I've finished
Wolfenstein: The New Colossus on
I am Death Incarnate so I could tell you to not play the game on Death Incarnate (or at all). I was actually kind of optimistic about this game. Not because of the narrative or promise of cool setpieces or anything, but because of the new enemy types shown in gameplay trailers, with all of them moving away from the overbearing hitscan enemies of Wolfenstein: The New Order (not Colossus, but ORDER). These new enemies included a robot rapidly dashing about and shooting actual projectiles at you, or robot-dogs running around charging up clearly telegraphed explosive shots, or big Nazi Übersoldaten with big-ass telegraphed lasers that can melt the cover you're covering behind. Unfortunately these new enemy types can never quite live up to their strengths and end up being a waste of space because of reasons I'll list later on. Which kind of left me with nothing else to look forward to in this game, as everything else the game does is the same as TNO, yet somehow worse.
There's nothing much new on the gameplay front. One new thing you can do is dual-wield different types of weapons to suit the situation more, which is a nice addition, but the problem with this is that with M&K switching weapons is incredibly cumbersome. So you press one of the number keys to select what weapon you want in your right hand, and then you press X to dual-wield the weapon you are currently holding. When dual-wielding, you can press the number keys to switch the weapon in your right hand, while your current left-hand weapon goes unchanged. The problem is there's no single button press to switch the weapon you're holding in your left hand. If you want to change what you're wielding in the left hand, you need to un-dual-wield, select what weapon you want to carry, then dual-wield again. This problem could have been solved through the easy use of key combinations, like numkey to switch weapons in your right hand and V+numkey to switch weapons in your left hand. Alas.
The other method is to bring up the weapon wheel which lets you select what you're wielding in the left hand. The problem is that the weapon wheel is also terribly cumbersome to use with M&K. Controlling the cursor in the wheel feels like a bad twin-stick shooter. When moving your mouse across the center of the wheel, controlling the cursor feels incredibly imprecise when this problem could have been solved by extending the weapon selection areas in the weapon wheel towards the center rather than leaving the center empty. That works for analog controls, but is poor with M&K. What makes it worse that if you want to select what to wield in your left hand, you need to move the cursor to a smaller-selection-zone-than-it-should-be to open up another weapon wheel and only THEN select what weapon you want in your left hand. The weapon wheel method sucks, but the keyboard method is made unnecessarily worse by the fact that weapon switching speeds are
egregious. You're wasting too much time un-dual-wielding and switching weapons during fight than you really ought to be. At no point did I think the weapon switching was smooth, and to make matters worse there's not even an upgrade to make switching faster like in TNO.
There is now some form of auto-pickup. You don't need to pick up all helmets manually anymore, which is a slight improvement. However, your auto-pickup radius is ridiculously small and will often miss items, as you can only automatically pick-up weapons beneath your feet. If it's on a table or under a chair, you need to pick it up manually by pressing E. Some ammo drops by fallen enemies just won't get automatically picked up even though there is an interaction prompt on the screen right there to pick up that ammo. It's very inconsistent and as a result you'll probably prefer manually picking things up. I still don't know why it's so hard to get something as basic as automatically picking up items in a first-person shooter right. If you fuck up thrice in a row then there must be a special reason for why you just can't do it the conventional way.
Another thing to note is that for the first half of the game your maximum health is 50 HP, and you can overcharge it by picking up additional healthkits to get it up to 200. In TNO this used to be kind of alright since you usually had around 100 HP max, but here you're constantly picking up medkits because there's practically no reason not to, which makes the lack of a proper auto-pickup even more aggravating. The whole medkit system works rather badly for Wolfenstein to begin with. Medkit systems in first-person shooters usually emphasize long-term health management, where they go coupled with limited medkits in the level you're in and harder-to-avoid enemy attacks slowly chipping away at your health. TNC doesn't do that, the Nazis here are highly lethal and can reduce your armor and health to nothing within seconds if you look at them too long. Even hitscan enemies in older games weren't as ruthless with their RoF or their damage output.
With all this damage you're bound to take, running around constantly at low health and no medkits everywhere is bound to get players frustrated. So what did MachineGames do? Place medkits and armor everywhere. Outside fights you're always very likely to find enough stuff to get yourself back to 100%. It can only become a problem during fights that you're desperately searching for a medkit. However, the element of long-term health management becomes completely nullified when item placement is incredibly abundant. This way you avoid the pitfalls of regenerating health, but can't really make use of the strengths of medkits. Moreover, with the high damage output of enemies where you're bound to die quickly, and the means of avoiding damage (when the levels allow you to play in styles other than stealth and popamole) being rather inconsistent, it can cause more frustration than well-intended challenge.
But F.E.A.R. already solved this problem by letting you carry a limited amount of medkits with you which you could use at any time while not having medkits around every corner, still shifting health management to a long-term mode and offsetting the frustration of high-lethality hitscan combat somewhat if you managed to activate a medkit in time. Of course, armor also wasn't as frequently placed in F.E.A.R. so it felt kind of comforting to have a little more protection with you, as in F.E.A.R. you're not used to armor being everywhere.
TNC also introduces a near lack of damage feedback, where if you take damage your camera shakes a little and that's it. If you get hit from behind or from the sides the camera shakes opposite of the respective direction, but beyond that it's hard to tell you're actually taking damage from the front or whether the Nazis are just missing you. I'm not asking for jam on my screen when I get hit, but there's barely an audible grunt, noticeable screen effect or anything else to indicate I'm being shot at other than my HP and armor value decreasing. One moment it's on 100 and the next thing you know it's completely empty. It feels like there's no difference between taking a little and a lot of damage, which can cause you to judge the current situation wrongly.
There are some new moves to BJ's arsenal. BJ can now perform a ground pound, which is incredibly clunky, pointless, slow, motion-sickness inducing, and just useless aside from breaking boxes. It's used briefly in the first levels where you can pound your way through grates on the floor to get to lower levels faster, but it's completely useless beside that. Knives are now replaced with axes, which are the meme weapons for this installment, like the pipes were in TOB. You can now perform Glory Kills like in nuDoom just by meleeing enemies when you're standing close to them, but you're given no invincibility frames during the animation and it just leaves you incredibly vulnerable when shooting the nazi would have been faster and safer. If you melee from the right angle you can whack nazis with the axe and kill them instantly anyways without being slowed down, so I really gotta ask what the hell the point of copying Glory Kills is. You don't get anything for doing it. The executions are definitely snappy, that axe cuts through nazis like a hot knife through butter. There's still that useless slide move which is too short and limits your movement too much, but it gives me the placebo effect that enemies are more likely to miss me when I slide, so maybe it actually does.
You also get three new contraptions of which you can choose one later in the game. One lets you shrink (kind of) so you can crawl through even smaller spaces, but the only reason to pick this is if you want to play stealthily, though I don't know why you would play TNC if you want stealth. The second are a bunch of stilts which increase your height and lets you peek OVER cover. Is kind of useless since you can already lean left and right, and you have to do the manual vault move to climb on anything which makes the levels still very vertically restrictive even with the stilts. The third lets you ram through walls and enemies, and is definitely cooler. The problem with it is that it's kind of cumbersome as running into something slightly staggers you and slows you down instead of continuing your bulldozer rampage. Ramming into enemies sometimes kills them at full health, sometimes it just knocks them down and you have to kill them manually. But it's definitely the coolest contraption of all. Unfortunately you only get these mid-game, so the levels before that aren't built around these contraptions at all. Which is a shame, because I think having the game be built around the ramming upgrade would be very cool.
You get six weapons this time around, which I think is slightly more than in TNO, with the sixth weapon depending on which timeline you chose. The pistol is eh. When dual-wielded it pales in DPS to the Sturmgewehr and in RoF to the Maschinenpistol. It can be upgraded to fire Magnum rounds which deal more damage, though I've never really noticed it having a noticeable impact, so the pistol is only any good for being silenced. The Maschinenpistol is a SMG which is decent at medium-range and can be upgraded to fire nailgun rounds which deal more damage but travel slower, which is a reasonable trade-off. Though I've never used it that much. The reason being is that most guns pale in comparison to the Sturmgewehr, which is what you will be using the most. When upgraded with the scope which lets you deal more damage with it at the cost of it being single-fire and upgrading it with armor piercing rounds which makes it ridiculously OP against mechanical enemies, your standard grunts can go down in two to four shots, with most things above being killable within two-three seconds. It's ridiculous.
Another thing to consider that hipfire with dual-wielded Sturmgewehren in scope mode might as well be 99% accurate (there is actually no reason for ironsights to even exist in this game or any kind of zoom, save for using the scope on the Sturmgewehr). With a ridiculous amount of DPS, ridiculous accuracy, plentiful ammo placement, and an upgrade which bypasses mechanical enemy armor, these are hands down the best weapons in the game. You really don't need to use anything else because with two of 'em you can deal with any situation in the game (unless you're playing stealthily), which begs the question why you even need other weapons.
There are still some other weapons in the game. The shotguns make a return. Bouncing pellets is now a fixed upgrade rather than a separate ammo type, which I think is an improvement. It has a new mode which lets you fire three shells at a time at the cost of a slower RoF, which I think is a good one. It's a bit overkill for regular mooks but it kills armored guys good when applied up close. They're not terribly effective in open spaces (especially when compared to double ARs), which is unfortunate because shotguns are the most fun guns to use. You also get a revolver-shaped mini-rocket launcher, but it ends up being rather useless in the presence of the almighty ARs as there's not a lot in the game that warrants a rocket to the face to begin with, especially not when double ARs can kill it faster than rockets can. There's your signature weapon depending on what timeline you picked. If you saved Wyatt, you get a silent sticky grenade launcher which can be used to silently stick enemies with explosives and have them go boom all at once, though I didn't use it all that much. The other is the LKW which acts like a sniper of some sorts, but with the double ARs you don't need to. The weapon balance is fucked, mate.
You also get more heavy weapons to play around with, like a kind of minigun and a kind of laser gun and a kind of grenade launcher and a kind of BFG. However they all slow you down immensely and get you killed by enemy fire unless incoming enemies are funneled through a corridor where you don't need to worry about enemies flanking you, so unless all the enemies aren't within a 45 degree cone of your barrel, you're the one who's going to get killed faster.
Weapon upgrades have been kind of changed. Instead of finding special upgrades for your weapons as the campaign progressed and maintaining that sense of progression and knowing what to build the levels around, you now find generic weapon upgrade kits which let you apply any kind of three selectable upgrades for each weapon. Using this the developers could sprinkle upgrades around as a means to make exploration more meaningful as you can place a worthless collectible as a secret for exploration so often, but I think it kind of demeans the progression. For player freedom it's good so stealthy players can slap on silencers ASAP, but upgrading your stuff feels less special as a result.
The perk system from TNO is still in place, where you upgrade skills by doing certain things instead of finding upgrade points, and it's made even more inconsequential here. The upgrades in question are boring crap like increased mag size, increased max item capacity, +5% faster crouch speed, +5% faster health regeneration, and a whole bunch of other boring crap. I wonder why the hell they couldn't make some things like slower overcharge deflation or faster crouch movement speed a base ability instead of an unlockable upgrade. I never liked this upgrade system since it just enhanced existing playstyles instead of allowing new ones or expanding existing ones, like what the Contraptions did. It just adds a bunch of distracting rudimentary challenges you need to follow to further optimize yourself. It doesn't really add anything to the game and you could easily do without it without losing anything, possibly replacing it with something better. It's less convoluted than TNO's system which hid some essential abilities behind the challenges which for some reason couldn't be available to you from the start, but the new one is just so inconsequential and feels like it's another symptom of AAA developers just
having to have some kind of RPG elements because replay value and all those other memes.
TNC is also still sticking to that 'play however you want' meme even though the main draw of the game is clearly supposed to be one-gun-in-each-hand over the top shooting action instead of ye olde basic press-crouch-to-enter-stealth-mode-and-perform-takedowns-from-behind stealth gameplay which has nothing on actual stealth games. Most people didn't bother with the stealth in Metal Gear Rising either unless they wanted to take the easy way out. Despite this the game still seems to clearly nudge you into playing stealthily whenever you can because playing stealthily is easier than killing everything with respawning enemies coming from everywhere. It sure would have saved me some time if I didn't take everything head-on, but I wanted to see how far I could take the game by being full-on aggressive. On Death Incarnate, it was rather painful. I know it's optional to play stealthily... but why? Focus your efforts into making something coherent instead. This ain't Deus Ex.
Which brings us to the new enemies I mentioned in the first paragraph, and why they're complete wasted potential. While they're an improvement over the dick-ass bulletsponge Übersoldaten in TNO and their bullshit ass hitscan weaponry and complete resistance against hitstun, the new enemies are more fair in their attacks, yet go down so easily that the role they're supposed to have during combat can never be truly fulfilled. How do they go down so quickly? Grab two fully upgraded ARs, shoot them in any part of the body ten to fifteen times or so, and they're dead within seconds. What a waste.
The new Übersoldaten even have a weak spot on their back which you can shoot for bonus damage, but the ARs work wonders against Übersoldaten from the front to the point where you don't even have to take advantage of the weakspots! There's even a mini-boss type of enemy which fires a barrage of rockets at you, but you can cheese it by standing behind a piece of cover blocking the line of sight just enough so you can unload your two ARs into its arms or torso while it is unable to get a lock on you. The dogs also make a more dangerous return with them dragging you to the floor and rendering you temporarily immobile, which is doubly annoying when they're running right around the corner and bite you before you know what's going on.
Another problem which prevents the new enemy from reaching their potential is a simple but core one, namely that they always go accompanied by hitscan Nazi grunts. Hitscan Nazi grunts who, on Death Incarnate, have ridiculous accuracy over long ranges and can reduce your health to zero within two seconds when they get a shot at you and reduce your armor to zero practically whenever they fire at you. In the old Doom you'd always prioritize the zombie guys because they're hitscan and you'd usually have enough cover and opportunity to take them out without taking damage, but the zombies didn't fucking annihilate all of your HP if you were in their line of sight for longer than 2 seconds. So even if there's this big guy firing big-ass slow lasers at you, you have to put him at the backburner because there's a fucking human-sized nazi grunt, some Fritz who recently enlisted in the Macht, with a fucking standard-issue pistol pointed towards you, so of course the big-ass death machine should be ignored for the moment.
What we have here is two different types of enemies who belong in different types of levels. The hitscan enemies would work better in enclosed levels with a lot of corners and side-routes everywhere so you can break line of sight and flank nazis without having to worry about the hitscan, whereas the new enemies would work better in more open levels where you'd have more room to dodge their attacks, if they were more numerous and didn't die as quickly. Instead we get an awkward mix of both, where mechanical enemies are just a minor hindrance you need to fix with your double ARs before moving on with the rest. Unfortunately the level design on the whole barely even managed to reach TNO's or TOB's heights, for heights they had whenever they had enough common sense to put you in a small arena-maze where you could get up close to encroaching nazis without having to play it like a popamole, kind of like in F.E.A.R. Some levels have crawlspaces dedicated for stealth, some have secrets, but nothing feels particularly outstanding.
Meanwhile TNC likes to play the more open-ended level type of game, with several nazis in front of you forcing you to pop in and out of cover as if it were CoD or some shit. TNC tends to take TNO's Commander mechanic a bit too far. Basically whenever an alarm is raised before you kill the commander, reinforcements will keep spawning in seemingly random positions in the level until you killed the Commander. There's always a radar on-screen which determines how far away you are from the Commander, however it cannot make the distinction whether a Commander is above or beneath me in the level, costing me precious time trying to figure that one out. Levels in TNC can be quite vertical at times, but in a rather bad way. Suppose you're on the bottom floor making your way through loudly and raising the alarm in the process, this will prompt the Nazis in the first and second floor to usually take a route where they go behind my back even though at times the faster way is to my front. I don't think this is a conscious course of action on the AI's part, because normally the AI never really attempts to flank you, not even on Death Incarnate. I can mind attacks from the left and right, but not from behind, especially not with enemies randomly spawning in in ways I cannot predict.
Commanders just appear way too fucking often and are not that engaging. Often you're better off rushing through as if you were speedrunning the game, and kill the commander on your way through, which kind of works with the ram upgrade and a shotgun in each hand, unfortunately you still can't fire while sprinting. I miss stuff like the hospital shootout in TOB or the submarine engine room fight in TNO, damnit. Randomly spawning hitscan enemies you can't see spawning in is bad for the soul.
An important distinction should be made that while the Nazis you encounter are very lethal (on Death Incarnate), they are also very dumb. They hide in cover for longer than necessary, they only use grenades if you stay in the same place for a certain amount of time instead of aggressively, they don't make an attempt to preserve their own life when you're shooting at them from a crawlspace, they can't tell a friend of theirs is being executed right next to them, and they think that walking right into a corridor filled with dead Nazis where you're still busy slaughtering incoming nazis before they can react is a good idea. The reaction times for Nazis is thankfully not instantaneous, meaning a safer course of action is to funnel Nazis into a corridor or doorway where you're right around the corner putting lead in their heads before they can tell what's going on. Which is silly. There are AIs in several other games who recognize the player trying to pull such a stunt, and then respond in kind with grenades. The Nazis may say they're trying to flank you, but ironically a lot of levels don't even allow them to flank you, nor will they seriously attempt to. Their moronic behaviour should be more apparent on lower difficulties when you don't have to worry about getting killed as much.
Another thing to point out is that if we were to look at how the ruthless of efficiency of the Nazi forces in gameplay were to relate to the Nazi threat the narrative sets up, we'd come to the conclusion that
the Nazis are all a bunch of useless fucking idiots who somehow managed to conquer the whole world but are dumb as a ton of bricks and mostly act as cannon fodder, yet when the story dictates it they're supposed to be a serious threat, which just creates this disconnect between gameplay and story. But not even the story is really consistent about average Nazi intelligence, at times they're practically Sturmtroopers, at others they're just regular joes fighting for their Vaterland, and at others they're ruthless homicidal maniacs.
I'm starting to think that idTech 6 handles sound rather poorly, or is handled by incompetents, because even after nuDoom TNC does a ridiculous poor job when it comes to positional sound design or sound design in general, especially where sound mixing is concerned. Weapon firing sounds are too silent, enemies make no footstep sounds to give you an idea where they are (and they still have the gall to unintentionally sneak up behind you), enemy-player callouts are minimal in combat, and you can't really pinpoint the origin of a sound because of how noisy everything is. The only things that stand out in the audio-mix are the screaming of Commanders over the mic, some other characters talking over the mic, heavy weapons being fired, and some telegraphed attacks being charged. Past that you're practically deaf and no other sound stands out, which is subpar compared to the sound design in F.E.A.R. where shit not only sounded satisfying, but was actually kind of helpful.
Mick Gordon returns to compose for TNC, and I have trouble calling this the OST anything above noticeable. The combat tracks aren't played as often as they should be, and they all tend to blend together, if they aren't the same song to begin with. The badass new Wolfenstein theme only makes its return in the main menu, whereas past that it's never used in-game unlike in TNO where a remixed version was played in the last mission of the game. Aside from Changeover Day (which is more of a joke song played in promo material), I don't think there's a song for a particular section of the game anybody would go out of their way to look up and find out what it was. I think that Mick Gordon should mix his game up soon before he starts getting stale. His style he pioneered in TNO and nuDoom hasn't really advanced or been used to any kind of interesting extent here in TNC, so he's gotta step his game up sooner or later.
There's also that story thingie in the game. You once again take up the role of BJ Blasckozwicz, nazi-killer extraordinaire, who directly after the events of the first game finds himself near death after assassinating General Deathshead from the previous game. You remember which guy you actually rescued at the start of TNO, and for some reason you also start to experience flashbacks of your childhood memories. Memories which involve your dad beating your mom, and your dad forcing you to shoot your dog in order to teach you a life lesson. You're not really given much of an option, you can't continue and your dad will repeat the same line over and over if you do nothing instead of pulling the trigger.
Then you wake up from a coma (again) and find yourself in an U-boat you captured in the previous game, which also happens to be under assault by Nazis (just like in the previous game). However your injuries have left you unable to move your legs, so the only way to move forward is to, wait for it... ride around in a
wheelchair. Did you just mention
wheelchairs? Yes, that's right, you get to ride around in a
wheelchair. Dude, are you fucking serious about the
wheelchair? Yes, you get to ride a fucking
wheelchair. Fucking
wheelchairs.
Wheelchairs.
WHEELCHAIRS.
WHEEEEEEEELCHAAAAAIRS.
HOTWHEELS.
IT'S A MOTHER FUCKING WHEELCHAIR. THIS GAME HAS A
SEAT WITH WHEELS YOU CAN DRIVE AROUND WITH. DID YOU HEAR ABOUT
WHEELCHAIR?
VROOM VROOM CHUGGA CHUGGA VROOM VROOM. I CANNOT BELIEVE THERE IS A
WHEELCHAIR.
HOTWHEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The wheelchair mission lasts about ten minutes.
A bit later an unskippable in-game cutscene ensues where General Engels from the first game captures you and forces you to watch as she decapitates Caroline, that one leader chick from the first game. It feels to me like they tried to emulate the Deathshead forced kill choice scene from the first game where your friends were pinned down and you were forced to choose which one of them to have killed and turned into an experiment by Deathshead. In this case the game does a rather poor job at making us care for this supposedly important character. In TNC she briefly kind of appears twice in the intro with most her plot relevance being situated in TNO, but it never hurts for a sequel to give us a reminder of why we should care. There's probably a sadder reason why it had to be her to die, namely so you can get to her Da'at Yichud exoskeleton suit and get your body moving properly again. Probably to compensate for not establishing Caroline's importance at the beginning, they have BJ talk to himself
very often as if he were talking to Caroline in heaven. That's some patchwork writing there.
Some scuffle happens when General Engels' fat daughter rebels after Caroline has her suit and head forcefully taken off, so you can equip the Da'at Yichud suit and get your legs moving again.
The Da'at Yichud suit, which I'll call the Jewsuit because it just rolls off the tongue better (seriously, try saying it out loud a few times), lets your broken body move again, and raises your maximum armor cap to 200 while your maximum HP remains at 50 HP to emphasizes you're a broken man being recycled to live a bit longer in a tin suit. However it's no Nanosuit despite its cool appearance, so there's no cool abilities attached to it. Even though Caroline used it to take out several nazis at once bare-handed, all it lets you do is move again.
A shootout ensues, General Engel escapes, and you escape back to the submarine. The submarine itself has been turned into a resistance base where everyone from the Kreisau Circle has taken up camp. Inbetween objectives when you're milling about doing chores, you can listen in to some conversations of other characters. Some of these can be entertaining, most of them I skipped because they were on the long side. Your submarine might as well be called Noah Ark's, given that it contains a Pole, a Jew, an Italian, a Frenchwoman, a Spaniard, a Japanese, a Swede, an African, African-Americans, a Scot, a Czechoslovak, a pig, a Fin, a German, and a Hungarian, most which tend to make their nationality clear by interjecting a few words of their native language while speaking English. The Fin even wants to make a sauna on the submarine. Though they all don't come in pairs. The existence of Italy and Japan is acknowledged here, but Italy's and Japan's involvement as Axis powers are still largely ignored, probably because it'd be too much of a sensitive issue to punch in the face.
We get sent down to exterminate the Nazi's in the basement of the submarine who've been surviving there for 5 months because people forgot to check the basement because they thought it didn't exist (lol?), and some time later again we go down the basement again to pick up a nuke we also supposedly had lying in the basement all along (LOL?). The idea is to start a revolution, so we get to visit a nuked NYC and experience post-traumatic Fallout 3 flashbacks with its copious amounts of
rubble. Everyone here wears hazmats, but our Jewsuit protects us from radiation and gas, so we're good. You meet up with Samuel L. Jackson's ma and wacky alien conspiracy meme man, as you hightail it out of there. Even though the story is wank, I have to say the acting is top notch, and so are the facial animations.
Depending on who you saved, your cutscenes will contain either Wyatt or Fergus. Wyatt is nervous about having to step into Caroline's shoes as leader, though all he does for the entire duration of the game is use drugs and get high loudly over the microphone, wasting everyone's time in the process as he becomes little more than a joke character. Fergus gets a new robot arm which is trying to kill him, while constantly getting up in arms about Mrs. Jackson, though not being as much of a joke character.
The plan is to put a nuke inside the reactor of Area 52 where all the nazi head honchos are, so you can wipe them all out in one go, and maybe some civilians too. There is something questionable about leaving a nuke inside a nuclear reactor for safekeeping and then being to somehow detonate it several kilometers away on the surface with your dinky remote, but I don't think we're supposed to ask questions. So to get there we need to infiltrate a suburban American city under the disguise of a fireman while there's a Nazi parade going on, and everybody is cheering! This is one of the rare moments where TNC actually makes use of its alternate history setting. I actually took it very slowly and tried to listen in on most of the conversations because America living under a Nazi regime is an interesting aspect to explore and one we somehow don't see much of in the game. We hear everybody is practicing their German for Changeover Day when everybody will shift from speaking English to German. Everybody is aching to see the newest German kino. Slavery is cool again. People are ratting others out for favors with the nazis. The KKK is walking around in broad daylight. Seems like living under the Nazi regime isn't all that bad, unless you're not white, that is.
You make your way to ancient alien meme man's diner (how the hell does he manage to keep a legit diner up and running when the first time we met him he was locked up in the top of a tower building of the irradiated NYC wastes, which civilians shouldn't be able to normally access? does he make regular trips back and forth?) as Kommandant Milschschake barges in for his milkshake and reenacts the implied interrogation scene from the first game without any of the interactivity or tension before promptly getting shot in the head. Under the diner there's a tunnel leading to an underground Nazi base (with a lit fucking exit the Nazis should've very clearly noticed during construction of the base) which has a rocket train leading to Area 52. Dead nazis ensue. You insert the nuke, hightail it on your motorcycle, but decide to give your old home a visit so you can get that one wedding ring.
Unfortunately your dad had the same idea that, since you were close, you might be coming for a visit to the old abandoned house. After some 'non-linear' storytelling (Gone Home eat your heart out) you explore your house a little, find the weapon upgrade in your basement (lol?) and go to your old bedroom where you find your father waiting for you. He tells you that he sent your ma away to a concentration camp and calls you a failure of a son given that he never intended to raise a killer and a terrorist. So you brutally execute him. Unfortunately your old abandoned home still happened to have a working telephone line (lol?) so the Nazis sent their Ausmerzer to drag the whole thing into the sky. BJ isn't a very smart person, so his first idea is to detach the claws holding the house a hundred feet from the ground, which after doing so send you crashing towards the floor and get you captured by General Engel.
Your dumb captured ass gets presented in front of public television for bonus humiliation, before briefly getting thrown in the slammer. Ancient alien meme man comes to you as his lawyer in an attempt to have you escape, detailing the whole plan of escape without considering the possibility that the room you two are in might be bugged, so he just gets killed before he can execute his master plan in an admittedly somewhat hilarious scene which then somehow turns into a femdom scene once General Engel steps in. Your ass gets the übersentence, but you're BJ Blastkowich so you just rip open your shackles and engage a shootout in the courtroom which is without a doubt the worst level in the game.
This one deserves its own paragraph. In the courtroom fight you start off with no weapons aside from the SMG you just picked up (which isn't suitable for long-range engagements), and are stuck beneath five guys behind you on one side and a whole regiment of incoming nazis on the other side. There's no other option for you here other than to hide behind cover and pick off nazis little by little. The guys behind you can be solved with a grenade, if you can get to the grenades without getting shot, that is. The incoming nazis will be shooting at you from the balcony and from turret emplacements near the entrance, with useful supplies being scattered all over the place you can't get to without tanking a bullet. But especially on Death Incarnate this is like playing Super Meat Boy where you can't set a single foot outside without getting almost shot to death. If you manage to survive long enough, the courtroom side gates will open where you can run outside and make it a whole lot easier on yourself because all Nazis will just follow you like a duckling follows his mother. One phase it's about getting shot from every possible angle, which goes against the style of every other level in the game where you at least had SOME leeway in breaking line of fire while moving around, the other it's just funneling nazis into the meat grinder again because it is the safest and most efficient solution given how many there are out there and because the AI is braindead. They won't try to throw nades or try to flank you for doing that shit, they just keep on coming like Lemmings. This might as well have been a level ripped straight out of CoD and nobody would have noticed. For all the peeking you're supposed to do in this fight, the hitboxes for some of the level geometry is fucked too. For some reason when you're peeking around one of the courthouse room seats aiming at the head of a nazi on the turret, you'll be shooting invisible walls instead, which is just ridiculous.
To rub it in your face even more, everything the courthouse level was just your imagination, so you didn't just break free and kill everything. Back to reality. You get the übersentence, you get a public execution by General Engel herself, you get decapitated in first person. You fucking die. The End.
Technically a severed head will be alive for a couple of seconds or minute, so the rest of your resistance buddies manage to catch your head using a drone before it would fall into a massive pit of fire, and then kind of keep you alive by feeding your brain oxygen in a tank, just like in Futurama. Thankfully every facet of this out-there plan just so happened to work out. Your pals also inform you that Caroline had a spare vat-grown Nazi body lying around in your basement she stole one day from the Nazis (LOL?), which would never see much use until someone conveniently got his head chopped clean off which could in turn be transplanted to this unused body. They even have the monkey-cat thing huffing around on your tank to tell you 'we did foreshadow the head transplant after all :^)'. It's not so much that I have a problem with believing the idea of someone getting his head chopped off, being put in a safe state within the nick of time, and the head being transplanted on a new body, but that it is a cop-out to what was being established before.
At the start of the game it was revealed that BJ's kidneys were failing and that he did not have long to live. The suit would keep him alive a bit longer, but it was more of a patchwork solution. He'd have to deal with the fact of telling Anya that she might have to raise their kids alone, a fact he'd soon come to accept. So when his imminent death is just thrown directly out of the window because of a deus ex machina, it begs the question what the hell the point was of the whole dying thing. It's like that one comedic take on the classical train departure scene where Mr. in the train looking out of the window and Mrs. on the perron are wishing eachother goodbye, as Mrs. runs after the train once it departs, but in this case the train departure is delayed because of technical issues, so after wishing eachother tons of farewells they're now awkwardly just standing there after expecting the train to depart and weakly turn away from eachother. That's pretty much the only way I can describe someone's imminent death being made out to be a huge deal only for it to be written out of existence as it never happened. The whole plotline is straight up dropped.
I have no idea why they chose a fresh nazi übersoldat body in particular to pilfer, as the only thing they could really do with it is put it in the fridge. Supposedly Caroline stole it, but I have no idea what she would intend to do with it, let alone trying to splice her head on a male body, which would just be awkward for everyone involved later on. Supposedly these plot holes are supposed to be explained through background notes and
lore stuff you find by ruffling through everybody's diaries, because apparently explaining these plot holes away wasn't deemed that important because apparently you're just expected to take this shit at face value. When you ask Anya about the garage shootout with the nazis when meme man's rescue plan failed, Anya just tells you to 'not worry about it'. For what kind of cretin is this shit being written for?
Maybe most of the plot holes would make more sense if I read all the lore, but the problem is that there's
so fucking much of it. Everywhere you look there's some piece of lore in the form of newspaper clippings or postcards, most of them being a waste of your time. When you put that many lore pieces with many of them having nothing of interest or importance to say in a game not paced around analyzing every little thing, how the fuck am I expected to read all of this shit? Lore material is used for expanding the world through supplementary material. You don't need to read a book to understand what's going on in a game like Halo. Hiding vital pieces of characterization or motivation of major characters in little snippets is just a hack's way of doing things when the main cutscenes fail to adequately explain everything. Plot holes in the main story shouldn't be explained away in supplementary material unless you're bound to get your hands on that material, especially not in this kind of game. We're not even told why the hell Engel even received a promotion to general after the fuck-up under her command that was Belica in TNO.
BJ also hands Set one of those Da'at Yichud doodads ancient alien meme man gave him before dying, which Set treats with extreme importance. Supposedly the thing is a doorknob to some Da'at Yichud vault of some kind, but we don't know, and we won't know until the sequel. Through several cutscenes we are constantly given the impression that that thing is very very important, but we won't know until next game, so why the hell is our time being wasted with this crap? All this plotline serves to do is to set up a MacGuffin for the sequel, but it is done beforehand so we can't accuse the writers of pulling things out of their ass. Even so, it is done very cheaply. We know it'll be important, but we are not told why. Knock it off with that crap.
Mrs. Jackson sends you back to the DC Wasteland for no real reason other than to obtain some document of which we never know the importance of, as the only real purpose of this mission is to pad out the game. After that we're supposed to find some resistance leader named Horton in order to bolster our forces, after which we are sent to New Orleans where we suffer post-traumatic Fallout 4 flashbacks. Again with the downtrodden urban areas? A bunch of dead nazis later we find the guy, and after a couple of drinks Horton and BJ end up in an argument about Horton and his bolshevist pals avoiding the draft because they didn't feel like fighting the war for the bourgeoisie in Wall Street, with BJ blaming them for not fighting back in time to prevent the Nazis from rolling over America which brought them to their current situation. So it kind of ends up being a 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' kind of alliance.
Horton gives you one of those big robothunds to put up a distraction for the Nazis while Horton and his crew are escaping. When riding the dog you can set everything on fire with one of the better representations of flamethrowers in videogames I've seen, and only the dog takes damage when you're riding it, so you're safe. On Death Incarnate it just takes way too much damage than it should, the enemies are too bloody ruthless on it for what I suppose should've been a roflstomp section where you're just burning your way through. Once it dies you need to go all the way down on foot. The dog being a big and slow thing does not get a lot of maneuverability against hitscan enemies unless you're playing the funnel game. You can heal the dog by picking up armor from fallen foes, but even when riding a giant dog the auto-pickup radius is still unbelievably finnicky. Often I found that I had to scout ahead on foot and kill the nazis waiting ahead so my dog could pass unharmed without tanking a zillion bullets.
This section works better on lower difficulties, which is surely what the game is actually balanced around. I'm convinced the thought process for Death Incarnate was to increase enemy AI parameters to obscene amounts and just let players deal with it instead of properly testing and balancing the game around it. At least NIGHTMARE difficulty in nuDoom was somewhat fair, especially compared to this dreck. Yet MachineGames had the gall to backport the permadeath ULTRA-NIGHTMARE mode from nuDoom as well under the name of 'Mein Leben!', where you have to play through Death Incarnate without dying. Now ULTRA-NIGHTMARE was actually possible, whereas Mein Leben is only possible through copious amount of stealth and crouchwalking and funneling nazis around corners. It's possible to win Mein Leben, through the least fun of way of playing. Compare that to where you had to be at peak performance in nuDoom on ULTRA-NIGHTMARE. You can't just add superhard difficulty modes for bonus hardcore points and make the most viable way of playing the game on that difficulty without constantly dying the most passive and boring-to-watch way possible. I hate to use nuDoom as a standard for
anything, but when you're clearly just ripping off/backporting shit from nuDoom with even less regard to consistency, you're only outing yourself as more of a clueless chucklefuck than the flukes over at id.
Horton doesn't actually do anything in this game, the story could have proceeded just fine without him as he does absolutely nothing of consequence or even help. We just haul his ass out of his New Orleans in this game so he can actually do something important in the sequel. Wouldn't it then be a better idea to rescue him in the sequel or have him be actually integral to the plot?
BJ and pals escape the incoming Ausmerzer's grasp by firing a nuke over New Orleans to propel themsleves away using the shockwave of the blast, killing all remaining nazis and non-nazis in New Orleans. Good job, BJ. Truly you are a hero of the people. It's not like the small ragtag band Horton brought with himself to the submarine could have been all of the survivors in New Orleans. After that you're supposed to get the codes for the Ausmerzer's control system, however these are locked away all the way over in fucking Venus. So the idea is that you're going to pose as an actor auditioning for the role of a movie depicting the madness of Terror-Billy which is being shot on Venus, and infiltrate the base from there. Hold the fuck on, haven't I heard this before? Haven't we traveled all the way up to the Moon in TNO under disguise to get some sekrit codes too?
Yeah okay, I'm starting to see a pattern here. We've got the 'BJ wakes up from a coma during a nazi assault as he proceeds to move around with difficulty and kill everything in his path' plot beat with the asylum level and WHEEEEEELCHAAAAAIRS, the 'main protagonist forces you to watch as he executes one of your friends right in front of you' plot beat with Deathshead and General Engel at the start, the 'nazi commander subtly interrogates you while you're wearing a disguise' plot beat with Engel in TNO and Kommandant Erdbeermilsch, and the 'infiltrate offworld Nazi colony under disguise to obtain secret codes' plot beat with the Moon and Venus. It's not even done in a smart way where it's done in an established cycle, but more in a lazy way where they're trying to recreate the highs of the previous game by simply doing it again, except worse. The asylum level gave you a much better sense of being a fish fresh out of water. Engel doesn't even force you to make a tough decision even though she does suggest it. Milkshake interrogation is mostly irrelevant and doesn't set up any character, whereas it served as an introduction for Engel in TNO. Venus just looks like drab compared to the Moon in TNO (save for some cool-looking interior areas), especially when you're walking on the surface (which given the air pressure on Venus shouldn't even be possible) which looks like it was ripped straight out of nuDoom, and nuDoom wasn't terribly aesthetically pleasing to begin with.
Back to the story, as we're about to get comfy in our seat talking to other actors, someone
very special barges into the room, namely our best pal Adolf Hitler! He doesn't look so good though, I wonder if he's okay. He's also the one overseeing the production of this movie after all, still trying to continue his legacy as an artist. I don't know how he managed to survive after he got shot to pieces in his mech suit, but apparently he just did and probably forgot about it. Old age and paranoia must've gotten to him, because he's claiming he was the one who captured BJ rather than General Engel. He's also seeing Jews everywhere, which probably isn't too far from the truth since BJ is sitting inside the room. Nonetheless he accuses the actor sitting next to you of being a Jew for addressing
Mister Hitler wrongly, whereas the actor responds by saying he's only from Arizona, whereas Hitler responds by shooting him in the head. Hitler then decides to take a load off by urinating blood and vomiting on the floor. I get that he's supposed to be a decrepit hollow husk of a man, but you don't need to go into toilet humor territory when the scene did a good job at getting the message across without body fluids.
Hitler then forces you at gunpoint to read the lines you just had practiced and wrote on your hand as a cheatsheet, though all the lines are wiped and hard to make out. If you mess up, you die. Otherwise BJ proceeds to read the correct lines in the most flat way possible. Whereas the guy next to you does a perfect job at it. Hitler even commends the guy next to you for understanding the psyche of Terror-Billy much better than you do. It's about time to rehearse a fight scene, but Hitler is tired and takes a little nap on the floor. One other actor tries to wrestle the gun from a Nazi soldier in this scene, but only gets a nosebleed in return. Hitler shoots him for doing such a poor job.
It's your turn now. You can actually kick Hitler in the head and kill him dead while he's still lying asleep, though the room you're in is filled to the brim with Nazi soldiers and war machines, so if you try to kill him you'll get an inevitable game over no matter what you do. Don't know what all the hubbub about this game being a commentary on the current state of America is when you can't even kill Hitler. They probably wanted to keep him around for the sequel. Then BJ breaks cover and brutally executes the nazi for no real reason. This brutal display of violence luckily speaks directly to Hitler's heart, and he gives you the job as the actor for BJ Blackowitz immediately while killing off the other remaining actor.
This somehow manages to be the high point of the game given that it actually manages to be somewhat humorous in context while also being disturbing at the same time. Hitler here is like the old grandpa who used to be a war hero back in the day, but now everyone else tries to coax him into the attic because nobody really wants to put him out of his misery, as he decides to come down the stairs and everyone has to pretend to like him because it's tradition. Kind of reminds me of that old guy Vlad had hanging around in his attic in Max Payne 2. It manages to avoid the rampant tonal inconsistency of the rest of the game (toilet humor aside) where you have a raving demented madman waving around his gun like he owns the place, but in a way he does so everyone just puts up with it. It's not improbable, nor does it break the atmosphere for cheap laughs. The insanity is actually acknowledged here.
You then get inside the base and wreak some havoc using a gun you smuggled in (so much for Nazi security standards), and take a walk on the Venus surface. Shooting on the surface of Venus doesn't differ at all from how you do it normally. The only thing that changes is having to refill the coolant supply of your suit every minute if you don't wish to burn to a crisp. It's more tedious than anything. Coolant refill stations are everywhere, so you're never really in danger of running low on coolant. The animation for refilling your suit takes longer than it really needs to. Other than that you just blast on like normal.
I'd also like to point out that the UI in this game is a big downgrade stylistically. The UI of TOB/TNO had a neat font which fit in with the rest of the game as the same font was used a lot everywhere, whereas for TNC they went for the minimalism meme, so everything is a transparent gray and nothing stands out anymore. They also need to keep putting in reminders to remind you that you haven't looked at these incredibly basic tutorials in the menu. Just go away, I already know how to move!
BJ then steals the codes (he is an expert at operating Nazi computers) and hijacks an UFO back to the Earth (he is an expert at operating Nazi vehicles for space travel). The writers must've forgotten in the process of copying the Moon scene from TNO that a journey from Venus to Earth would probably take MONTHS, though this doesn't seem to be acknowledged anywhere. Anyways, your friends in the submarine throw a surprise birthday party for you, and everyone gets plastered. You then either go looking for a suicidal Wyatt or Fergus' robot arm. Now that everything is in place, the plan is to hijack General Engel's Ausmerzer using the codes you found on Venus while she's giving a public interview live on television about how she executed the greatest terrorist who ever lived. The Ausmerzer manages to be one of the better levels in the game because of the lack of wide open spaces and side routes during fights, so at least that's a positive.
What's not so positive is the final boss at the end of the Ausmerzer. Yes, this is also the final level. The 'final boss' are two upgraded versions of the übersoldaten you encountered throughout the game who can fire a BFG, are larger, and have more health to boot. But in terms of behavior they're just the same as the regular übersoldat. So you kill them the same way: standing a good distance away and unloading your double ARs at them until they explode. They can dash a good distance towards you, but so can you run away from them. What a lousy final boss this is. And Mick Gordon still can't compose a fitting track for a final boss fight. There is zero sense of climax to this fight with no (emotional) build-up, especially when compared to the Deathshead fight in TNO which was mostly a puzzle boss (puzzle bosses being shit by design when they aren't in a puzzle game, because they only challenge you to solve some arbitrary puzzle to win instead of challenging you on the skills you learned throughout the game). On paper this fight is better designed, as you have multiple high-priority targets to contend with while you have to deal with randomly spawning Nazi grunts, but again two ARs turn this fight into a massive joke. I have no idea whether they were referencing the Bruiser Brothers at the end of Knee-deep in the Dead, but they did a poor job regardless. Besides, you don't want your final boss to be a reference to only the
first episode of Doom.
You enter the bridge, after which a ridiculous cutscene ensues where BJ finds himself ambushed by a force of Nazis who were hiding behind the door. But at the same time Anya runs past them (they didn't notice her?), throws three grenades in their direction (all unpinned at the same time), body tackles you on the floor (somebody please think of the babies), before the grenades explode and create a shower of blood and guts (it just keeps raining men!), as Anya takes off her burning jacket to fire at the surviving robot dog with a gun in each hand and in her half-naked, pregnant, blood-covered glory, punctuated by the exploding dogbot (wat). This made the paternal instincts in even a loveless virgin like me cringe at such carelessness with the babies. Doctors tend to recommend against firing a weapon while pregnant because the vibrations of the recoil might induce early childbirth, let alone the negative effects her stress under combat is causing for the embryos. When someone is handling something so fragile, you can't help but cringe when they don't seem to care about properly handling the fragile wares. I get that they want to set her up as a badass of some kind, but they really didn't have to, especially not in a way like this. I know that pregnant women technically
can be useful in the line of fire, it's just not a very
smart thing to do.
You hack the Ausmerzer with ze codes, and it's yours now. Which only leaves one thing. The team heads to the broadcasting station where General Engel is being interviewed on live TV. So you make a public reappearance by publicly and violently executing General Engel with an axe. Plop goes her eye. Maybe I'd care a little more if it were more personal like it was with Deathshead, whereas Engel just was this mook following me around who also executed Caroline, the latter being handled poorly in terms of making the player care. So after that whole TV segment where you and your team are being made out to be violent terrorists, you commit an act of violent terror on live TV, in front of people who probably regard you as just a violent terrorist. Mrs. Jackson/Horton or Wyatt, depending on whether you saved Fergus or Wyatt, then tell the American people to rise up against the Nazi oppressors, that the time for sitting idly by has passed and that it's time for a revolution. Then the credits roll as the cheesiest possible song starts playing.
I don't think the revolution will come though. From what little we've seen of America under Nazi rule, the people (or at least the white people), seem to be living comfortably, with the only complaint apparently being that the food sucks. I don't think they're in a mood to grab their guns and start shooting Nazis in the middle of the street just because this guy who was made out to be the most violent and dangerous terrorist to have ever lived told you to. There remains the question of how he came back to life after receiving a public execution, but TNC doesn't touch on that point. So the minorities who are already actively being oppressed will most likely be fighting back, but I think most of them already were. That just leaves the slaves, which are only mentioned off-hand and are never seen.
That was a crappy ending though. TNC clearly suffers from the middle-child syndrome of trilogies where the first has the advantage of justifying its own existence by setting up the world and the characters, whereas the second often only exists to set up things that will get resolved in the third and final part, making the second on its own feel rather weak. There is no real sense of closure to TNC unlike with TNO. You don't even get to see the thing you were working for towards in TNC (the revolution), whereas TNO could work as a stand-alone story about killing General Deathshead. If you're going for this kind of set-up where things only really get in motion with the final part, then you should at least end the second part on some personal note or with a sense of accomplishment at the very least. TNC feels like it ended at the halfway point of a bigger game.
After that you're warped back to the submarine, where Mrs. Jackson tells you that the revolution really is going on in the background, even though you don't get to see it all. Really, just trust her. Buy the DLC to see how it turns out. After that you're only left with a bunch of side-missions where you get to assassinate a bunch of random Nazi commanders. All these missions reuse the levels from the main game, so you're not gonna see something new here. The enemy placement might be a little different, but in the grand scale it doesn't feel like it really matters. Sometimes you'll play through levels in reverse, even though this feels like a cheap way to make the levels feels somewhat fresh when some levels clearly aren't built around being played in reverse.
For example, when you trigger an alarm, a Commander will always retreat to the same position in the back of the level where he can be safe. However, if you were to reverse the direction from where you start the level and where you must go next, the Commander safety position remains the same even though it is not logical at all given the circumstances. So you might get Commanders retreating to positions right next to you as a result of these levels being reused with zero effort involved, which makes zero sense.
YOU SHOULD ALL BE RUNNING AWAY FROM ME.
You can go complete all those side-missions, but I don't think it will unlock anything of interest. You can also go collectible hunting, if you're some kind of completionist. The game tends to clock around nine hours, which can be longer on Death Incarnate because of all the deaths, and a bit shorter if you skip all the cutscenes. There's not a whole lot of replay value, as the timeline choice at the start of the game only gives you a different weapon which you won't use all that often and an altered set of cutscenes.
That's The New Colossus for you. The gameplay turned out to be a dig bissapointment, even though I'm probably the only one to really get his hopes up about it. The difficulty here is mostly the bad kind of difficulty. I'm not sure what the deal is with the story. I'm told that this is
just an over the top story which is not meant to be taken seriously, even though there are several story segments in the game which are played completely straight with no humor behind it or whatsoever, so I can't believe that at all. I'm sure if you told the writer that this is
just a fun story which is not meant to be taken seriously, he'd probably awkwardly nod in false agreement, as most writers do when their drama is considered a good comedy. The two different tones are only detrimental to eachother. When it tries to be funny, it feels out of place and sometimes disturbing given how gory it can get. When it tries to be serious, the impact is lessened because you're expecting something more light-hearted. Only rarely does it really manage to strike a balance, but overall it comes off as not knowing what it wants to be. And then it ends on a poor note too. What's more unfortunate is that the alternate history aspect just feels wasted here too. Don't waste your time on this unless you're curious about how the story pans out or to learn what happens when you awkwardly try to force old-school elements in a shooter which is overtly modern.
Even as a political commentary this game comes off as a political cartoon you'd find in a highschool newspaper. There's nothing of insight to be found or learned here, aside from violence being the solution to everything. I think everyone knows that one already. It's not even that related to current-day events, yet we have people who treat this game as some kind of stress relief with nazis as their target. There's cheaper and better stress relief on the market than The New Colossus. I'd say The New Order/The Old Blood was better than this crap.
And we
still don't know the involvement of Imperial Japan in this new Reich. Quit beating around the bush MachineGames,
I want my fucking nazi mechs damnit
I don't think this game deserves that much thought out into it.
lololololo
:vivelafrance:
