As with the first Wolfenstein, New Colossus shows that there are few studios out there who get singleplayer FPS quite like MachineGames does. A big part of that is down to their focus not just on the shooting, but on the world you’re shooting your way through.
In New Colossus, a game full of lovable and fantastically-written characters, one of the real stars isn’t a person at all, but the stage design. Wolfenstein is able to take locations as varied as a New Orleans swamp, a nuclear-ravaged Manhattan and the skies above Los Angeles and somehow unify them with matching visual signatures like 20th century pulp and the excessive use of steel.
Also helping tie things together are the game’s posters, which litter almost every corner of New Colossus and play a big role in not only making each level feel like a lived-in place, but doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to environmental story-telling.
In Wolfenstein canon, the player has been in a coma for 15 years while the Nazis won the Second World War. That’s a lot of backstory to catch up on, and these posters do much of the talking.