Wolfenstein: The New Colossus
February 13, 2026
--todo--
B
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.
