All Reich Now

Wolfenstein Is Back With The New Colossus, But After We Blew The Limbs Off Nazis On The Moon In The New Order, How Do You Top It In The Sequel? We Took A Trip To Bethesda’s Offices To Find Out.

- Stephen Ashby

Punching Nazis is fun. There’s no two ways about it: dishing out knuckle justice to those fascist fiends using our fists of freedom is fabulous. Chucking hatchets at them, or using those hatchets to open up new holes in their necks at close range, is also surprisingly entertaining. Oh! And so is shooting them close up with an automatic shotgun – sorry, we mean a Schockhammer. Or at long range using a laser gun that ruptures them into glowing, electrical embers. Or at medium range with a machine gun. Or silently with a suppressed pist… You know what? Hurting Nazis, in pretty much any way, is fun. Let’s just go with that.

That probably explains why we had a great time doing just that when we headed over to Bethesda’s offices to get our hands on the latest build of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. We played through the opening level, which sees a wheelchair-bound BJ multitasking like a pro, and then a later section set in Roswell, New Mexico. It was here that we got to see a little more of the story and found that,as expected from a Wolfenstein title, this game is pure sci-fi.

Set in 1961, The New Colossus moves the focus to America more than ten years after the Germans defeated the allies. It’s a setting that the team at Machine-Games had in mind from the start of the previous game in the series, The New Order. “We started talking about what a world like this would be like if the Nazis had conquered everything and over a decade had passed,” explains Jens Matties, creative director at Machine-Games. “Specifically, if you look at the US and the UK, where so many things happened culturally in the ’60s, what would it look like if subverted by Nazi ideologies?”