Midway through Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, series protagonist BJ Blazkowicz falls to drinking moonshine and talking politics with a lefty firebrand in the sealed-off, waterlogged remnants of New Orleans. The man - a rebel general you've been sent to recruit - screams at BJ about well-heeled imperialists grinding up the proles in capitalism's war machine, and BJ roars back about good-for-nothing bohemians and bolsheviks dodging the draft. The camera circles the table unsteadily, as if waiting to cut in. To the rear, a female college professor crisply picks off Nazis in the street below while an African-American clarinet virtuoso launches into a jazz solo, accelerating the tempo as the scene unfolds. In short order BJ chugs down so much hooch that he topples over into a stupor. Impressed by his forthrightness, the general agrees to join your cause.
It's a pretty good summary for the story as a whole: a stylish and drunken confusion of screeds, motifs and caricatures plucked from the subversive 60s and copiously reimagined, care of an alternate-history premise in which Nazi Germany prevailed over the Allies using gadgets stolen from a mystical Jewish sect. Dreamers, stiffs and crazies raging, bleeding and hugging it out against a steady chorus of gunfire - all of it somehow funnelled into the woozy, battered persona of one of the industry's longest-serving action heroes. There is much about The New Colossus that is clumsy and self-indulgent, even a little reprehensible, but that's because it strains to address ideas big budget first-person shooters seldom dare to, and I would argue that even its failures are worth experiencing. Launched at a time when real-life fascism is resurgent in the USA, it's a game people will be picking apart and mulling over for years to come. It gives great shotgun, too.
There is a sense throughout that MachineGames wants to leave BJ behind but doesn't know how to let him die. As The New Colossus begins he's fading fast, rattling around the gigantic, wonderfully furnished submarine that serves as your mission hub in a wheelchair with his legs and guts in tatters. Eventually, he obtains an arcane exosuit that restores your ability to walk and duck, but he remains a hero "on autopilot, waiting to hit the wall", as one ally puts it. After decades of war BJ's psyche is imploding, reverting to its point of origin. Early on you're introduced via flashback to his bigoted Texan brute of a dad and beaten-down Polish mother, in a somewhat gratuitous, superficial tale of domestic abuse that does take a more engaging, Gone Home-ish turn in a later level. While squeezing through vents in search of giant cyborgs to blow up or electrocute, you'll hear him mutter to the ghosts of fallen comrades, promising to join them soon. "All they are. All they've felt. Like water. Like it never was."
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