Colossus
Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2024 5:48 pm
Douglas Mercer
December 29 2024
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a 2017 action-adventure and first-person shooter game developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks. The seventh main entry in the Wolfenstein series and the sequel to 2014's Wolfenstein: The New Order, the game is set in an alternate history that takes place in 1961, following the Nazi victory in the Second World War. The story follows war veteran William "B.J." Blazkowicz and his efforts to fight against the Nazi regime in the United States. Gameplay mechanics are largely similar to those of The New Order, though the team introduced improvements such as allowing players to dual-wield any combination of weapons in the game. A binary choice in the prologue alters the game's entire storyline; some characters and small plot points are replaced throughout the timelines.
As the game is set in a Nazi-occupied America, the team was intrigued by the juxtaposition of America, which was "founded on the idea of freedom", being under totalitarian control, and wanted to explore how Germany would have attempted to subvert American culture. Continuing from The New Order, the development team aimed to characterize Blazkowicz for players to adopt his personality. Mick Gordon returned as the game's composer and is joined by Martin Stig Andersen. Both Brian Bloom and Nina Franoszek returned to provide voice and motion capture for Blazkowicz and Frau Engel, the game's primary antagonist.
Like its predecessor, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a first-person shooter. Once again, the player assumes control of the series protagonist, William "B.J." Blazkowicz, who must venture into a Nazi-occupied America to ignite a revolution against the Nazi regime. Blazkowicz has a large arsenal of gadgets and weapons, such as shotguns, submachine guns, pistols, and assault rifles, as well as grenades to fight against his enemies. Players can freely mix weapons for dual-wielding, giving them an advantage over enemies by dealing twice as much damage.
During the events of Wolfenstein: The New Order, the Kreisau Circle retrieves a critically injured Blazkowicz from Deathshead's fortress before destroying it with a nuclear cannon. With Deathshead's death and the compound's destruction, the Nazi's research division is crippled, stagnating their technological advancement. Blazkowicz falls into a five-month-long coma. As he fades in and out of consciousness aboard the captured U-boat Eva's Hammer, it is revealed that Anya, Blazkowicz's love interest, is pregnant with twins. The U-boat is attacked by SS-Obergruppenführer Irene Engel, a sadistic Nazi commander who captures Caroline. Blazkowicz devises a plan to get himself captured and taken to Engel's airship, the Ausmerzer, which is suspending the U-boat above water. Engel's daughter Sigrun refuses to decapitate Caroline, so Engel kills Caroline instead. Sigrun tackles Engel, allowing Blazkowicz to use Caroline's armor. Blazkowicz disconnects Eva's Hammer from the Ausmerzer and flees back to the U-boat with Sigrun and Caroline's body.
After Caroline's funeral, the group decides to carry out what would have been the next step in her plan to end the Nazi regime: liberate America and use it as a central base from which to free the world. The group sets out to contact a resistance group hiding in the Empire State Building amid the ruins of Manhattan, which was destroyed by a Nazi atomic bomb. Blazkowicz finds and recruits Grace Walker, a passionate, scarred African-American woman, and Norman "Super Spesh" Caldwell, a lawyer-turned-conspiracy theorist. Grace informs the Circle of her plan to cripple Nazi leadership in the US by destroying the Oberkommando in Roswell, New Mexico, near the site of an unearthed Da'at Yichud cache. Blazkowicz travels to Roswell with a portable nuclear warhead before heading to Super Spesh's hideout. Spesh takes him to his bunker and to a tunnel that leads to the Oberkommando, where Blazkowicz deposits the bomb in the base's reactor and detonates it.
After escaping Roswell, Blazkowicz takes a detour to Mesquite, his hometown, to recover an heirloom ring. His abusive and racist father Rip (Glenn Morshower) appears and chastises him, justifying his abuse of Blazkowicz and his mother. Rip tells Blazkowicz he allowed his mother to be taken by the Nazis because she was Jewish, and he intends to hand him over as well. Blazkowicz kills his father as Engel's forces arrive, and he is captured while Engel keeps the ring. Super Spesh visits Blazkowicz under the guise of his lawyer, telling him of their plan to break him out. However, Engel kills Spesh, having known his ruse. Blazkowicz is sentenced to death and beheaded at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in front of millions in a televised event.
The Kreisau Circle recovers Blazkowicz's head and surgically grafts it onto a bioengineered Nazi super-soldier body. Blazkowicz breaks into a Nazi bunker under New York, stealing a file on New Orleans, which is revealed to be a large ghetto. Blazkowicz travels there to gather freedom fighters under communist Horton Boone's command. They break out of the ghetto and escape on Eva's Hammer. To capture the Ausmerzer to prevent its use against the Kreisau Circle's planned revolution, they plan to steal the codes to deactivate its automated defense system by traveling to Venus, where the codes are kept in a Nazi facility. Blazkowicz assumes the identity of an actor and is invited to Venus to participate in a propaganda film audition produced by Adolf Hitler, who is looking for a suitable actor to play Blazkowicz. Blazkowicz retrieves the codes and returns to Earth to decipher them. The Kreisau Circle mounts an assault on the Ausmerzer, where the resistance members disable the defense and hijack its command systems. Blazkowicz and his team travel to the ground, where Engel is on national television in California. Blazkowicz kills Engel, and the Kreisau Circle proclaims the start of a revolution to liberate America. To ensure the total collapse of the Nazis's chain of command in the US, Grace orders BJ to kill all Ubercommanders who served as Engel's lieutenants.
The revolution is depicted pictorially during the credits sequence. In a post-credits scene, Blazkowicz takes back his heirloom ring from Engel's body and proposes to Anya.
***
Notes:
In the promo for the game the main character puts on his fake mustache and asks his driver how he looks. In order to indicate that he looks great she says: like a walrus.
December 29 2024
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a 2017 action-adventure and first-person shooter game developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda Softworks. The seventh main entry in the Wolfenstein series and the sequel to 2014's Wolfenstein: The New Order, the game is set in an alternate history that takes place in 1961, following the Nazi victory in the Second World War. The story follows war veteran William "B.J." Blazkowicz and his efforts to fight against the Nazi regime in the United States. Gameplay mechanics are largely similar to those of The New Order, though the team introduced improvements such as allowing players to dual-wield any combination of weapons in the game. A binary choice in the prologue alters the game's entire storyline; some characters and small plot points are replaced throughout the timelines.
As the game is set in a Nazi-occupied America, the team was intrigued by the juxtaposition of America, which was "founded on the idea of freedom", being under totalitarian control, and wanted to explore how Germany would have attempted to subvert American culture. Continuing from The New Order, the development team aimed to characterize Blazkowicz for players to adopt his personality. Mick Gordon returned as the game's composer and is joined by Martin Stig Andersen. Both Brian Bloom and Nina Franoszek returned to provide voice and motion capture for Blazkowicz and Frau Engel, the game's primary antagonist.
Like its predecessor, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a first-person shooter. Once again, the player assumes control of the series protagonist, William "B.J." Blazkowicz, who must venture into a Nazi-occupied America to ignite a revolution against the Nazi regime. Blazkowicz has a large arsenal of gadgets and weapons, such as shotguns, submachine guns, pistols, and assault rifles, as well as grenades to fight against his enemies. Players can freely mix weapons for dual-wielding, giving them an advantage over enemies by dealing twice as much damage.
During the events of Wolfenstein: The New Order, the Kreisau Circle retrieves a critically injured Blazkowicz from Deathshead's fortress before destroying it with a nuclear cannon. With Deathshead's death and the compound's destruction, the Nazi's research division is crippled, stagnating their technological advancement. Blazkowicz falls into a five-month-long coma. As he fades in and out of consciousness aboard the captured U-boat Eva's Hammer, it is revealed that Anya, Blazkowicz's love interest, is pregnant with twins. The U-boat is attacked by SS-Obergruppenführer Irene Engel, a sadistic Nazi commander who captures Caroline. Blazkowicz devises a plan to get himself captured and taken to Engel's airship, the Ausmerzer, which is suspending the U-boat above water. Engel's daughter Sigrun refuses to decapitate Caroline, so Engel kills Caroline instead. Sigrun tackles Engel, allowing Blazkowicz to use Caroline's armor. Blazkowicz disconnects Eva's Hammer from the Ausmerzer and flees back to the U-boat with Sigrun and Caroline's body.
After Caroline's funeral, the group decides to carry out what would have been the next step in her plan to end the Nazi regime: liberate America and use it as a central base from which to free the world. The group sets out to contact a resistance group hiding in the Empire State Building amid the ruins of Manhattan, which was destroyed by a Nazi atomic bomb. Blazkowicz finds and recruits Grace Walker, a passionate, scarred African-American woman, and Norman "Super Spesh" Caldwell, a lawyer-turned-conspiracy theorist. Grace informs the Circle of her plan to cripple Nazi leadership in the US by destroying the Oberkommando in Roswell, New Mexico, near the site of an unearthed Da'at Yichud cache. Blazkowicz travels to Roswell with a portable nuclear warhead before heading to Super Spesh's hideout. Spesh takes him to his bunker and to a tunnel that leads to the Oberkommando, where Blazkowicz deposits the bomb in the base's reactor and detonates it.
After escaping Roswell, Blazkowicz takes a detour to Mesquite, his hometown, to recover an heirloom ring. His abusive and racist father Rip (Glenn Morshower) appears and chastises him, justifying his abuse of Blazkowicz and his mother. Rip tells Blazkowicz he allowed his mother to be taken by the Nazis because she was Jewish, and he intends to hand him over as well. Blazkowicz kills his father as Engel's forces arrive, and he is captured while Engel keeps the ring. Super Spesh visits Blazkowicz under the guise of his lawyer, telling him of their plan to break him out. However, Engel kills Spesh, having known his ruse. Blazkowicz is sentenced to death and beheaded at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in front of millions in a televised event.
The Kreisau Circle recovers Blazkowicz's head and surgically grafts it onto a bioengineered Nazi super-soldier body. Blazkowicz breaks into a Nazi bunker under New York, stealing a file on New Orleans, which is revealed to be a large ghetto. Blazkowicz travels there to gather freedom fighters under communist Horton Boone's command. They break out of the ghetto and escape on Eva's Hammer. To capture the Ausmerzer to prevent its use against the Kreisau Circle's planned revolution, they plan to steal the codes to deactivate its automated defense system by traveling to Venus, where the codes are kept in a Nazi facility. Blazkowicz assumes the identity of an actor and is invited to Venus to participate in a propaganda film audition produced by Adolf Hitler, who is looking for a suitable actor to play Blazkowicz. Blazkowicz retrieves the codes and returns to Earth to decipher them. The Kreisau Circle mounts an assault on the Ausmerzer, where the resistance members disable the defense and hijack its command systems. Blazkowicz and his team travel to the ground, where Engel is on national television in California. Blazkowicz kills Engel, and the Kreisau Circle proclaims the start of a revolution to liberate America. To ensure the total collapse of the Nazis's chain of command in the US, Grace orders BJ to kill all Ubercommanders who served as Engel's lieutenants.
The revolution is depicted pictorially during the credits sequence. In a post-credits scene, Blazkowicz takes back his heirloom ring from Engel's body and proposes to Anya.
***
Notes:
In the promo for the game the main character puts on his fake mustache and asks his driver how he looks. In order to indicate that he looks great she says: like a walrus.
