That, in a nutshell, is the underlying premise of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox.
Set in 1961, the background to the game will be familiar to anyone who’s read or seen The Man In The High Castle or Fatherland. The Germans used Nazi super science to win the war, taking over the world and doing all sorts of unpleasant Nazi stuff to anyone who dares step out of line or have the temerity to not look like an Aryan underwear ad model.
Nazis are perfect generic bad guys and there’s no reason to feel bad about mowing them down with automatic weapons or hacking them up with a fire axe, which is something Wolfenstein II grabs and runs with like my cat when someone’s left a smoked salmon bagel unattended momentarily.
Wolfenstein II picks up just after its predecessor finished, with seriously injured protagonist BJ Blazkowicz calling in a nuclear strike on a Nazi island fortress that he is still inside.
It turns out BJ’s fellow resistance members decided to come and get him before pushing the nuke button, and he wakes up in the resistance U-boat several months later just as the Nazis show up with a jet-powered sky fortress to get the submarine back and kill the resistance leaders while they’re at it.
Numerous elements of the game can be described as “balls out insane”, with explosions, gunfire, grenades, fire axes, giant robots, Nazi super science, alien conspiracy theories, and humour among just some of the attractions on offer.
Wolfenstein II is also really, really dark in places, too. Fairly early in the proceedings the Nazi general antagonist proves exactly how unhinged she is as she berates her own daughter for being overweight and deviant, decapitates a prisoner with a fire axe, then taunts your crippled character before pulling a classic Bond villain and leaving you in the Room Of Easily Avoidable Death.
She gets darker in subsequent meetings, but those are something best experienced in-game for the full impact.
The juxtaposition between BJ’s armoured exterior and his increasingly weakening ability to go on is well played and the foreshadowing in the game is masterfully done too, with seemingly irrelevant elements suddenly reappearing later in much more significant context.
The Nazi-shooting aspects of the game remain superb, with well-balanced weapons ranging from fire axes to silenced handguns to laser rifles and flamethrowers. You can dual-wield the weapons as well, creating interesting combinations such as “submachine gun and pistol” “dual Sturmgewehr assault rifles” and my personal favourite, “laser rifle and Gatling shotgun”.
Your opponents run the gamut from “nameless Nazi goon” through to “Nazi Terminator Robot” and even “Power Armour Stormtrooper”. They also contain enough blood to mortify a paramedic, and it ends up everywhere — I don’t envy whoever has to do the cleaning after BJ has made a Special Guest Appearance in the haus.
Some missions take place in the ruins of New York after it has been hit by a Nazi atomic bomb, and the inspiration from Fallout 4 (also a Bethesda title) is both unmistakeable and very welcome. There’s also a Nazi rocket train (there’s an indie band name if I ever heard one), Nazi flying saucers, and a flame-throwing Nazi robot tank-dog in the game for good measure too.
In fact, the levels themselves are generally excellent, albeit not always brilliantly designed. On a few occasions I found it hard to work out where I needed to go next, but the addition of an on-demand hint system (with on-screen marker) proved very helpful in those situations.
MachineGames have done a good job of humanising BJ as well. The internal conflict BJ feels between fighting what might be a losing war and the toll the conflict is taking on himself and his pregnant wife features prominently.
Some of the twists and turns the main story takes are excellent too, taking me pleasantly by surprise.
Wolfenstein II’s single-player campaign is absolutely superb, but the game itself is not perfect. For a start, there’s rather a lot of “AMERICA IS THE BEST!” jingoism in there, with rousing speeches about how the spirit of the American people yearns to be free and so on.
Even with the game’s deliberate B-movie feel, it’s jarring and rather grating at times; some of the dialogue generally seems a bit unironically clichéd too.
The campaign also ends fairly abruptly and it felt to me like there was a level or two missing somewhere.
It’s certainly possible the additional content will show up in DLC or Wolfenstein III: Die Nazis, Die, but I still found myself at the end of the game knee-deep in dead Nazis and spent cartridges seeking something particularly meaningful as an ending — and feeling somewhat disappointed, especially after all the other excellent work elsewhere in the game.
There are also series of sub-missions to eliminate Nazi ubercommanders in the game, but despite requiring a fair bit of work to unlock (including deciphering locations via an Enigma machine) they serve absolutely no story purpose whatsoever and seem to be there largely to give players something to do once they’ve finished the main game, assuming they aren’t thinking of taking a breather from shooting Nazis by that point.
Having said all that, shooting Nazis in video games is never not fun, and Wolfenstein II is no exception. There’s not many games that manage to combine complex storytelling, excellent visuals and emotion — but Wolfenstein II certainly does.
If you like single player FPS games, alternative history, the previous games in the series, or starring in your very own over-the-top action movie, then Wolfenstein II should be very clearly in your sights.
IN a world where Nazi Germany won World War II, one man must single-handedly kill all the Nazis …
Jacqueline Mulvey 