Two of our editors have finished Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, and now that a few days have passed since the sequel's release last Friday, Sam and Evan sat down to discuss what they thought of its alternatingly dark and silly story, combat, and plot twists.

Evan Lahti, US Editor-in-Chief: Sam, you reviewed Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus for us, and now that I've finished it too we can engage in a lively,  spoiler-filled discussion of its absurd alternate history and hyperviolence.

Samuel Roberts, UK Editor-in-Chief: Indeed. I mostly enjoyed the story, particularly the characterisation of the game's larger cast on your u-boat. Stopping to witness new interactions with them between levels is a treat. The alternate history setting was vivid, weird and horrifying at the game's best, but they probably could've shown you more of it. 

Evan: I wanted more of that too. Wolf 2 feels like a case of the game's marketing pulling disproportionately from a visually-interesting area of the game—Nazi America—and in the process misleading us about how substantial that is.

 Samuel: A big deal was made of the game's Roswell/Galveston level, where you explore a small town during a Nazi march. It's probably the most interesting snapshot of everyday life in Wolfenstein 2's alternate universe, and it maybe totals 20 minutes out of the game's 10 hours. Then you're back in generic corridors and ruins shooting Nazis. I would've loved maybe two or three more hubs like that. What does San Francisco look like now? Or could we see what a more civilised district of New Orleans looks like? In the latter's case you don't get much of a sense of the place outside of a swamp at the start and jazz during the cutscenes when you meet that resistance group. 

Evan: But hey, the u-boat has a lot of character. The early plot point of having Nazis hiding on the ship in a secret section was clever—I liked finding their desperate letters to their German wives on the ship. And on the main decks, the cast of resistance fighters are good comedic relief from Wolfenstein 2's brutality. Debra Wilson gives a great performance as Grace Walker. I remember around 2013 or 2014 we'd complain often about story-driven games being so serious. Wolf 2's weirdness is a big reason I enjoyed it so much. Finally, an FPS that's cool with sending pregnant women to fight robots on Nazi air carriers.

Samuel: Yeah, I love that you can still find games like this. I could play new Dooms and Wolfenstein until the end of time, and I hope Bethesda keeps bankrolling them. That's much more interesting to me as a player than dozens of expensive-looking multiplayer games with cartoon-y character designs that find no audience and are quickly forgotten (though we can have both, of course). Whether the market tells that story or not, I have no idea, and I suppose that's not my problem until this type of game goes away. 

Evan: OK, let's talk about one of the big moments in the game—this is our readers' chance to avoid über spoilers, if they've made it this far without playing. 

The execution scene is incredible. I think BioShock was last time I found a plot twist that gratifying. It was pure emotional whiplash: you kill your stepdad, you're captured, you heroically fight your way out of the damn courtroom during your trial, psych—that was a fantasy—and now you're being beheaded on TV. ...Wait, am I really, actually dying? Yeah, it seems like this is really happening. And it's clumsy, ugly, and I'm experiencing every moment of it. BJ's low point was my high point of the game.

Samuel: Having played the game for five or six hours in a row at that point, I felt like I was dreaming. They just plugged wires into his head to save him? Of course they did. It's bloody Wolfenstein.

Evan: We and a lot of other critics have praised games like Dark Souls and XCOM that handle death and failure in interesting ways. Usually that means a mechanic, though, rather than a plot twist. Here, there's a profound feeling of failure—you're watching the apparent last hope of humanity's head get chopped off. It does what good fiction does—for a moment, you have zero answer to the question "How the hell are they gonna get out of this one?"

Samuel: And it's certainly an interesting way to introduce upgrades into the game. I like that it marks a turning point in BJ's attitude towards life and death—the certainty of his demise turns into hope. 

Evan: I honestly couldn't take much more of that 'gloomy, battered-soldier Billy' monologuing. And what did you think about all of the 'parents of weak children' stuff? It's established as a theme right at the outset with BJ and with Frau Engel and her daughter too.

Samuel: Yeah, I wasn't convinced by the way they built on BJ's background with his abusive father and victimised mother, in all honesty. It felt like surface-level exploration of a pretty serious subject, just to make sure the player knows everything around them is as horrible as it possible in this world. I felt like they could've spent more time digging into this, instead of giving BJ this caricature of an abusive/racist father who's in three or four cutscenes, then gets fucked up with a hatchet before the house is literally picked up by Nazis. 

Evan: I didn't hate it. I liked that they made time for BJ's backstory during a continental war.

Samuel: I guess making him so reprehensible and over-the-top is in line with the game's presentation generally—this is Wolfenstein, after all—but domestic abuse and racism deserve a bit more than being treated as superficial details. It's not that I don't think these themes shouldn't be in Wolfenstein 2—I just think they should've given them more time and nuance to justify their inclusion. They're not quite earned for me in a game where the storytelling is otherwise extremely good.

Evan: But hey, I sure did like crawling around those pristine Nazi bases.

Samuel: Yeah, I'm not sure what your experience was, but in most cases I'd sneak for as long as I could before getting caught and unleashing all hell. I reckon I killed about 25% of the game's officers in full stealth—which I'm happy enough with. 

Evan: Nice. I think the silenced pistol is the second or third best gun in the game, after the heavy laser. One-shotting those officers feels like defusing a bomb from a distance… a racist bomb. But I still find cycling guns while dual-wielding to be a nightmare, and I don't like the radical gun menu at all. More importantly, there were moments on my difficulty level, "Call me Terror-Billy!" (does a game really need seven difficulties?), when Wolf 2 taxed my FPS skills and forced me to improvise my way through waves of reinforcements. The resistance base escape sequence in Manhattan was definitely one of those.

Samuel: It's slightly too tricky to play in full stealth without tons of quicksaving and reloads, which I might do on another playthrough with more time. I loved the larger environments, though—great venues for a firefight. I wish they looked a bit more vibrant, though. Most of the time you're fighting in generic military bases, rather than feeling like you're in some twisted version of America. 

Evan: I thought the bases were nicely detailed, actually—every control panel and workstation looked lived-in and authentic, unlike the dull ruins of New Orleans and Manhattan. Combat-wise, more than anything I wanted some more intimidating bosses. The pair of Reichbots you fight at the end of the game are a total letdown—I didn't like the level layout for that section, how I could hide underneath and pop out like a prairie dog. 

Speaking of bosses: Why didn't we get to kill Hitler? Will they revisit it in the DLC?

Samuel: Yeah, maybe. I tried three or four times to see if I could somehow sprint to the nearest guard and melee them after booting Hitler in the face, but no luck. Also, wouldn't BJ try and blow up the base on Venus instead of just leaving? 

Evan: It was supposedly an HQ for top brass, but hey, not every base can have a convenient auto-destruct sequence, Sam.

Sam: How did you feel about the Hitler scene generally? I found it at times both a bit horrible and amusing, which is almost certainly the point. I never figured out how I felt about the breakneck tonal variance in this game—I'm somewhere in the middle, probably. Wolfenstein is having its cake and eating it, here—Hitler references the real-life dictator's ideologies while having a piss, and there BJ is in a comedy mustache doing a bad job of pretending to be himself. I'm amused and yet ever-so-slightly put out. Machinegames creates this feeling then leaves the player to figure out how they feel about it, for better or worse. 

Evan: If anything, I think they deliberately wanted to avoid mirroring the end of Inglourious Basterds. Like Tarantino's film, you've got Hitler involved in the production of a movie—it's halfway there. But yeah, I guess the thing that rubbed me the wrong way is that Hitler's depicted as senile, which portrays him as a deranged, broken Nazi grandpa rather than simply evil. You also can't kill him, although there's a consolation 'cheevo for trying.

Sam: It's an unforgettable moment, at the very least. I just wished the sub-Doom Venus level that followed was more fun. Nothing took the wind out of my sails more than having to cool down BJ's suit every 60 seconds. This didn't really add anything to the game other than slowing it down. 

Evan: And as the game went on, I was let down by the design of the special 'components' BJ unlocks. Wherever BJ had to crawl through a tiny vent, there was almost always a spot for him to bust through a wall or use the Inspector Gadget stilts. What's the point of unique gadgetry if they're all effectively the same? A missed opportunity for some weirder level design.

Samuel: Yeah, the seams are very obvious in that regard.

Evan: I did like the Oberkommando missions a lot, though—I like that I'm free to go through them at my own pace without any burden of story. It's a clever structure that lets you finish the story when you want to.

Samuel: Yeah, I like these too, although in some cases you feel like you've seen more than enough of the same environments from the story. Either way, they add more value to the game for people who want more of Wolfenstein 2's stealth/action loop. I like that you can use them to go back and get the extra contraptions, although when I came across this option it was far too deep into the story to really get any use out of them. And the ram shackles contraption is the most fun one, really. 

Evan: I'm really curious how the season pass stuff, "The Freedom Chronicles," is going to slot into this.

Samuel: But they've already confirmed they're about non-Wolfenstein 2 characters, right? I feel like there's more to tell here with BJ and company. Frau Engel is dead, but surely the next chapter is the full-on revolution that the game has only really teased by the start of the closing credits? Maybe that gets saved for Wolfenstein 3. I hope there is one. 

Evan: Me too. As much as we clearly didn't love everything, this should end up being my favorite singleplayer FPS of the year. And I don't love that more of Wolf is being meted out as DLC, but I'm certainly going to play all of it. 

Call of Duty: WWII is now right around the corner, and like clockwork Nvidia has released a 'Game Ready' driver package that ensures it will run optimally on GeForce GPUs.

"Game Ready drivers provide the best possible gaming experience for all major new releases, including Virtual Reality games. Prior to a new title launching, our driver team is working up until the last minute to ensure every performance tweak and bug fix is included for the best gameplay on day-1," Nvidia says.

Nvidia is also known to optimize its drivers for recent games, along with ones that are coming soon. In this case, the new 388.13 WHQL driver release is also optimized for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (released last week) and Need for Speed Payback (due out November10).

As for bug fixes, the new driver release solves an issue that's preventing images from appearing on secondary monitors. It also gets rid of the yellow bang by the graphics entry in the Device Manager, and fixes a corruption issue that would momentarily occur on some laptops right before a streaming games goes into full-screen mode.

In addition to installing new drivers for your GeForce GPU (if that's what you're running), you can preload Call of Duty: WWII on Steam so that you're ready to go the moment it releases on November 3.

You can grab the new driver release through GeForce Experience, or go here to manually download it.

Since its launch last week Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus has given us much to think about via Samuel's review, the seven things Austin wished he knew before jumping in, and this GIF-tastic gallery of Nazi slaughter. 

Now, MachineGames and Bethesda have rolled out a beta hotfix patch that fixes Steam overlay and re-enables Async compute for AMD players, so long as they're using the latest drivers. Most crucial for players in Japan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia—an issue affecting file deployment has been resolved. 

Here's the patch notes in full: 

• Resolved an issue affecting the deployment of full game files in Japan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
• Re-enabled Async compute for AMD users (requires AMD driver version 17.10.3).
• Temporarily disabled Async compute on 1080ti until driver fix is in.
• Re-enabled Steam Overlay.
• Added driver version detection and dialogue. 

MachineGames advises those interested in the above to install the patch via the Steam public beta branch, and by right clicking the game via your Steam library. Select "betas" from there and then public beta thereafter.

As we said in our review, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is a great shooter and a worthy sequel, albeit a touch less fresh than The New Order. The New Colossus will feel familiar to anyone who played its predecessor. There are some new weapons and abilities, but the shooting and stealth plays the same notes, which isn't a bad thing. That said, there are a few new idiosyncrasies to Machine Games' latest Nazi killing simulator, some of which can radically alter your play style and even the stuff you encounter. With that in mind, I've put together a list of the most useful tips for BJ's return.

Warning: slight spoilers ahead. I've avoided major plot points in these tips.

Collect and decode enigma codes to unlock assassination missions 

Whenever you kill a Nazi commander—the uptight suits who sound the alarm when you're spotted—he'll drop an 'enigma code' denoted by an icon that looks like a work stub. The in-game tutorial entry for these codes will tell you to use the 'enigma machine' to decode them. You unlock this machine around the middle of the campaign (it's located near the war map). Once you do, you can use your collected enigma codes to unlock side missions about assassinating Nazi leaders. These missions are set in unique areas around the U.S., and they'll show you a different side of several characters. Suffice to say, they're good fun and worth doing.

Each missions 'costs' a certain amount of enigma codes, and there are about a dozen missions in all, so be sure to loot all the Commanders you kill. You have to play a little matching minigame (above) to unlock the missions. All you have to do is manipulate the rows of symbols so that your rows match up with the symbol you're given. If you succeed, you'll spend however many codes the mission costs. But if you run out of time and fail, you'll lose one code and have to try again. 

Even the most difficult and expensive missions are easy once you get a hang of decoding, but don't be afraid to reload your save if you fail. You don't want to waste enigma codes, after all. 

Oh, and don't feel pressured to finish all the assassination missions before the story. You can do them in the post-game, too.

Talk to crew members to unlock side missions 

You can also unlock side missions by conversing with the crew of Evas Hammer, The New Colossus' submarine hub world. Crewmates do more than quip and bicker when you walk by. Some will ask you to complete odd jobs and conversation-based side quests around the submarine itself, but others will give you missions to complete out in the world. These are more diverse than the enigma assassination missions, and some come with very good rewards, including new abilities which I won't spoil for you here. Just be sure to talk to everyone you see between story missions. Well, not everyone; a speech bubble icon will appear in front of anyone who has a mission for you. So be sure to talk to them at least.

Restock ammo between missions at the shooting range 

Speaking of breaks between story missions: do yourself a favor and visit the ammunition depot located near the shooting range before each mission. Lovable inventor Set will acquaint you with the shooting range very early on, so make a note of its location. Your ammo reserves carry over between missions, so if you're totally spent on submachine gun or rifle rounds when you finish one, you'll start the next at a disadvantage—unless you pop into the shooting range and stock up. You can refill all your magazines, grab some hatchets and charge up your laser, which is a nice cushion to have.

You need to look for weapon upgrades, they aren't handed to you  

Lots of singleplayer shooters gradually hand you new weapons and powers as you progress through the campaign, but The New Colossus is a bit more BioShocky with its upgrades. Some weapon upgrade kits are lying around in plain sight, but the vast majority of them are squirreled away in all manner of vents and crates and corners, so it really pays to investigate. Be especially wary of rooms where you stop to converse with allies, either over the radio or in cutscenes. In my experience, there's often (but obviously not always) an upgrade kit nearby. Another common tell is an odd abundance of art or story collectibles like journal entries and newspaper clippings. If you find a room filled with these things, especially if you had to go off the beaten path to get to it, double-check for weapon upgrade kits. 

Stealth-kill armored Nazis and hack robot Nazis to level useful perks 

The New Colossus emphasizes shooting and stealth pretty evenly. Personally, I find the shooting more satisfying (as evidenced by this GIF essay), but playing it stealthy and stabbing everyone has been dramatically improved by the addition of hatchets, with which you can dismember, decapitate, and otherwise use to ruin unwitting Nazis. 

But did you know you can also stealth-kill those hefty armored Nazis? Simply sneak up behind them and follow the standard stealth prompt to puncture their gas tanks. They won't notice that they're leaking (highly flammable) fuel. Depending on the nature of their death (sometimes the explosion gets them, sometimes it's the fire—it's a toss-up, really) you'll contribute to your environmental or burning kill counters, which provide useful perks. The explosion may also kill nearby Nazis, which is always nice. 

Just as usefully, you can remove robot Nazis from the equation by 'tampering' with them. It's not hacking exactly—you can't actually make them fight for you, freaking amazing as that would have been—but it's still the easiest way to take them out. Many robots will remain in standby mode until you're spotted, so if you come across any stationary robots, just mosey on over and rip out their batteries. Bam, dead Nazi robots. Tampering with robots will level another perk which rewards you with energy ammo when you successfully disable a robot. It's one of the many cool examples of perks naturally accentuating your play style, and it's especially helpful if you're fond of lasers.

Throw back enemy grenades to level another useful perk 

Maybe I'm the only one who didn't get this memo, but I honestly didn't know you could throw back enemy grenades until I was nine hours into The New Colossus. If there is a tutorial explaining this early on, I'd like to apologize for neglecting it. I'd also like to advise it to speak up, because this technique is useful. 

If an enemy grenade lands near your feet, don't panic; just look for its blinking red light, a small arrow prompt and press 'E' (or whatever your 'use' key is) to pick it up and toss it back. Not only will this keep you safe from the grenade and ideally take out some Nazis in the process, it will help you level the grenade perk in your 'tactical' perk tree, which extends the timer on enemy grenades, making them easier to dodge and throw back. 

Melee as many dudes as you can to buff your health  

There's one more easily missed perk that is definitely worth your time: the 'combat takedown' perk in the mayhem tree. At higher levels, this significantly boosts the speed of your natural health regeneration, which is a life-saver on higher difficulty modes. To level this perk, you have to kill Nazis with normal melee attacks. Critically, stealth kills and robot kills count toward different perks, so whenever you find an isolated Nazi soldier, try to get in close and give him a taste of your hatchet. This will save you ammo in the short-term and a lot of health in the long-term. 

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus retains the unexpectedly strong storytelling of its predecessor. BJ and the gang are colorfully characterized throughout the bombastic story, making the narrative itself a fun ride. Which is great, but not really why I'm here. As far as I'm concerned, Wolfenstein 2 is a Nazi killing simulator, and as we said in our review, it's one of the best. Shooting Nazis is a classic FPS pastime, so to celebrate Wolfenstein's return, I've put together a compilation of the many wonderful ways you can kill Nazis in The New Colossus. Many Nazis were harmed in the making of these gifs.

Warning: slight weapon and area spoilers ahead. I've avoided any major plot points in these gifs.