Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (

2017

)

Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein. I love you, I hate you. You draw me in with fantastic FPS combat, then you piss me off with your retarded cinematics. I'll admit, as I was working my way through Machine Games' follow up to the criminally overrated Wolfenstein: The New Order [2014], I was torn. On the one hand, The New Colossus has refined The New Order's formula, the gunfights are more visceral, the issue with annoying bullet-sponge enemies has been fixed, and stealth is an actual workable approach rather than a glorified mini-game. Sure, enemy variety is still pathetically limited (you have like six different types of nazi grunts whose only difference is how much armor they're wearing, quick robots, slow robots, dogs, and two mini-bosses that get constantly recycled – Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem [2021] has three times as many enemy types in its first mission alone) and you'll be stuck using the same five guns for the entire game, but in every other way, the combat has been significantly improved. Whereas in the previous game I'd groan at the prospect of another lengthy slug-fest with a horde of generic Nazi troopers, here I was genuinely excited whenever I caught sight of their gas masks and stahlhelms. Indeed, tellingly most of my problems with the New Colossus relate to what happens in-between the game's numerous shootouts.

Indeed, as I look back at the game I can only see one significant fumble in the gameplay department, which occurs when the main character BJ Blazkowicz is captured by the Nazis and made to stand trial. Just as the judge is about to pass sentence BJ bursts out of his bonds and engages in a running battle with the court guards, only to kill all the Nazis in the courthouse and make his escape. This turns out to be a fantasy, a mere daydream that BJ has as he's nodding in and out of consciousness while the court passes sentence on him. This in-and-of-itself is fine. It plays on the player's expectations and if you stop for a moment you'll realize how absurd it is well before you clear the courthouse. The problem is, you have to complete this dream sequence to advance the game and for some reason, Machine Games made it the most difficult section in the entire game! It doesn't make any narrative sense. If this is supposed to be a daydream of Blazkowicz, then why is he making it so damn hard for himself? How should it even be possible to fail a fantasy? Maybe if this was a regular action sequence I'd cut it some slack, but this is an insane difficult spike and an obvious oversight. Still, when compared to the game's world-building, character, settings, and themes the issues with the courthouse firefight are small potatoes.

The problems with the game's story begin immediately. At the end of the last game, BJ Blazkowicz, the series' long-time protagonist, heroically sacrificed himself to defeat the evil Nazi space wizard: General Deathshead. It was a satisfying enough ending that gave Blazkowicz a heroic sendoff. BJ Was never a particularly compelling character, but he was a series staple and his final monologue in the New Order served as a fitting coda. I was glad to see him go as The New Order had done just about everything it could to give him a compelling character, and even that had mostly failed. He was still just a generic soldier, no matter how much bad poetry he narrated in between the game's action set pieces. 

The first thing New Colossus does is undo the ending of the previous game and has Blazkowicz be rescued from the blast at the last minute by his lover Anya. Not only is this extremely sloppy writing, but in making it so easy for him to escape death, the game accidentally makes his actions in the previous installment look less like a heroic sacrifice and more like a failed suicide attempt. Are we supposed to think that Blazkowicz was battling chronic depression throughout Wolfenstein: The New Order [2014]? Besides, there's also no real reason to undo the conclusion to the last game like this, as even with Blazkowicz dead there were plenty of options for playable characters in the sequel. There's no reason why we couldn't play as one of the other members of the resistance network like Anya, Caroline, or Bombate. I guess Machine Games was just uncomfortable with the idea of making a game where the protagonist was a black man or a lady.

Bringing Blazkowicz back for the sequel could be justified if Machine Games had some brilliant plot line that he was central to, but this just isn't the case. For the most part, BJ is a spectator in his own story going to whatever location somebody tells him to and carrying out whatever objective he's instructed to. At this point they could have replaced him with a reprogrammed Nazi robot and nearly all the game's set pieces would have played out exactly the same. What little characterization he has is confined to his voice-over narrations where he spends the entire first half of the game whinging about how he's certain he's going to die. Mate, you're conscious, running around and slaughtering scores of enemy soldiers. Sure, you need a suit of power armor to do it but you're not exactly on death's door. Indeed, the whole angst over his imminent death makes even less sense when you consider that Blazkowicz has access to Seth Roth, a doctor with such advanced technology that he can attach a severed head onto a new body with ease. I'm pretty sure he can manage to treat whatever boo-boos are afflicting Blazkowicz.

Of course, Roth has also been hit with the retcon bat a bit since the last game. Apparently, somebody explained to the writers that having a secret conspiracy of Jews that had space-age technology in the first half of the 20th century and were secretly guiding human history from the shadows was not only anti-Semitic but the kind of antisemitism that people would use as a comic exaggeration. Seriously, this is something I'd expect the Nazis from Iron Sky (2012) to be talking about, not a bunch of contemporary virtue-signalers. Amusingly, the existence of Da'at Yichud validates many of the most paranoid delusions of the Nazis, justifying (at least in Wolfenstein's fictional world anyway) some of the horrific crimes of Hitler's regime. I can understand why the Da'at Yichud has been retconned into a non-religious order of engineers who are trying to build a radio to speak with God, I just wish that it had been done with a bit more care. Indeed, the new explanation for the Da'at Yichud raises several questions. Namely, if they are a non-religious order, why is the name of their organization in Hebrew? Moreover, if they are just trying to build a radio to speak with God why do they build so many weapons? I understand that lessons in engineering are transferable but maybe you'd have better luck with your divine telephone if you didn't spend so much time perfecting power armor and wrist-rockets.

Amusingly, the writers of The New Colossus have not learned their lesson about racism, and the game's story is positively riddled with racial stereotypes. Indeed, we're reaching Transformers (2007) levels of comic racial stereotypes. Every black woman without fail will be absurdly sassy and bossy regardless of the situation, while any Jewish character will constantly throw out funny-sounding Yiddish words so we don't forget that they are not really white. No non-white character is ever allowed to grow or change in a meaningful way, instead, they are just permanently stuck as a grotesque racial exaggeration that wouldn't be out of place in a comedy from the 1930s. Quick question: Has anyone at Machine Games actually met a minority before? Can we introduce them to a few real-world blacks and jews before they make another inadvertently racist game?

While the developers were certainly eager to retcon huge parts of their previous work, they seem to have identified the worst aspects of the previous game's story and have inexplicably doubled down on them. Wolfenstein: The New Order [2014] struggled with keeping a consistent tone, as it alternated its levels between sabotaging the secret Nazi moon base, and being pushed into a cattle car for a trip to ersatz Auschwitz. The developers at Machine Games have somehow concluded that this was what endeared gamers to the New Order, and have decided to make the tone of their sequel so completely bipolar that it lurches back and forth between wacky and maudlin at a moment's notice. I'm not exaggerating either, in a single cut-scene we have a goofy slapstick moment, only then to jump to a woman describing the sight of a mother cut in half crawling desperately towards her dying child, only to then segway into a conversation about how balls are a silly metaphor for toughness as they are so delicate themselves. This all happens in five minutes! It's like somebody saw iHawk from Futurama and decided this was a perfectly reasonable approach to dramatic storytelling rather than an absurd parody.

This is not an isolated incident either, the plot will veer back and forth wildly between horrific atrocities and zany hi-jinx. You have a quick description of how the Nazis rounded up all of America's undesirables and walled them off in a massive ghetto in New Orleans, before meeting the wacky conspiracy theorist character who thinks the Da'at Yichud technology is the work of space aliens. Wyatt becomes an acid junkie because the developers don't know what to do with his character, and this development is played for laughs right until he takes too much and attempts suicide. You get flashbacks to Blazkowicz's childhood where his abusive father forces him to shoot the family dog (more on their later) then cut to a senile Adolf Hitler pissing on the floor. There's even literal toilet humor sprinkled in, like the time the fat German chick welcomes Blazkowicz back to HQ and then announces that she has to pee, only to discover that the black panther chick has left a stinky dump in the toilet (I'll give the writer's the benefit of the doubt and pretend that they let a dying six-year-old write this scene as a favor to the Make a Wish Foundation). Maybe these wild tonal shifts would work if any of the attempts at humor were actually funny, but except for the scene where a heavily pregnant Anya strips nude and mows down Germans with akimbo machine guns, none of the jokes landed for me.

The issue is more widespread than just a few groan-worthy writing decisions; towards the end of my play-through, Blazkowicz's ever-growing gang of NPC sidekicks began to feel like they belonged to some other universe than the gritty Nazi-dominated world they live in. Everything would be bleak and depressing till this wacky cast of characters skated on by diffusing all tension wherever they went. It's like having the gang from Scooby-Doo gathering evidence for the Nuremberg trials. Wyatt regularly goes into combat high off of acid, but he never catches a bullet as the result of his recklessness. The resistance fighters regularly take Max Haas, a simpleton with the mind of a child along with them, and not only does he not wander off and get killed her even contributes to missions regularly as if his intellectual disability only exists outside of the combat zone. Meanwhile, Anya is heavily pregnant and still runs and guns through numerous battles, even though there are scores of resistance fighters just hanging around the home base who don't share her delicate condition. Between this and The Last of Us Part 2 [2020] I genuinely don't understand modern AAA gaming's fascination with putting pregnant women in front-line combat.

All this does have the advantage of making the rare moments where one of these idiots has to suffer some consequences for their stupidity genuinely shocking. At one point when Blazkowicz has been captured by the Nazis, Super Sesh, the alien-hunting conspiracy theorist, barges right into the Nazi headquarters and demands to speak with him claiming to be his attorney. At this point I was rolling my eyes, does this retard genuinely think that the Third Reich gives a shit about the rule of law? Hell, this isn't even Stalin's Russia where there was at least a pretense at judicial process; the Nazis just executed people they found inconvenient and wrote legal justifications for it after the fact. I assumed I was in for another cringe-inducing cut-scene but then something amazing happened: The Nazis shoot this annoying little fuck in the back of the head. I was genuinely shocked; though I'll confess I was mostly just thrilled to see one less obnoxious side character bumbling about, cluttering the plot. This scene gave me some hope that similar treatment was waiting for the rest of the cast, alas, these hopes would not be fulfilled.

I'll also confess to being a bit peeved at the game's politics. No, I'm not talking about the vilification of Nazis, Fascism is an evil totalitarian ideology and belongs comfortably in the dustbin of history. No, the problem is the fact that the game lionizes the other group of mass-murdering 20th-century totalitarians: The Communists. One of the groups of revolutionaries you team up with is openly communist; worse than that they are Bolshevik agents. You know, the only group that can boast of killing more Slavs than the Nazis! It's amusing that Machine Games is so hell-bent on patting themselves on the back for demonizing Nazis when they just turn around and make heroes out of an ideology just as drenched in innocent blood. The only thing communists are good for is killing fascists.

Indeed, the presence of communists within your group makes the revolution at the end of the game more sobering than the developers probably intended. While Democratic nations freed from fascism were content to execute and imprison a handful of the more egregious collaborators while letting the majority of German supporters quietly return to civilian life, communist Eastern Europe persecuted fascist collaborators with a bloody zeal. Indeed, they didn't just limit themselves to the postmen who continued to deliver mail once the fascists took over the country, as whole revolutionary armies that fought the Germans were cynically denounced as pro-fascist simply because they opposed Stalin's rule. In the best-case scenario the communists will fail their bid for power and be defeated in a protracted civil war, in the worst case they'll take over the new America and do what communists always do when they achieve power: mass-slaughter, first their political opponents then their own supporters. One wonders, in Wolfenstein's universe how long it will be before B.J. Himself is led before the communist tribunals and given a show trial where he is forced to admit that he was a Nazi all along.

I shouldn't be surprised by the game's lionization of communists though, as there is a strain of historical illiteracy running throughout The New Colossus. It makes itself known constantly in several small ways, like how the black revolutionaries you recruit all dress in black panther getups and sport Afros even though neither of these fashion trends was popularized until the late 1960s in real life while the game takes place in 1961. Indeed, the other resistance fighters all dress in flower-power regalia which once again would have been common in the late 1960s. Moreover, I'm not sure that these costumes would be turning up at all in the Nazi-dominated 1969. After all, they are products of a system that tolerates, and often celebrates rebellion and dissent. Rebellious groups in liberal democracies can afford to openly identify themselves because their status as rebels grants them a not inconsiderable cache of support (and quite frequently sex appeal to boot). It seems much more likely that a resistance movement against a totalitarian invader like the German Reich would prize blending in over wearing easily identifiable uniforms. The French Resistance didn't have a distinctive costume for obvious reasons and any American resistance would likely follow suit.

Then there is the game's primary antagonist, Frau Engel, a female German General who has been given complete command of the American occupation forces. This makes little sense historically as the Nazis were not great believers in gender equality, particularly when it came to things like the military. Sure, you could probably comb through the ranks of the Nazi high command and find a few exceptions to the rule (Joseph Goebbels seemed weirdly enthusiastic about female combat troops for instance) but the overwhelming majority of fascists favored strict segregation of gender roles. There were women in the Wehrmacht and SS but they were overwhelmingly employed in administrative jobs (typists, telephone operators, and the like). The most common female combat position was (wo)manning anti-aircraft guns. The notion that the Third Reich would allow a woman to command hundreds of thousands of combat troops is absurd, no matter how competent she was.

Moreover, even in the context of the game, it's ridiculous that this particular woman would be chosen to command the Nazi military machine. In Wolfenstein: The New Order [2014], she was just a concentration camp commandant. Moreover, the only thing she did in the last game was preside over a disastrous breakout! It's as if Ilse Koch, having failed to prevent a mass escape at Buchenwald was subsequently given Irwin Rommel's job as a reward. Even if we're going to accept that the Nazis would be willing to put a woman in high command, there is no reason to think that it would be this woman!

Another big problem for the game's historical verisimilitude comes in the form of BJ's father, Rip Blazkowicz. In the years since the war, Rip Blazkowicz collaborated with the Nazis handing over his Jewish wife as well as her extended family. There's a little problem with this scenario though, Rip Blazkowicz is a Slav. Seriously just look at his last name and tell me it doesn't scream Polish. Consequently, he wouldn't be viewed as a fellow Aryan and as a point of fact would probably be considered a subhuman according to the logic of Nazi racial science. There is a reason why the German military pursued a mostly normal war in Western Europe (accepting of course their treatment of special groups like Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals) and a war of annihilation against the Slavic nations of the East. Danes, Frenchmen, and the Dutch were fellow Aryans while Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians were not. Indeed, the Nazis would probably be more willing to tolerate and collaborate with African Americans than they were with Slavs like Blazkowicz.

Yet beyond the historical absurdity of the Nazis making common cause with an American Slav instead of his WASP neighbors, there is more to talk about with Rip Blazkowicz's character, that I think will bring us closer to the heart of what is wrong with the New Colossus. Even ignoring his implausible alliance with the Nazis, Rip is presented as a comically evil figure. He beats his son and wife regularly for the flimsiest of reasons. My personal favorite is when he decks BJ for the crime of being robbed by a couple of older kids. He's also extremely racist and teaches BJ that blacks are no lazy good-for-nothings in language that sounds like it was borrowed for Clayton Bixsby. When he catches BJ kissing a black girl he beats BJ to a pulp and forces him to kill the family dog. There is no reason given for this bizarre punishment, and I suspect it was just chosen simply for shock value. Even then, I could imagine far better punishments for Rip to inflict on his son for this transgression: kidnapping the black girl and forcing BJ to kill her for instance. Unfortunately, that would count as “fridging” which is part of an ever-growing list of tropes and stories that are forbidden in contemporary art, so instead, Rip just acts like a total weirdo and takes everything out on the family pet.

Rip's motivations for his actions make no sense. In one moment he confesses that he detests BJ for being so weak, and in the next, he says he always knew BJ was a monster and was trying to stop him from becoming one. These are mutually exclusive motivations. Either BJ is too soft-hearted to survive or he's indifferent to the suffering of others to the point where he gleefully inflicts pain on people, he cannot possibly be both. Consequently, Rip Blazkowicz is what I've come to expect from villains in contemporary politically-minded stories (Hawkins from The Nightingale (2018) springs to mind), he's so evil that he is downright nonsensical and the game is afraid of giving him real motivations or a real personality, less the creators get accused of sympathizing with him by the brainlets on Twitter. It's a shame too because there is a potentially compelling story in him about a man who in terror that his son won't be strong enough to face the cruelties of the world, denies him the nurturing that a child needs.

Moreover, it seems that the developers were flirting with this approach as well. There is a short optional scene where Rip urges BJ to confront his fear of monsters in the house's basement by handing him a gun and urging him to go downstairs and confront the monsters head-on. Here we see a father who is stern and aloof, but nonetheless has the best interest of his son at heart. He's a flawed man, and perhaps one capable of great evil, but this evil is only ever born forth from his noble intentions. Yet, this is just one scene and the cartoonishly evil monster we see everywhere else bears no resemblance whatsoever to this man. We have here a vestigial story thread. In an earlier draft of the New Colossus' story, perhaps Rip was a real character with complex motivations that caused him to commit horrific actions. Now all that's left is this scene, which most players probably won't even see. All this was sacrificed, no doubt, so the audience would better understand that he was bad. I watch stupid crap all the time, but it's seldom that I find a piece of media that insults my intelligence to this extent.

The bungling of Rip's character points to a larger issue: The way the game handles parenthood in general. We do not see any positive parental relationships between parents and their grown children. Most notably we have BJ and his father but there is also Frau Engel who has a massively overweight daughter she drags along on missions and verbally berates (again, why are you taking your daughter on military missions instead of say, one of the five sons you mentioned you had in the New Order). The most positive parent-children relationships we see in the game, are with very small babies (like with Grace and her child) and the unborn (as is the case with BJ and Anya and their twins). The game is preoccupied with this theme of parenthood, particularly with Bj's desperate need to be a better father to his unborn children than his own was to him. However, if we examine this alongside the game's bizarre historical idiosyncrasies, things start to add up.

I've mentioned before that the Nazis in The New Colossus are not acting in a historically authentic manner. They are not massacring Jews, conquering lebensraum, or subduing the subhuman Slavs. In short, aside from their aesthetics, a stray line here or there, and the presence of Hitler on Venus they have nothing to do with the historical Nazis. Instead, we have scenes where Frau Engel demands that her daughter stop gobbling down sweets and start exercising. Sure, the Nazis were great believers in public health and physical fitness (though there were more than a few in the upper ranks who didn't exactly measure up to this ideal like Herman Goring and Ernst Rohm), but one has to wonder why the developers at Machine Games singled out what is probably the least objectionable aspect of Nazi ideology for special comment. Why do we spend more time with the Nazis talking about physical fitness than we do with them discussing Jewish manipulation? The reason is simple, these Nazis are not supposed to be the historic figures, they're supposed to be proxies for the writer's parents.

It makes a certain degree of sense. Spoiled, stupid teenagers the world over have been denouncing their parents as fascists for not letting them eat junk food and sleep in until noon for decades. Most people grow out of this juvenile mindset but apparently, the writers at Machine Games have clung to this childish worldview for far longer. As a result, they cannot even represent a historical force as well-known as the Third Reich with anything resembling authenticity. For them, hearing the word Nazi does not conjure up images of concentration camps and panzer columns but instead the time their mom told them they'd rot their teeth out if they kept eating candy bars. It becomes more depressing when you consider that many of these writers are no doubt parents themselves and are desperately trying to reassure themselves that they are still hip and cool. It's why they trumpet the game's anti-fascist credentials at every turn. It's also why the only positive parent-child relationships in the game are between parents and small infants or even the unborn, that is to say, children that have not yet developed any individuality. They have no idea how to depict a nurturing relationship because they've managed to convince themselves that every nurturing relationship is secretly oppressive. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.