[h1]Mini-Review[/h1]
The New Colossus is a very honourable successor to the solidly good The New Order.
It keeps its predecessor’s solid FPS foundations, but takes its universe and storytelling somewhere much stranger. The New Order was relatively classic in tone: a serious alternate-history war story, with dark humour, sci-fi excess and a few memorable weird moments. The New Colossus instead goes full grotesque gothic pulp.
Occupied America becomes a nightmarish carnival of blood, machinery, decay, fascist family insanity, grotesque characters and increasingly absurd situations. It is often funny and horrible at the same time. It took me around ten hours to really get into this tone, because at first I kept wondering whether the game actually knew what it wanted to be. Once I accepted its rules, though, I found it genuinely unique and memorable.
The main story took me just under 18 hours, and I was actually disappointed to see it end. The game takes a while to pull you into its madness, then wraps up just when you are finally fully on board.
[h2]The Storytelling[/h2] (very mild spoilers incoming)
The story is not perfectly balanced all the time: it jumps between trauma, grief, absurd humour, grotesque horror, family drama, revolutionary pulp and extremely bloody action. But that instability is also part of its identity.
The game does something particularly interesting with its Nazis. You often overhear soldiers having ordinary conversations: discussing colleagues, relationships, daily annoyances, fears or stupid little details of life. It humanises them, but not to excuse them. Quite the opposite: it makes the system more disturbing, because fascism is not presented as an army of supernatural monsters. It is presented as ordinary people normalising, serving and benefiting from something monstrous.
They also regularly speak about B.J. as “Terror-Billy”, a terrifying, bloodthirsty terrorist who murders soldiers and destroys the Reich. From inside their propaganda bubble, this makes complete sense. The game lets you hear how an authoritarian regime turns resistance into terrorism by erasing everything that came before: the occupation, the ghettos, the murders, the camps, the repression. It is a bold and politically interesting choice.
Frau Engel is a truly despicable antagonist, while Hitler himself is one of the most grotesque depictions of the character I have ever seen. He is not presented as a darkly charismatic supervillain, but as a physically pathetic, decaying, repulsive, paranoid old tyrant who is nevertheless capable of casually destroying lives. It is rather funny, very ugly, and very effective at stripping away any possible aura of greatness.
The game’s message is not subtle by the end: fascism is not just something to laugh at from a comfortable historical distance. It must be resisted before people get used to living inside it. That is a welcome reminder, even in a deliberately ridiculous fictional universe.
[h2]Gameplay and Difficulty[/h2]
The gameplay itself is still not exceptional, but it does the job very efficiently when you get to kill some Nazis.
Gunfights are satisfying, the weapons are varied enough, dual-wielding is fun, and the perk system gives you a decent incentive to vary your approach. Like in the New Order, by doing specific actions, such as killing enemies while dual-wielding, getting headshots, using stealth takedowns and so on, you unlock useful bonuses. It is not revolutionary, but it helps avoid playing exactly the same way all the time.
The main downside is the same as in The New Order: the difficulty is ridiculously low.
I usually play FPS games at difficulty 3 out of 4. Here, I had to move up to 5 out of 6, with the sixth difficulty locked away for the first run, and it was still a little too easy most of the time. There are, however, a couple of absurd difficulty spikes that I have rarely seen in a video game. I enjoyed them because they finally forced me to think and adapt, but average players should be prepared to temporarily lower the difficulty level.
The higher difficulty has one big advantage: stealth becomes somewhat meaningful. Since you die very quickly, there are a few sequences where reaching the commanders without being noticed, and preventing reinforcements from being called, can make the difference between life and death.
I also avoided using the LaserKraftWerk most of the time because it is clearly overpowered. I kept it mainly for the difficulty spikes, where it became a useful emergency tool.
The downside of dying quickly is that making a perfect run between two checkpoints can become nearly impossible. Fortunately, manual saves are available, and they helped me a lot during the more punishing sequences.
The game also throws far too much ammunition, health and armour at you. You are almost always at maximum resources, especially because health regenerates up to the next multiple of 20 after a short while. There were a few areas where I had to pay attention, but not many.
One strange design choice concerns alarms. Once an enemy sees you, it triggers the alarm (by radio?). You can unlock a perk that delays that triggering, but killing the enemy who saw you does not stop it: the alarm still happens once the delay ends. It feels weird and artificial, although I assume it exists for balance reasons: otherwise, stealth would probably become too easy.
[h2]Assassination Missions[/h2]
I completed a few assassination missions after finishing the campaign. They are not bad if you simply want a few more hours of shooting Nazis, but they have no story and mostly send you back to previously visited locations. They became repetitive quite quickly for me.
[h2]Technical Issues[/h2]
Technically, on an Nvidia RTX 3070, AMD 5950X and 64 GB of RAM, I did not have many issues at maximum settings. I regularly got an "out of VRAM" message after a couple of loadings, but it never caused an actual problem, so I simply ignored it. I also had occasional frame drops and a few crashes on exit.
[h1]Pros :[/h1]
- A unique grotesque gothic pulp atmosphere
- Efficient and satisfying gunfights, with a decent weapon selection
- Good story, memorable characters and bold storytelling choices
- The Nazis are humanised without being excused, which makes the regime more disturbing
- The "Terror-Billy" perspective is an interesting look at authoritarian propaganda
- Hitler is depicted at the top of his form... (almost 😅)
- Frau Engel is a wonderfully despicable Nazi villain
- Stealth is helpful on challenging difficulty levels without becoming cumbersome
- Perks encourage you to vary your playstyle
- It reminds us that fascism is not just an old museum exhibit, and that resistance matters, Revolution ! ✊
[h1]Cons :[/h1]
- The main campaign ends too early, I needed more!
- Lighting is more beautiful than in The New Order, but still contains a lot of grey destroyed buildings
- The difficulty is ridiculously low
- Except when the game suddenly produces a few absurd difficulty spikes
- Resources are handed out far too generously
