Wolfenstein: The New Colossus
February 13, 2026
I have tried to gather my thoughts on this one for quite some time. The longer I sit on it, the less fondly I remember it. While a quite serviceable game, I think The New Order left some quite large shoes to fill, and personally I didn’t think The New Colossus really lived up to that expectation. The game isn’t bad, and in objectively is quite good on its own, and well deserving of the praise it gets. I think now after playing most of the Wolfenstein entries however, I would rather just replay The New Order. Let’s start with the good.
Continuing right after killing Deaths Head, BJ finds himself back in recovery, nearly killed for the second time. Nazis attack, go figure, and you have to wheelchair n’ gun (yes, BJ can’t walk yet) out to help find Anya. An amazing start to the game that sets the tone for how over the top the rest of the game is. From here, you lose your commander, get a power suit, get your head cut off, go to Venus, meet hitler, and start liberating America. Yes all of that is real. A hilariously silly game about killing hundreds of Nazis, but The New Colossus feels more like a Marvel movie than it did a Wolfenstein game - at least tonally compared to the previous entries. I think that tonal shift for me was the beginning of the end for the series, and after playing Youngblood - looks like I was right.
Not that I expected a gritty war game, but I think The New Order was more tonally grounded. You are working with a resistance faction trying to dismantle the oppressive Nazi forces right from under their nose. The New Colossus follows a plot more loosely. Go here via submarine, do a thing, go there, do a thing. And while I did have fun with the silliness, I don’t know I just wonder if they went a little less hard on the idea of “how do we make this even cooler”, they spent more time inventing some newer mechanics.
The best we got from MachineGames in the sequel was now you can duel wield any combination of weapons. On paper that sounds awesome, but in execution the approach was fumbled pretty bad, almost to the point to where I just used weapons without duel wield, which is absolutely the opposite of their intention. If feels like they are just throwing enemies at you, with the intention you will be duel wielding the whole time, and in the prior game, that truly felt like an optional part of the game. You could tailor your play style more, and I really wish they would have leaned more into that - to me, it felt like there was only one way to play, and its frustrating when you don’t want to play in that way.
Maybe it feels like Im being overly negative as if I didn’t enjoy the game, which isn’t true at all. However, I do think The New Colossus has a bit of an identity crisis, muddied by some poor design choices by the team. The story is silly, but fun. The gunplay is top notch, but limited in player expression. It seems like everything about the game has an equal and opposite reaction. Perhaps just showing MachineGames slowing down - or perhaps the idea of a game like Wolfenstein can only go so far.
C+
Wolfenstein: Youngblood
February 18, 2026
I really didn't want to jump on the bandwagon of gamer hate against this game. Every bone in my body wanted to blame the negative reviews on the female protagonists, and review bombing that comes along with every game that adds in a woman main character - aka "woke got to this one too, and takes all good things away from us". To top that off, 2 female protagonists become the easy target to make the reviews for the game at launch not stellar, to say the least. After buying it twice, second time on deep deep sale, and playing for a collective 5 hours - I found myself deeply disappointed, not because of the female protagonists, and not because of the pairing with Arkane studios, but because it didn't even feel like the studio cared about the game they were making. Like they were just checking a box. "Open-ended, co-op, action shooter, with RPG elements". Wow. It's like the game was set up for failure.
From a gameplay perspective, the game is more nazi killing fun, with arguably some of the best mechanics in the entire Wolfenstien series - and it's co-op. Whats not to like? Thats what I thought when I bought it on release, and subsequently returned it because I felt it was an uninspired buggy mess back then. Perhaps the crashing, and bugs were largely to blame for me putting less than an hour into it years ago, but now after putting a few more solid hours in, I realize now that the game is just...kinda bad.
An uninspired story has you controlling one of BJs twin daughters as they go to help the paris resistance, and find their father. After an initial cut scene explaining thats why you are in paris, the game sets you lose in a typical open world fashion and lets you take on different objectives to help you level up so that you can be strong enough to fight the nazis in their main bases scattered around Paris. Sounds cool on paper, except all of the quests have almost nothing to do with one another. None of the areas are connected with one another, and the gameplay boils down to "go here, do a thing. Fast travel here, do a thing again. Fast travel back, get a reward." A really underwhelming misuse of the idea of a "connected" world. The real kicker here about the world feeling disconnected, is Wolfenstein 2009 got this down. Sure it wasn't great by any means, but you actually connected through areas and had to back track. Here backtracking means go find the map, and then fast travel to your next destination. Sloppy, and just made for a poor experience.
I was hoping for the story, and maybe even the music to be a saving grace to actually make me want to finish this game - but no, everything felt rushed. Everything about this game felt like no one cared. The music is generic 80s slop like what you'd hear out of stranger things so thats cool. After Bethesda broke up with Mick Gordon seems like all the good music in the series left with him haha. The story, when the game started had me caring! The 2 twins of Terror Billy, going to save their father and liberate paris! But then...nothing. 4 More hours of gameplay and not a single cut scene. No more story beats. I couldn't even tell if I was doing story missions at that point. Ultimately made me feel like I was wasting my time.
I would have a hard time recommending this to anyone. What a letdown because, the others in the MachineGames repertoire were quite good. A bad final taste in my mouth for the Wolfenstein series, and unfortunately I believe the nail in the coffin after a pretty significant flop. I hope some day we get to see another take on the series, or perhaps BJs time has officially came to an end. Like most things, its better to quit while you're ahead, versus continuing and failing miserably.
