On my last replay of the Machine!Wolfenstein series, it dawned on me that I don’t really like TNC that much, at least not compared to TNO and TOB, which are both utterly fantastic.

I’m playing these games for the first time and I wouldn’t call TOB fantastic. It was a fine DLC if you wanted to see more of the classic WWII Wolfenstein setting in the MachineGames continuity but it just felt so much lesser than its parent game, especially in the writing department. I was also disappointed by how they didn’t do anything particularly interesting with the supernatural elements which just amounted to unremarkable zombie enemies and the final boss. The beginning had amazing atmosphere though and the interactions with Rudi Jäger were great (Ja, uhh… ein… Hot Dog)

Also, minor gripe, but having studied them recently for a course I’m taking, I dislike in hindsight the way the KKK is portrayed in the game. I know the devs are just playing to the popular perception of the Klan as a bunch of ignorant hicks, but in actuality the Klan tended to be populated by small business assholes and middle class joiner-types, people who would’ve been seen as pillars of the community. I know this wasn’t the intention, but portraying them as baying rubes seems like an attempt to downplay how pervasive white supremacist beliefs were even among “respectable” cirlces.

In some ways The New Colossus definitely feels like a reaction to Trump and the alt-right (TNO came out in the middle of Obama’s second term, TNC came out during Trump’s first year as president) and you get the feeling the devs are using the occupied Nazi America setting to comment on and dunk on them. There’s a scene where BJ stays behind to cover members of the Black Revolutionary Front from a Nazi assault as they’re evacuated by the Kreisau Circle and he says “Come fucking get me, you white-ass Nazi pigs,” which came off as such a weird line to put in BJ’s mouth. In the previous game, he came off as a Greatest Generation guy that definitely hated the Nazis and everything they stood for but wasn’t necessarily too politically aware. This was best demonstrated in the Wyatt timeline scene where J vents about his experiences with racism and racial segregation growing up black in pre-WWII America to BJ and tells him to his face that blonde, blue-eyed jarheads like him were the Nazis back home, and BJ gets defensive, angrily shoving J up against the wall before backing off. That came right after a scene where Grace makes fun of testicles being a synonym for toughness since they’re so squishy and delicate, which is fine, but it was prompted by BJ admiring Caroline, the dead Kreisau leader for having “balls of steel” which didn’t feel a very BJ line either and more like something Fergus would say

I played the TNO and TNC on steamdeck and fuck me the difficulty made things a slog. I did most of TNO on regular difficulty but had to drop it down to baby mode because the 2nd boss battle phase was absolutely bullshit, especially with a controller layout (albeit gyro-assisted)