Remember, at the end of the episode The New Order, BJ.Blazkowicz, our hero, had to order the bombardment of General Strasse's fortress before he could even take cover, which had left in a bad state after a piece of shrapnel cut into his skull. Don't worry if you haven't played this episode, because true to their passion for B series, the developers have thought of including an excellent "Previously On" introductory cinematic. We therefore relive all the events of the previous opus, including this moment when BJ.Blazkowicz had to choose between one of his friends and sacrifice the other. A choice that we are also asked to make and which will condition the identity of one of the characters who will accompany us during the adventure. Of course, we find most of the members of the resistance that we saw in The New Order, including Anya, the Polish nurse who is now pregnant with BJ.Blazkowicz. The story of The New Colossus begins when crazy Blazko comes to his senses, in bad shape and bedridden. If Blazkowicz's friends are present, certain antagonistic characters are also making a comeback, starting with Irene Engel, the Obersturmbahnfürher who assisted General Strasse in the previous opus. Since our hero slaughtered her superior and nearly killed her, she's risen in rank, while corrective surgery has sealed the open wounds on her face, making her even more terrifying than before. Still as dilapidated of the brain, the shrew lives from now on only to achieve a single objective: to find the one who disfigured her and who liquidated her boss as well as her lover. To say that Frau Engel has a grudge against the hero is therefore a mild understatement. Indeed, the submarine stolen from the Germans, and which hosts the Resistance, has been spotted by the she-devil who sends her shock troops to regain possession of it. Barely awake, Blazkowicz must therefore jump on the first wheelchair available, grab an automatic weapon handed to him, and leave to clean the corridors of the U-boat from the invaders.
KKK & NSDAP
No half measures here, the blood still squirts profusely, especially when using the melee attacks that the valiant OSS soldier can perform brilliantly, even nailed to his chair. Even after several months of inactivity, the veteran is still in good shape, and those who have played The New Order will not be disoriented by the context of the 60s, nor by the rather massive draw of enemies who have not greatly evolved. , which is understandable from a scriptwriting point of view. Beneath its B series exterior, The New Colossus is also much deeper than its ancestor, with a much more serious story that tackles the hero's childhood, as well as various problems such as racism. This last subject is also very represented, because in this new episode, the Resistance will attack the United States. However, after having invaded the country, the forces of the Third Reich succeeded in finding excellent allies on the spot by recruiting members of the Ku Klux Klan. The latter are also quicker to persecute the black community, traditionally ostracized from society in the southern states, while the Nazis hate everything that is not Aryan and conforms to the rules, to the point that the girl even Frau Engel is rejected by her mother because of her overweight. Don't expect a great humanist plea, however, the Wolfenstein series is based on derision and nonsense, and this episode is of course no exception to the rule.
Beneath its B series exterior, The New Colossus is also much deeper than its ancestor, with a much more serious story that tackles the hero's childhood, as well as various problems such as racism.
If The New Order was inspired by the nanar Iron Sky by sending the player to face the Nazis on the Moon, this time, it is on Venus that it will be necessary to seek out the elite of the regime. No question of going there by rocket, because after a visit to Area 52 (yes, you read that right, 52) located around the city of Roswell, we discover that Germany can now produce flying saucers. In short, a big mess that serves mainly as a pretext for the developers to offer us epic clashes against gigantic robotic enemies, all while having fun with an arsenal of madness. It is also the heavy weapons that have been the subject of particular care, with among others the Lasergewehr which allows you to melt enemies or any other metal surface thanks to its ray. There is also the Dieselkraftwerk which allows you to explode gelled fuel and which will also have its little effect. As for the primary weapons, they are more or less the same as before and we are therefore pleased to find the classic gun, the submachine gun, the assault rifle, the shotgun and the grenade launcher, knowing that they all have been boosted with Nazi hormones. Everything exudes raw power, and you can even upgrade certain characteristics via modification kits that you pick up in the levels. This allows you to multiply the firepower of the weapons, and we recommend that you recover a maximum of these kits, while improving in priority the guns that correspond to your style of play. Moreover, if the game includes a perk system , be aware that we have little impact on the bonuses granted by the system. Indeed, everything is managed automatically so as not to transform this nervous FPS into a slow-paced RPG, and it is therefore the way you play that will define the unlocking of the perks. The more you play it infiltration with a lot of ax throwing and melee executions, the more effective you will be in this style of play.
If infiltration was never really a viable option in previous Wolfensteins, the developers modified the level-design with much larger levels, which gives credibility to stealth kills, in particular thanks to the multitudes of rooms and other passages available. The other side of the coin is that if you opt for the "rain of bullets" approach, the levels then seem unnecessarily vast, and quite empty, with all the AIs in the area having charged you at the first shots. heard. We must in passing salute the work of MachineGames on the enemies since their attitudes are very convincing. Indeed, they do not hesitate to take a short trip to take us from behind, or resort to grenades as soon as we squat the same hideout a little too long. We were surprised several times by the tactical game of the enemies who even prefer to wait for reinforcements rather than rush at us. Therefore, the key to survival is based on significant mobility, but above all on maximum firepower. To this end, the dual-wield system (akimbo) is renewed so that we can explode everything with a gun in each hand, knowing that we can now choose which weapon to place in each hand, which allows very tasty duos , and a fairly impressive slew of tactical options. On a personal level, we fell in love with the shotgun/grenade launcher tandem, which offers maximum destruction at short and medium range. In addition to a very good level-design and the nice environments offered (such as Roswell, New Orleans transformed into a Warsaw ghetto, the burning surface of Venus, a Manhattan ravaged by the atomic bomb), Wolfenstein 2 has a great soundtrack that will put you right in the mood. We think in particular of the cutscenes of parade which are accompanied by martial music, or even the big riffs of metal during the fights. This is all the more pleasing since the recordings of the record company Neumond (which revisits the pop classics of the 60s with the sauce of Dr Goebbels) are always present with, among others, Die Käfer, which means The Beatles in English.
ABOUT & SUBMARINE
In addition to the main adventure, Wolfenstein 2 remains true to tradition by offering a slew of hidden items and other discreet rooms to discover in each level. Also, to ensure an even longer lifespan, the developers have added new challenges in which it is necessary to assassinate high dignitaries who wander in the levels already covered. By killing these officers, we thus recover punch cards which will serve us as tokens to access a mini-game located in the U-boat of the Resistance. Serving as a sort of hub, this submarine (called Eva's Hammer) is full of additional activities including the famous Enigma machine which will decode the cards with holes, and thus allow us to obtain new missions. Sporting impressive proportions, the submersible is home to a crowd of people with whom we will be able to discuss in order to obtain information on the background of each character, but also to find new objectives which are either in the levels already visited, or simply on board. of the submarine. The latter also contains many interesting places such as the characters' quarters, a canteen, a shooting range with a real "Kill House"-style training course, with its own scoreboard and even a bar with an arcade machine on which you can play all of Wolfenstein 3D. As an indication, know that it took about 15 hours to do the main quest to which we can add some side missions, all in “Death Incarnate” difficulty. Players who choose a difficult difficulty, or who seek all the objects and trophies, will logically spend much more time there. Technically, the game remains honest without putting the retina full of it, which is quite surprising since the id Tech 6 engine is supposed to have it under the hood. Tested on PC with an nVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti, Wolfenstein 2 presented us with no problems, but the game being optimized for AMD (Ryzen and Radeon), those who have nVIDIA graphics cards with little VRAM may encounter disappointments. Also, some display bugs have been reported by other players, but it looks like recent patches have fixed those few issues.
