You escape your pursuers Via underground sewers, So we start as we mean to go on. Any pretense of freshness is gone At the very outset of Stage One. The new Wolfenstein seeks to enthrall With an ongoing high-octane brawl, But it’s a game about war That we’ve all seen before And just like the title adds fuck all. It’s actually meant to succeed Return to Castle Wolfenstein’s lead Which is pretty damn slow ‘Cause that was eight years ago And the memories have gone stale indeed. You may wonder if this is a sequel To some past Wolfenstein, or a prequel Depicting our hero In a previous era When he wasn’t looked upon as an equal. It soon becomes clear that the city Has been invaded by occult committees: Mystical preachers And slavering creatures And gymnasts with stonking great titties. There’s an active resistance In need of assistance And everything’s gone greyish-brown. So they stand up and shout, “BJ, sort this all out! “We’d do it ourselves, but we’re busy.” So he’s sent to a big German town Where some serious shit’s going down. He was out one day murdering Germans, As they tried to enact London’s Burning, He beat up some dudes, And broke missile tubes, So their boat got blown up, that’ll learn ‘em! But while there he made the discovery That the Nazis had powers like no other-y, He bought back a bangle With some mystical angle, To which the Allies responded, “Oh, buggery!” At the secret service of Queen Lizzie BJ’s bosses find themselves in a tizzy. In the tumultuous time before D-Day, There once was a man named BJ, With chocolate box hair And a face like a bear And a jacket he picked up on eBay. That’s why I’ve decided to review it in limerick form! It feels weird to call it generic, since this is the franchise that practically invented the genre, but Wolfenstein – the new one, that is – subscribes to so many of the cliches of current generation action games that it’s like The Spy Who Loved Me of FPSes it’s so obnoxiously safe and committee-designed that any attempt to critique it in my normal manner would be equally as dull. From this we can conclude that the people of the early 21st century were taking the piss!” What, did some kind of apocalypse happen while I wasn’t looking and now everything has to reset? You know what future historians will say about us, right? “There were two very different games within the same 20-year period, both called Wolfenstein, and the second one was not strictly speaking a remake of the first. It’s like what they did with Star Trek, Friday the 13th, and Final Destination. Christ, we’ve been getting big-headed lately haven’t we? Not Wolfenstein 2 or Wolfenstein: Revenge of the Man with a Chocolate Box Concealed In His Hairdo, just Wolfenstein.