The New Colossus initially feels like a continuation of the theme, which is disappointing given its unusual and charismatic supporting cast, but slowly evolves into something a bit more challenging. The developer's first Wolfenstein game was broadly about rehabilitating an archetype that had run its course, the last gasp of a typically 90s videogame dudebro who had belatedly discovered emotional complexity or at least, the ability to suffer visibly, as a means of staving off irrelevance. Like it never was."įor the first few hours, I was only too ready for BJ to pop his clogs. While squeezing through vents in search of giant cyborgs to blow up or electrocute, you'll hear him mutter to the ghosts of fallen comrades, promising to join them soon. Early on you're introduced via flashback to his bigoted Texan brute of a dad and beaten-down Polish mother, in a somewhat gratuitous, superficial tale of domestic abuse that does take a more engaging, Gone Home-ish turn in a later level. After decades of war BJ's psyche is imploding, reverting to its point of origin. Eventually, he obtains an arcane exosuit that restores your ability to walk and duck, but he remains a hero "on autopilot, waiting to hit the wall", as one ally puts it. As The New Colossus begins he's fading fast, rattling around the gigantic, wonderfully furnished submarine that serves as your mission hub in a wheelchair with his legs and guts in tatters. There is a sense throughout that MachineGames wants to leave BJ behind but doesn't know how to let him die. Remember when BJ was just a head in a box?
Launched at a time when real-life fascism is resurgent in the USA, it's a game people will be picking apart and mulling over for years to come. There is much about The New Colossus that is clumsy and self-indulgent, even a little reprehensible, but that's because it strains to address ideas big budget first-person shooters seldom dare to, and I would argue that even its failures are worth experiencing. Dreamers, stiffs and crazies raging, bleeding and hugging it out against a steady chorus of gunfire - all of it somehow funnelled into the woozy, battered persona of one of the industry's longest-serving action heroes. It's a pretty good summary for the story as a whole: a stylish and drunken confusion of screeds, motifs and caricatures plucked from the subversive 60s and copiously reimagined, care of an alternate-history premise in which Nazi Germany prevailed over the Allies using gadgets stolen from a mystical Jewish sect.
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