Kinda shit!

Its just more of the first game except with more versatile dual-wielding, some short side-missions, and another gimmick that comes in about halfway into the game. Said gimmick is one of three "contraptions" that compliment a style of play, I call it a gimmick because it didn't really have much of an impact on my playthrough, I chose the ram shackles cause it made the game more braindead to play so I could just rush through it and be done a little quicker.

This game also suffers from having an obnoxious difficulty spike at the ass end of it because there is NO ACTUAL BOSS FIGHT, it's just another encounter except with an onslaught of the game's harder enemies at the arena before you go run up and press your melee button/key to kill the boogeyman villain of this game.

The story is forgettable, I played this late Nov-early Dec and I already dont remember much of it besides the things that made me roll my eyes. The characters are mostly one-dimensional or just kind of there for a gag.

Thankfully, I didn't have to pay for this game cause I gameshared it off a friend's account. If I actually paid money for this I would've been disappointed more than I already was and dumbfounded. TNO didn't really set a high-bar, the word disappointed isn't really something I should have to use when I wasn't even expecting much in the first place.

If you want to try it out, torrent it.

at several points in the duration of the new colossus, i have to admit i enjoyed it more than the new order. that's not a reflection of the quality of the new colossus - everything is worse here - but it's a reflection of the fact that i can play this kind of game on PC now. no doubt in my mind if i had played this on console i would have thoroughly hated it. mastery of doom '16 and even eternal on console is achievable, because despite being pc games at their core the tenets of their mechanics (forward momentum at all costs, easily defined hurtboxes and hitboxes, hit and run strategy, weapon chaining, enemy prioritization) are within the realm of gamepad execution. ultraviolence, demanding though it is on a pad, remains an exhilarating affair. wolfenstein, with its emphasis on overwhelming the player, is far too reactive to have struck such a balance. your reliance on headshots and general precision is too great, your movement too improvisational and prone to jerking around, your fight against enemies who can rip you apart is breathless and unabated, all while no resources exist to readily replenish you. these games are simply more at home in this environment. so i did end up having fun, with the difficulty tuned up to my liking, at times greatly so, but there's a paucity of virtues here actively enabling that enjoyment. everything here feels like a first draft, so there's not actually a lot of refinement to the formula, but rather a feeling that things have been pared down, particularly with regards to stealth - not only are your approaches generally more restrictive due to less intricate level design, but your objectives are placed too 'conveniently' (ie the commander, who may call in reinforcements if alerted, is almost always just before the next segment of the level) for their consequences to matter. this also ends up greatly frustrating in the case of the titles optional ubercommandos, equipped wIth kampfpistoles that can easily knock you down and slug you while you're getting up, forcing you to restart several of those segments from the point of origin.

some of the loudest umbrage concerns the issues people have levied with the titles level design, actually. and its true that exploring this cluttered, often inadvertently abstruse geometry often yields little purpose or reward, and sparks no imagination. there's a moment halfway through when you gain access to one of three movement options, for instance, and as soon as you think levels will open up as a result, what ends up happening is the next barrier to progress will simply have three methods of progression all literally right next to each other (in this case a gate, a vent, and a window) to accommodate you and make sure you didn't have to look too hard. even beyond several frustrating incidents like this, in general i think this games problem has less to do with its errant level design and far more to do with its lack of meaningful escalation. the worst offender of this would have to be the final level reusing one of the opening levels environments to do much of the same, culminating in a shrewd arena fight that's only a little bit more taxing than its predecessors, and before you know it the games abruptly over in ten minutes. but there are several instances of this kind of deflation, partially a result of the games lack of evolution and scale. a dream sequence played out for subversion hardly feels like a climax because anyone paying attention can recognize it's a dream; a trip to venus that invokes the aesthetics of doom hardly feels as playful, missing the spark of adventure often found in the new order; a title depicting revolution spends so little time with any perspective that isn't BJ's.

that last point is crucial, because the new colossus is endlessly hokey. any intriguing subtext raised in the first half is promptly dropped in the second, where the game quickly becomes more embarrassing by the stage (either be a machismo-laden power fantasy or don't, stop interrogating this thread half-heartedly especially if you're going to contradict all of your imagery). configuring its assault on nazi ideology through a lukewarm 'the old shall perish at the hands of the progressive young' lens or, worse yet, a game about abusive parenting, ends up really cartoonishly flattening a great deal of the games narrative threads and stakes. BJ, the only mover and shaker in the story, is the only perspective afforded any material representation, so despite being a story about revolution enlisting all walks of life one never gets the sense they're truly liberating anyone, changing anyone's ways of lives, or making any sort of impact. by the time the game resolves what little conflict against its antagonist it had, and it closes on a truly awful cover of a song i won't be spoiling, it becomes apparent it couldn't have ended any other way.

don't be surprised if this eventually turns to 1/5, is all im saying (it did, i can't stand this kind of superficial treatise that people regard highly that nevertheless remains every bit as regressive and annoying as other works before it). discussing whether or not a game has 'aged' mechanically often gives me pause, in part for me because it's difficult to definitively say that they can, but wolfenstein II is an instance of an all-too common type of game: one that has aged narratively. and it's only going to get worse and worse from here on out

Crusader Kings III is an amazing strategic rpg that has so much content. There is a crazy amount of stuff to do, you could start a religion, you could conquer the globe, or you could just grow your family until you have 425 generations.

Although there are some issues, whilst this was is an awesome game and one I would usually really enjoy (and I mean REALLY enjoy) Crusader kings just falls short, I can really only play it for an hour or two before I start to get bored. I think this has to do with a lack of an end goal. Other than this this though I would still recommend this to someone who wants to play a good strategic rpg.

Going in guns-a-blazin' provides for some of the tightest action and shooting seen in a Wolfenstein game, and I think that speaks highly for a series that already struck a golden gameplay standard with the New Order and further polished in Old Blood. And that goes to say that some of these individual set pieces are just as, if not more, breathtaking than what was seen in previous games. The tools and setup were all here to make for a truly excellent Wolfenstein experience, but there was definitely a level of misuse in these factors that led me to feeling far less satisfied than I did with New Order.

Stealth has practically been neutered to hell in this game. I played on the "Do or die" difficulty and I never felt like I could get any good stealth kill streaks in. Sometimes the linearity and cramped nature of the maps kept you way too close to the enemy to reliably sneak around and I swear guards randomly noticed me at some points when they really shouldn't have. Chock this up to me being bad at stealth if you will, but I never had this issue with New Order or Old Blood and I kind of miss being able to reliably swap sneaky vs ultra-aggressive playstyles without one being heavily favored over the other.

The gadgets were more wasted potential if anything. I was actually very exciting when I got to choose one out of three options as it felt like a decision that could carry some weight and really change how my campaign would play out. There's definitely unique uses for each one, but nearly every time there was a roadblock that required a gadget, there would be others to accommodate the others nearby. So in the end, they all took you to the same place; it's what you used to get there that's different.

Neither of these flaws would be damning to a truly amazing game in my opinion but I think the biggest ball dropped here is with its story. Taking the already loveable cast from the New Order and continuing the story from that game's ending was a no brainer. And for the most part, the characters still have that level of charm to them. The actual plot however feels rushed in areas and never feels like it uses its concepts to their fullest potential. So many plot threads like (minor spoilers?) Wyatt taking psychedelics and BJ's tragic childhood feel like they're brought up either for gags in Wyatt's case or sympathy in BJ's case and then just dropped where they really could have been tied up better. It feels like they cut out a couple chapters in the late game and thus is paced very weirdly, almost like they had to glue it together and jump to the climax without clear buildup. I can't help but feel hollow inside when I game only begins to captivate me with its story right as it ends without much of a rhyme or reason.

As stated before, I really enjoyed the moment-to-moment shooting mechanics and feel this is a game with great aspects and mechanics behind it, but I find it hard to ignore how rushed it felt in some areas and how weak of a note the story ended on (albeit the main villain's death was fairly satisfying for what little buildup there was).

Bulletstorm has aged worse for me than any other game. I first played Bulletstorm back when I was a high school freshman and loved it. At the time, it was everything I wanted in a shooter. A decade passes and I decide to buy the remaster, thinking it’d be fun to revisit one of my favorite 7th gen shooters, only to feel nothing but utter betrayal. The game I remembered being colorful, fast-paced, charming, and unique was actually this ugly, boring slog with godawful dialogue. I felt betrayed by my own memories, I couldn’t believe there had been a point in my life where I had actually liked this game.

One of Bulletstorm’s biggest sins is how it absolutely wastes the voice talents of Steve Blum and Jennifer Hale. Both actors have done extensive work in children’s media, yet Bulletstorm’s script might be the single most juvenile thing either of them have ever recorded. It’s nothing but ‘shit fuck ass balls’ from the moment the game starts to the moment the credits roll. This shit makes Borderlands dialogue look like Disco Elysium.

Above all else, Bulletstorm is just lacking in any real creativity. The skillshot system seems fun at first, until you realize just how little opportunity you’re given to experiment with them so you’ll just be doing the same basic ones over and over and over again. Aside from that, It’s the same basic 7th gen shooter you’ve played a million of that Bulletstorm promoted itself as the ‘wild and crazy’ alternative to.

I really enjoy how this falls somewhere between a heavily-scripted CoD campaign and something like Half-Life, often carrying the strengths of both. When you take that, some solid enough gunplay, and throw in some post-Bioshock storytelling squarely focused on hating Nazis, you get a pretty satisfying experience.

The New Order also manages to deliver when it comes to showing both the absurd cartoon Nazism you probably started the game expecting and the real life horrors of fascism and genocide. In that sense, it's a very responsible game which never lets you start thinking of them as simply video game villains. It even goes above and beyond, drawing parallels between the Nazi regime and the United States that BJ served. When you take that along with one-off moments where a heroic character is mentioned to have had an abortion or where the game spotlights Nazi persecution of trans people, it's clear they wanted Wolfenstein to directly comment on the present day more than was even necessary.

Worth playing both for mindless Nazi killing and for an excellent and well thought out alternate history narrative. Unless you count the Beatles records...that was pretty bad lol.
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Completed on Linux using Proton.

B.J. Blazkowicz is the greatest war hero of all time. o7

Seriously though I was expecting this game to be just mindlessly running round killing nazis for kicks and that'd be that. The plot existing just enough to string together a series of levels. But no, the story and characters were surprisingly engaging, and what I'd intended to be a game I play on the side ended up being a game that I played and enjoyed like any other. Sure it's got a lot of silly shit in it, but hey, so long as nazis are getting fucked over I'll allow it >:)

I had a lot of fun with this and I'm interested to see where things go from here. My only regret was neglecting the perk challenges until the last third of the game :(

Bring on the next one!