This is the first big-budget shooter since Doom (2016) that I wanted to replay after I watched the credits. That impulse was partly informed by the fact that The New Colossus presents two alternate timelines for players to choose from which are reflective of events that happened in The New Order (2014).

A cruel choice, handed down by a Nazi, means that one must sacrifice a companion at the start of the game. For the duration of the campaign, one can either enjoy the good company of Fergus, a ribald Scotsman, or Wyatt, a genteel Harvard man.

In the alternative history of the recent Wolfenstein games, the Nazis have taken over the United States. At the end of The New Order, William “B.J.” Blazkowicz, the hero of the series, was gravely injured in a fight with a Nazi general.

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The New Colossus opens with Blazkowicz drifting in and out of consciousness as his friends attend to his condition. If you’ve seen Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line (1998), or almost any of his other films, you’ll have a sense of the kind of introspective moralistic musings to which Blazkowicz is inclined.

Brian Bloom, who returns to his role as Blazkowicz, is adept in his role. His deep voice rolls from steely bravado to tenderhearted yearning.

When Blazkowicz wakes from his coma, the U-boat his friends have requisitioned is under attack. Your first moments playing the game involve zipping around in a wheelchair shooting Nazis.

No matter how good you are, Blazkowicz, ever the self-sacrificing mensch, eventually surrenders to a vicious high-ranking Nazi who captures two of Blazkowicz’s friends. Said Nazi, Frau Engel, is a villain who leaves the smell of sulphur in your nose as her awfulness ignites the screen.

She bears a gargantuan grudge against Blazkowicz for disfiguring her face and killing her lover in The New Order. For payback, she kills one of Blazkowicz’s friends and desecrates her corpse. This gruesome scene is counterbalanced by the care with which Blazkowicz later treats his friend’s mutilated body, which he returns to his friends for a proper send off.

For a game that revolves around a massive amount of blood letting, a welcome degree of resources have been poured into creating moments of human connection. A decent amount of time can be spent wandering around your home base and watching the interactions between your comrades, many of which are hilarious and touching. Moreover, if you linger in the shadows before charging in to annihilate your foes, you’ll hear some of the Nazis engaging in conversations that suggest that at least some of your antagonists are more than inveterate brutes.

Although I enjoyed the narrative beats in other recent Wolfenstein games, I was never overly fond of the action sequences, which I recall being filled with jarring difficulty spikes. The New Colossus doesn’t have the sort of frustrating, bullet-sponge, endgame bosses of The New Order or The Old Blood.

Its overall difficulty curve struck me as sensible, as it impresses upon the player the need for caution in the beginning, while Blazkowicz’s body is damaged, but is more accommodating of guns-blazing, derring-do later on, after a radical operation improves his condition.

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I’ve seen some online commentators complain about how quickly Blazkowicz can be gunned down. I noticed that I had to alter my play style coming off a generally more forgiving shooter like Destiny 2. As with the earlier Wolfenstein games, there is no regenerating health so you have to be diligent about scouring environments for life-extending items.

The New Colossus rewards stealth and tactical approaches that seek out the most advantageous positions from which to launch assaults. Having to think a little bit before you shoot sits well with the game’s overall vibe.