delivering punishment dual-wielding some sub-machine guns or similar.

 

It's just such an engrossing game to play, I've never once got bored or wanted to put it down, I want to continue on and see what's next in BJ & co's story, it just feels so natural how the game progresses that you stay immersed the entire time. The only niggling issue I've had is repetition, most of the combat arenas involve you sneaking/shooting your way through a load of enemies in a set stage, there'll be a commander up ahead that the game will point out on your map, if you take him out you stop reinforcements. The problem is is that almost every combat arena I've gone into has gone the same way, you walk in, discover a commander on your HUD and know exactly what to do, it's just rinse and repeat really and there's no surprises. If this continues for the rest of the game it will get very old very quickly, I do hope they mix things up a lot as it goes on.

 

The last level I played was the Roswell (Diner Milkshake) that was in all the previews around E3. It's such a powerful image being dumped into this idealistic Americana town and seeing KKK milling about the streets and Nazi regalia everywhere, you're free to walk about at your own pace and some of the conversations you overhear about slavery and other such topics are incredibly hard hitting too, this game definitely pulls no punches when it comes to taboo topics that's for sure.

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Played another 3 hours today, actually haven't been able to get the game out my mind.

 

I know I'm (probably) known for my hyperbole and exaggeration, but how's this for a line:

 

BEST FPS CAMPAIGN SINCE HALF-LIFE 2: EP 2

 

This game man, THIS MOTHERFUCKING GAME. It is absolutely insanely amazing, words cannot describe the shit I've seen today.

 

I've been grinning like a cheshire cat, had my mind blown and a dumb look upon my face on more than one occasion. The game is just MAD FUN yo, it is fucking crazy how fun this game is.

 

Two levels that just personify this game, you're on a train, you pickup the shotgun for the first time, then another shotty, you go down these corridors blasting NAZIS IN THE FUCKING FACE whilst some hardcore metal booms in the background, it is just fucking magical, seeing the Nazi blood and gore go all over the place and the physical feedback you get from the guns and the bullets hitting the Nazis skulls, it is just magical. There was another room set in a courthouse, about a million Nazis are coming at you, hardest sequence in the game, and just like DOOM you have to run about zipping between cover, picking up ammo, armour and health as you go and eventually defeat the seemingly endless hordes of Nazis coming to attack you.

 

It is just pure adrenaline filled fun, only DOOM comes close to this level of adrenaline pumping gun porn. But you know what, I'm gonna say it THIS IS BETTER THAN DOOM, THIS IS BETTER THAN BIOSHOCK, THIS IS ACTUALLY ON PAR WITH HALF-LIFE 2, IT IS THAT FUCKING GOOD GUYS.

 

I haven't even got to the story yet either, fuck me sideways, this is why it's better than DOOM. DOOM was great and there are a lot of parallels there with the combat and gunplay but DOOM purposefully ditched its story for 'shoot some demon's' here it has a fucking INCREDIBLE Half-Life 2 quality story, I shit you not, it is just fucking bananas.


The shit I've seen today,

Spoiler

 

you go into a Nazi base let off a motherfucking NUKE, then you go back to BJ's childhood home and get a load of sombre flashbacks about his childhood, find his Dad there who pulls a shotgun on you, you fucking murder that cunts ass BUT HE'S CALLED THE NAZI HIGH COMMAND ON YOU. Next thing you know you're in the house about a mile above the ground, having to disconnect the Hooks from Engel's flying fortress.

 

Things go incredibly pear shaped and you get captured by the Nazis, put on trial for your crimes. The game sets it up so that you're there first hand at your own execution in a Nazified Washington, you see everything in first person, Engel drawing back the sword to chop your head off and you think 'any minute now my comrades are going to steam in and rescue me' NOPE you get your motherfucking head cut off! I was like WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED, then it gets even weirder, your comrades are below the Nazi execution platform, they capture your head re-circulate blood and re-oxygenate it, put it in a floating vat and eventually reattach it to some ANDROID BODY, like WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. That whole sequence just absolutely blew me away, it was just incredible, I can barely describe it.

 

 

I wish I had some screenshots to share but it's still not playing ball with GeForce Xperience or Steam so I'm unable to capture them, the game is fucking beautiful though I can tell you that.

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I'm hoping he keeps what he's said, because he's right. It's a sublimely constructed game. The pacing is pitch perfect, the graphics are great, the sound is awesome and it just feels so damn good.

 

I'm playing on the easiest difficulty (because I fucking suck, and I was playing it at the next one up but I was drinking and kept getting my ass handed to me), but even so, it's just so much fun! Running round hacking nazis in the neck, shotgunning them in the face (the upgrades for which make it even more fun) and generally causing chaos is pure unadulterated fun.

 

It's one game where @Blakey screaming GOTY would leave me inclined to agree. BJ's dad is a twunt though.

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Is this a on the rails FPS, or has it got silly jumping in it, to get from level to level, one of my frustrations in doom was jumping to my death, but the shooting stuff was great!

 

Might pick it up tomorrow from work if it’s jusy shooty and run?

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I've not come across any first person jumping as yet, it seems to have all been running and shooting. And one instance of feeding a pig some potatoes.

 

Edit: I just remembered one or two small platforms, but it's literally a case of sprinting and jumping. No nuance needed.

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Played another 3 hours earlier, 12 total, still can't stop thinking about it.

 

Started out by trying out the Enigma missions. You pick up Enigma cards off dead commanders in the regular levels, put them into this Enigma machine that's at your base, decode a sequence and then these unlock previously visited locations to explore and kill Ubercommandants.

 

They kind of remind me of the challenge missions from the Batman games or something, you go back into a level you'd previously visited and have a whole host of Nazis waiting for you, and a commander you have to fight/sneak your way through to, once you've killed them you exit the level (or can continue exploring, looking for collectibles). There's no checkpoints or anything, so if you die you have to go back to where you started. 

 

I'm not really sure about them, I had fun, for sure, running around like a mad man with my dual shotty's is fun whichever scenario it's in, but it just felt like it got in the way of me enjoying the regular story missions slightly and felt a bit superfluous. Still fun though, and folks wanting to get all 216 collectibles will need to unlock these to collect things they've missed, but yeah, I'm not sure I'll go back and do too many more.


Back to the story missions then, this time you get sent to

Spoiler

 

New Orleans. All incredibly cool stuff once again, breaking into the New Orleans ghetto, seeing bodies stacked up against walls and stuff, all quite sombre stuff, but then at the end of it you get to ride a robot-Nazi-dog (complete with Flamethrower) through the streets, massacring a ton of Nazis, honestly one of the most fun sequences ever, I really couldn't stop smiling, pure magic. 

 

Got out of New Orleans with a few new comrades in tow and the game takes a turn for the wackier. Folks who played The New Order will remember the Moon mission, well in this game, they send you to VENUS! :lol: It really is batshit crazy. Once you get to Venus you're treated to one of the very best scenes in video game history, BJ disguised as an actor auditioning for the role of BJ in Hitler's new film about 'Terror-Billy'. You sit in Hitler's office, talking to the director, see all the other actor's there and you have to learn your lines, write them down and everything, then Hitler makes an appearance and he's really old and decrepit, chucking up blood all over the shop, coughing all the time and generally even more batshit crazy than he's known to be.

 

You get shot by Hitler if you don't recite your lines correctly :lol: but once you've done it successfully another actor shows you up. The second sequence is the best bit though, where you have to go inside a glass room and assault a Nazi officer to show Hitler you have the right 'spirit' to portray Terror-Billy. The actor's go one by one and fail, with Hitler killing them off as they go, then it's your turn. You step inside, get the RS prompt to take his gun, when you do you pull the trigger and it cuts to a cutscene of BJ basically saying 'fuck these Nazi pigs' as he delights in slaughtering this fool. Hitler of course laps it up and you get given the part :lol:

 

It is just so exquisitely well executed, the cutscenes in this game are on a whole other level than a huge amount of games, but this scene was just pure genius in every way. The mo-cap, the voice acting, the way everything felt precisely perfectly done, it was just phenomenal. 

 

It all goes a bit DOOM after this as you're let loose on the Venus base to shoot a ton more Nazis, then get dropped down to the surface to shoot a load more on a (distinctly DOOM-like Mars) Venus surface.

 

And that's pretty much where I left it. It just keeps impressing me. The Enigma missions were a bit of a drag, but they're optional fortunately, once I went back to the story, the magic continued. This game man :wub:

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I haven't @mr lakitu. Got fond memories of HL2:Ep2 though. Yeah that's fair enough, if you didn't like Wolf: TNO then I'm not sure you'll like this to be honest.

 

 

Anyhoo, finished this today, took me 15.5 hours in total, completion percentage was 55%.

Spoiler

 

After Venus there wasn't really much more to do really, you go back to the Sub and then go back to the Alzmeister (same ship from the first mission) to hijack it. I was expecting to explore different parts of the ship and for there to be some humongous boss fight but it was exactly the same environs I'd explored at the start of the game and there wasn't really any boss fight as such, just two bigger robot dudes to take down (which were very easy with my fully upgraded dual-shotty's). 

 

The Epilogue after this was fantastic though. You fly to California on the Alzmeister, sneak into a studio where Herr Engel is on a chat show with a fake Jimmy Kimmel type, sneak through the audience, up a lift and around a lighting scaffold, eventually burying your hatchet deep in her skull on live TV, screened to all the Nazis around the world, love it! Definitely a HELL YEAH kind of moment.

 

 

The ending was rather abrupt though overall and definitely left me wanting more, I do have a load more Enigma missions to do and I am tempted to go back sometime and finish some of them off, but yeah it was a hell of a ride.

 

I'm not sure it's my GOTY anymore, I'd say right up until the last couple of missions it easily was but the abrupt nature it ended kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, and it's probably gone down a little in my estimations as a result.

 

It's still an incredible ride though, it goes places I've not seen a lot of games go, has some truly fantastic out-of-this-world cinematic moments with historical characters that you never thought you'd see in a game, it's so incredible well written and acted too. The feeling of running down a hallway with dual shotguns mowing down tons of Nazis just cannot be surpassed, such tremendous fun.

 

Finally managed to capture some pics too:

 

 

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I played the first 45 minutes or so - up to the point you get the armour you see BJ wearing in the E3 trailer.  It looks incredible. I played The Old Blood recently, so the grapical jump is quite noticeable. 

 

That intro. Wow. It really goes some places, and is pretty harrowing. The scene with Frau Engel is brilliantly performed. She's so OTT evil, but she still feels legitimately threatening and not totally cheesy thanks to the voice and mocap performance.

A couple of moments the way it's framed and characters are placed make it look like I'm watching a little stage play, but generally its very effective.

 

I won't get to put a lot of time into it until the weekend. 

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For those that have played it, I got to the "fucking hell!" bit, and fucking hell! 

 

It's a weird game tonally Wolfenstein 2, it was spends a lot of time being dour and sombre, lots of quiet contemplation, then it gets unusually brutal. It's funny, smart, then you'll have the motorbike escape scene 

 

Gameplay wise, I'm hoping it's going to shift a bit away from the commander hunting. I didn't mind them in the first game, but it seems to be 90% of the combat loop so far. Based on the perks they're clearly here to stay, but it could do with some gameplay distance between them 

 

I don't think you quite get enough feedback on your health either. I've died a fair bit, and most of the time it's only when it's too late to really do anything about it that I've noticed I'm low on health. Similarly the damage direction indicator needs to be more intrusive, I've had times where I I've not even realised I'm getting hurt, and then picking the direction isn't easy. 

 

Aside from that I'd say this is comfortably one of the better games this year so far, it is can be a bit hard mind 

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  • 3 weeks later...

This has had a bit of a rough time on PC. Initially it worked ok for me, and I completed the opening couple of hours in the sub (but Steam overlay didn't work, and Alt+Tab-ing would freeze the game,among other issues). 

 

They fixed the overlay issue, and I reached New York and got the local resistance to join the crew. Then another patch came along, and I was met with blue screen crashes that reboot my PC, and a blank, text-less start menu screen, meaning I couldn't start the game.

 

I have found a fix for the start menu problem after several days effort, but in the process of trying things until I found one that works, I lost my save. I started a new game yesterday and am nearly back to where I was before. It did crash my PC twice - once on launching the game, and once on quitting, but when running it seemed fine. (Well, apart from having an Xbox one controller plugged in appearing to cause audio and visual stuttering in cutscenes).

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I played a good chunk of the game on Sunday. From

Spoiler

Roswell

to

Spoiler

Landing on Venus

oh boy, there's some crazy shit going on in that section. I feel like I'm pretty close to the end now, although I haven't much of the enigma code stuff, or any of the side missions they unlock.

 

I've seen quite a few legitimate criticisms I agree with, regarding letting you know you're being hit, objective markers etc. But none of that has stopped me having a great time with it. I tried to play on the default difficulty, but after having to start a few sections multiple times, I knocked the difficulty down a couple of notches and haven't regretted it.

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  • 1 month later...

I finished the first 2 dlc (the first one is a set up for the season pass and was free with preorders). They're ok, they take the branching skill trees from the main game and separates them in to their own characters. Episode 0 features the 3 characters, giving a set up for who and what they are. There's a British secret agent who is the stealth character, she can hide in areas she shouldn't be able to fit in or under, her section is decent, it might be a bit slow but I did a decent amount of stealth. The 3rd dlc will be the guy with the telescopic legs, I liked his section but the legs weren't ever that useful in the main campaign

 

In episode 1 of the DLC you've got Gunslinger Joe, a black American football player who rebels against the Nazi's as they're beating him on the field, so he's taken off to be worked on. He's all power, you can still stealth but I never found a silencer for the pistol, and his perks are based around things like heavy weapons and duel wielding. He can also sprint through walls, and people I guess

 

 

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I'm not reading anyone elses posts untill I'm done. Im also not listening to anymore Giant Bomb GOTY till ive finished this.

 

Not a great start though. The story has been cool but the gameplay has mosty annoyed me, from not always seeing microwave traps to some shitty checkpoints. But I have enjoyed the cutscenes and I hear that's what you're here for.

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I've just started it. I'm enjoying it. I do like the more arcade style FPS and simple stealth or ballsout action. The enemies are dumb as post, but they're Nazis, so seems right. 

 

Everytime I see him in his suit I either think 'Dead Space' or 'Warframe' ?

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I finished this now.

 

 

The bit that stuck with me was probably the audition on Venus. Their potrayal of an aging, ill Hitler (possible rapper name for me?) was hilarious but also kind of scary in the fact that he was utterly unpredictable. One minute he was explaining his vision, the next he was killing some fucker because he thought he might be a jew spy, then he was pissing in a bucket, then he was asleep, then he was vomitting, then he was hungry, then it was time to kill again. Madness. And the look on his assistants face when he rested his head on her chest was great. Oh, and the topless pregnant lady covered in blood? Gold.

 

The combat was hard even on an easy difficulty level (Dont Hurt Me i think?). The enemies are bullet sponges sometimes and those fucking generals are so good at hiding, i couldnt see them somtimes even though I was right on top of them.

 

I tried to play stealthily as much as humanly possible and I abused the saved system as well, saving after I got to a new room most of the time. We have been spoilt with mini maps and enemy locations, this game doesnt help you at all and it's tough because of it. I felt like there were times an enemy couldnt see me even though i was in his line of sight, other times I got rumbled and I couldn't see an enemy anywhere. Those are fustrating moments, doing really well with the sneaky sneaky and then the alarm just goes off leaving you bewildered and often dead. Those dogs can proper fuck off, i couldnt see them half the time untill it was too late.

 

I did indeed enjoy the story, i read quite alot of the collectibles. I had a glitch happen where I would find a collectible but the icon would still appear on the map (they disappear after you pick them up), then I'd go to the next one and it wasnt there. Not just me not seeing it, it wasnt there. That happened three or four times so i thought balls to it after a while (but near the end) and stopped looking for them.

 

I certainly agree with what I heard though, average gameplay but good story. Definately worth a play and can't wait for Wolfie III.

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Finished it. Echo a lot if what is said above.

 

The Story is good. I like a bit of crass humour and classic FPS weapon wheel dynamic. The gameplay is a bit bland and downright obnoxious sometimes. Little indication of hit registration and the constant spawn of enemies, when trying to get to a commander, just drags a bit. 

 

I did like the little character plays between missions in homebase. Normally you'd just walk around talk to people, maybe they have new comments. Here though they interact with one another in some genuinely amusing moments. 

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