I beat TNO on the second highest difficulty and only got caught up trying the same level for over 15 minutes once or twice (granted, one of those snags lasted three years). This game is kicking my ass, though, and I'm on the third lowest setting. I think what Jeff said on the last Bombcast is right: this game wants you to run out into the open unloading dual-wielded guns into Nazi faces.

I just don't find that fun. I played through TNO mostly in stealth, and I loved the stealth mechanics in that game much more than I do here. The movement feels too loose in this game, and I just haven't been able to get a handle on it. Naturally, when the enemies you're eliminating aren't defenseless, it's going to make the game way harder.

I played a few hours of it last night on my brother's computer and it was tough but not that ridiculous. Keep moving, as Jeff said, and also buy that armor piercing upgrade for the supergewehr first thing. And the silenced pistol, for taking out commanders before you start shooting away. Once everybody starts shooting at you, don't hide in corners, keep moving.

There are some things I wished they'd change in a patch or something. Weapon switching should be faster and pulling up the weapon wheel should stop or slow time. Picking items up shouldn't even need the prompt, it should just automatically do it. It should be easier to tell which direction you're getting hit from. I also think the camera movement and bob is a little too much.

What can't be changed in a patch is the level design, which sometimes doesn't accommodate stealth very well and sometimes doesn't accommodate run-n-gun very well and sometimes it's too easy to get lost in. Everything needs to "flow" a little better.

I still had a ton of fun with what I played and I look forward to playing more! The writing and story in this game are excellent, there is no shame in playing on Easy just to see the excellent storytelling on display here.

Yikes, you guys weren't kidding. Just started the game tonight and it is brutal. Even on the second easiest difficulty I ran into a combat encounter that was so frustrating that I just gave up and dropped it down to the easiest difficulty. I didn't have nearly this much trouble with the previous game, but there's a million things that appear to make this worse.

Hit detection is a nightmare, so you never know where you're getting shot from. Level design is confusing as hell, so it's easy to get yourself or enemies lost or caught on geometry and then shot out of nowhere, especially with constantly respawning enemies. Stealth seems much more finicky in this game compared to the previous game so - combined with the bad level design - trying to take down commanders and prevent respawns before encounters is usually a lost cause. Health and armor basically mean nothing and you can die instantly against heavies or several enemies if you get caught out. All make it more difficulty in a frustrating way.

It's like the game doesn't know what it wants to be. Run and gun / melee gets you killed very easily. Level design doesn't work very well for stealth or hiding. Cover / ranged shooting isn't fun. I'm looking forward to the story, but it really sucks that they appear to have fucked up the fun combat from the first game.

I'm glad i'm not the only one. It feels really weird getting wrecked by two or three regular goons right off the back of completing the Destiny raid. Some things I've noticed:

• There's no real indicator that i'm hitting my target, their armour tanks so much damage that they barely stagger, and then they often ragdoll slowly so I end up wasting ammo shooting them after they're already dead
• The ironsights are completely garbage.
• Changing weapons mid-fight is slow and laborious, but your ammo pool is low and picking up armour off the ground is very inconsistent, so you often end up with empty guns midfight.
• Auto-aim snaps to the head of your target but the recoil is such that it will immediately bump your aim so you're shooting over their head.
• Enemies are fast and aggressive and will often appear behind you and spray you down to nothing with a single mag before you even know they're there.
• Terrible feedback regarding when you're getting hit. Your health drains crazy fast and you have no indication you're about to die until you hit 10HP at which point you're one shot away from death, which usually means you're already dead. The HUD is also terrible at keeping you informed about your current health status.
• Seems very inconsistent about health/armour pickups. Sometimes you can run through a room and ammo/health/armour will automatically get added, sometimes you have to run around staring at the ground while mashing Square (Then usually you'll get shot while doing this and die because you were looking at the ground).

I'm playing on the 2nd to lowest difficulty but I'm at the point now where I either lower the difficulty or I stop playing. Repeating the same section of one level for 45 minutes fucking sucks, especially when I feel like I'm actually playing pretty well.

How the fuck am I dying to these knuckleheads anyway, am I not wearing the fucking Jewish IronMan suit?

Lol just want to chime in after seeing all the people that beat Doom on UV finding this hard. I couldn't even beat the first level of that thing on UV but im having no difficulties with Wolfenstein 2 on Do or Die at all so far. The first time I beat TNO(in2014) was on normal, used a lot of stealth and I had a pretty though time with it but the second time (like a month or two ago) I went in on the hardest difficulty with no stealth(except for stealthing a commander once in a while if it was convenient) and had a way better and strangely also easier time. Pretty much every complaint Ive read here about the second game was also a complaint of mine for the first game during that first playthrough. Especially the lackluster feedback you get from damage taken.

The first game did have some weird inpulag or something on ps4 and that is completely gone in Wolfenstein 2 from what I've noticed. I do play with autoaim off and the sensitivity jacked up, not sure if that has any effect on it.

I started running and gunning like Jeff said and found myself getting caught up a lot less. Dual wielding shotguns is so effective and so much fun.

You can definitely die really fast if you just stand there tanking shots in the open. But honestly I'm playing on the third difficulty and not having that much of an issue, I'm not some hardcore shooter guy either.

Normally I take it pretty easy/slow and take out as many people as possible from stealth. When the combat pops its just general common sense I feel about avoiding open enemy sight lines and when you do get into their line of fire you kill them fast. Dual wielding sub machine guns or auto rifles kills anything in a split second, auto rifles even chew down supper soldiers in flash with the armor piercing rounds. One thing I did at the start was to farm a few guys to get some early perks going, that's been helpful too. Plus having a super fast load time on a PC with ssd helps too, sometimes it's less then a second with quicksave/quickload. That and playing with a K+M I feel is a big help, because being able to acquire and pop targets even a few fractions of a second faster in this game can stop a lot of that incoming damage that can ramp up fast.

The only to criticisms I will echo from others are the somewhat slow weapon switching especially with DW modes and the fact that it's sometimes very easy to miss all the incoming damage, it's like "woa I died?".

For what it's worth, I don't know if memorizing where enemies are would even help you all that much. The enemies seem to be constantly moving around to flank you, which is why not being able to clearly tell what direction fire is coming from is such a problem.

I finished it today, and while the game does get substantially easier at around the half way point when your max health is restored, the last couple of missions are obscenely frustrating during some of the bigger fights. I really think this game needs needs a gameplay overhaul and rebalancing big time. As much as I loved the experience as a whole, as it stands right now, playing it is not much fun for far too much of it.

I'm finding stealth to be more difficult in this game. I used it a lot in Wolf1, and I liked how it felt. The guards were kind of oblivious, but you didn't have the tools you would in a pure stealth game like Dishonored, so I thought it kind of evened out.

Now they've been given an overhaul, and the levels are bigger and more complex. Maybe I just haven't found my groove yet, but I'm not having a ridiculously great time playing this as a first person sneaker.

@skald said:

I struggled with it too having a similar background with the first one, but around the three-four hour mark it clicked for me. Towards the end my biggest worry was maintaining a supply of ammunition for the silenced pistol.

Something clicked with me. I am playing on whatever difficulty is one step above the default. It was brutal at first, but after a handful of missions, it all came together and felt fine. I find myself walking through encounters now. I've had two separate moments where I've checked the difficulty in the options to make sure I didn't accidentally lower it.

I think a few things happened. One, the most obvious and least tangible, I just got better at the game. You learn its tricks and learn to react to them. Two, I've upgraded some weapons. Getting the armor piercing bullets on the Sturmgewehr, for instance, has made the heavy enemies go from showstoppers to slightly tougher than the typical soldier. Three, I've become better/more patient with the stealth. If you can take out a commander before alarms are raised, you'll save yourself a ton of trouble. Four, I quit saving ammo. Heavy weapons chew through enemies as quickly as they do you. In most games I conserve stuff like this for boss fights, but you're actually finding ammo caches pretty regularly here. Use the mounted weapons, use your grenades, use everything at your disposal. If you're in a tough spot, don't be afraid to blow everything the fuck up. Once the dust settles, you'll likely be able to restock anyway.

Just in case anyone is still in the shoes I was in about a week ago, reading this thread while either catching up on the first game or just curious if the difficulty of this game was a widespread concern, I will say that they've really tuned their easy difficulty to be easy this time around. In the first game I could still die multiple times on certain encounters if I played completely recklessly (primarily meaning: stood still until the bullets stopped coming at me), but they seem to have gotten away from that this time around. I've stood in front of bosses unloading ammo on them and barely lost armor (in the Manhattan section currently), and the only times I've died have been when I ignored a prompt from an NPC to hold back for a few seconds and another when I just fell through the geometry.

I honestly think, because I have been trying to stealth when possible, that the stealth in this game is even worse than the first, though. The first time I played New Order I played on the default difficulty and I enjoyed the stealth enough when I interacted with it, especially compared to the firefights, so when I picked it back up a year later and bumped it down to easy I still tried to stealth for as long as I could. I find myself constantly breaking stealth with no idea as to why in New Colossus, though, which coupled with the lack of indication as to damage taken and the sources of that damage, I could see this game being absolutely infuriating on any actual difficulty level. I don't mind a challenge in games but this one just seems particularly poorly designed from a gameplay perspective. It's a good thing the guns, lighting and storytelling all seem to have improved significantly because this isn't a very fun game to play at its core; it becomes fun through the context surrounding it and the weird gun tech they've imagined.

@nodima: I think a lot of people might be finding their "groove" so to speak 3/4 through the game because it's when you finally stop being gimped on health. By that point I had unlocked several perks that let me roll around with 150 health and 200 armor going into most fights. That is a dramatic change from being constantly at 50hp or less going into very unforgiving combat encounters for the first three quarters of the game. I also stopped caring about stealth, which I greatly enjoyed in New Order, and started just running around like a mad man dual wielding whenever possible. Running around seems to work better than trying to take cover for some reason and since aiming down sights feels kinda of awkward you're better off sprinting and aiming your two gigantic cannons in the general direction of incoming traffic.

After having beaten New Colossus I gotta say that while I do think it's a great experience I would rate it as a very average game. The shooting continues to feel off, possibly because of how big your guns are and how clumsy aiming down sights feels when compared to other shooters. The pacing is all sorts of screwed up with what seems to be an entire 1/4 of the game missing. Gimping your health for the majority of the campaign and unlocking side missions literally two missions or so from the end seems like a baffling design decision. There are plenty of cool story moments but hardly any memorable combat encounters, with basically no boss fights. Granted I didn't think that final Deathshead encounter from New Order was particularly great but at least it punctuated the ending of the game. There is also a severe lack of weapon diversity. You get the same basic archetypes we've seen time and time again, pistol, submachine gun, assault rifle, shotgun... They didn't even add any cool quirks to these weapons and the only interesting gun is your timeline specific power weapon. In New Order you got the laser cutter which doubled as a tool and could be later upgraded to a rifle at least. With all this cool tech it seems like a waste that your guns, the primary means of interacting with the game world, are so plain.

I dunno, it's really weird because my gut reaction is to say this game was awesome because there were so many cool moments in it. But was the game really awesome or just the cutscenes in between the pretty average gameplay? I didn't dislike playing it, and the stealth was still weirdly fun in it's basic form, but I have a hard time actually recommending New Colossus as a solid shooter - and if I'm praising everything apart from the actual gameplay then how good is the game really?

I might be a bit late to the party here but i have a few tips. I just finished the game.

- You might have more places you can go than you think! If you find yourself fighting over and over in the same areas and dying over and over then try looking around and running around a bit. Not only are there items tucked all over the place but I would find out (way too late) that there are whole places you can go that ya don't see at first. These can be little tunnelways or even just stepping outside of a doorway that opened (in an event) and realizing there is a whole other area full of grenades and meds and weaponry. So if you are stuck, run around. Hell in some instances you can even just run pass shit :)

- You might be forgetting to upgrade weapons. I did. I horded upgrades. So you might think the game has no f'ing precision tools in it. How sick are you of people being able to shoot you but you can hardly even hit them? Especially with the big weapons. And yet they can peck at you with the same stuff. Ok well I wish I had done this earlier. Take the main rifle and upgrade it all the way. Scope and all. Now you will have an actual precision tool finally. It will help.

- You can grind out upgrades in some instances. If you die you keep the stat. So if you are having trouble you can resort to that. Believe it or not I never got the damn grenade one all the way up. Game is stingy on grens. I should have done grinding in particular spots for grenade perk. So get those perks up.

- Electro grenade is dope. I upgraded to that to work on the perk and then just used it the whole game.

- Sneaking in this game is trash. Do it when and where you can but after a while I gave up. You'll start to resent the game in some cases. It was hard espcecially cause I had this bug where I would throw or swing my axe for no reason. Basically if i moved my mouse fast or something it would swing. I don't know why it would throw it. Some button combo. Total glitch/bug in the game. A lot of the game I just said screw it and brought out Dual Shotguns and blasted on enemies.

- I swear the damn brightness setting was getting reset. The game never would save my mouse sensitivity either! Every game i had to set it and also after i beat the game and it went back in it reset it again! So make sure all your settings are good and may be crank up the brightness. Some areas of the game are just pitch black and you can't see whats going on. you can't see the dogs or anything. At some point I kinda gave up and just cranked the brightness up.

Only about a hour in and I'm already fed up with how the game feels. Gun control is all over the place and aiming down the sights feels less accurate for some reason. I'm using Xbox One controller on PC so maybe its a controller thing but there's so much shaking going on with the guns that its hard to get a clear shot sometimes.

@machofantastico: while I prefer gaming with a pad these days even on PC I switched to mouse and keyboard and it felt better. There is something awkward for me about holding down both triggers for dual wielding and I found it felt a bit more natural on a mouse. The process for choosing what to hold in what hand is pretty bad though and I had to often put away both guns, choose the gun I wanted, then bring both of those guns up because otherwise I’d get some weird combo like pistol and assault rifle which is like ..why? Never saw the point or need to mix and match my guns.

Get the magnum and suppressor mods for the pistol. Equip the rifle with armor piercing rounds and a scope, ADS spam until the cows come home.

It's certainly hard, especially at the beginning of the campaign. Stealth still works but it is a bit more difficult due to the improved AI and their many vantage points; It's easy to get spotted by someone who's not necessarily in your line of sight. The combat is even harder, not because of your capped health and overall fragility, but mostly because there isn't an automatic health regen system (There is a system that gives you health for every kill, but it's blocked behind some of the perks you unlock over time)

I feel like there would be a much better flow to the combat if ramshackle kills were easier to pull off, and like the glory kills from Doom, they could recover health and armor. Maybe the melee animations could be sped up just a tad as well.

After unlocking every single perk and using all the weapon upgrades, the gameplay feels way more solid and fun. The endgame missions are decent but I'd be a lot more interested in playing specific levels from the story campaign with all the perks and weapons at my disposal. That story is incredible, and it'd be great to experience it again without those early game frustrations. However, there are six different difficulty settings, so you play it how you want to play it. I started at 'Don't Hurt Me' and by the end of the game I was taking out commanders on 'They Call Me Terror Billy'.

The combat simulation arcade mode they put out is hot fucking garbage, mostly because of the unaddressed visual bugs. The Freedom Chronicles looks alright, and Episode Zero's levels and game design are slightly more akin to the New Order's streamlined approach; almost all the enemies you encounter while sneaking around have their backs turned to you and you definitely shoot or stab them to death, easy peasy. I'm not super enthused about the comic book aesthetic they're going for in the DLC. It's kind of irksome seeing them try to incorporate this B-movie vibe into the expansion, when they've already clearly demonstrated their A+ writing chops.

So yeah, good luck.

Glad it sounds like some people found their footing with the game, but I tried bumping up the difficulty a couple times in the second half and still never liked it. Stealth never felt good and the levels/AI seem to entirely prevent you from taking out more than a couple enemies with it. The later game upgrades slightly improve some aspects, but it never eliminated the biggest problem - enemies constantly spawn out of nowhere when you haven't taken down the commander hiding at the end of a long level and take you down incredibly quickly with almost no indication you're being shot. That and level design meant the game was almost all frustrating difficulty and not a fun challenge.

The main thing I wish is that they added some more difficulty settings on the lower end. There has to be a middle ground between the lowest difficulty where you have to try to get killed, and the next step up, which immediately ratchets things to the point where you can die in seconds. It was a game that had some great moments that I was happy to see, but I really hope they go back and figure out how they screwed up the gameplay for the next one.

@valjean9430: there's just something ridiculously fun about those hip shot like, 30 yard headshots. I was really glad to see it stayed as well.

I'm playing on the default (medium) difficulty and not having much trouble so far, about 5 hours in. The game's main problem I think is not communicating very well what your overall health is visually or where you're being shot from but once you adjust, it's not too bad. A few random tips:

- Never aim down the sights of guns. It's a waste of time.

- Stay on the move but don't play this like DOOM thinking you can run up for a glory kill. You need to use sightlines to your advantage and duck around corners when you can. It's very easy to kill one enemy without taking damage since they stagger so hard when you shoot them. I will even often spray my guns to hit multiple enemies so I can inflict that stagger.

- Dual wield your guns. I really can't think of any reason not to. You'll kill everything much faster and you don't use any more ammo as long as you can be accurate.

- Worry less about ammo. The majority of firefights start with me being 100% full up on grenades and ammo for every gun and when I empty out the reserves of one gun, I just switch to the next rather than spending my time jamming "E" to pick up dropped ammo. It's more fun to use all the guns and you won't have to disrupt your killing. Then just loot the ammo back up after the firefight is over so you're full for the next one.

- Pay attention to the Commanders. Use stealth to take them out if you can, but often I'm just starting firefights by trying to identify where they may be and just sprinting to them, killing them either before they call for reinforcements, or shortly after. You do still seem to gain some benefit after the alarms sound if you kill them quickly thereafter.

I had a great time with it on easiest. It felt like I really was the unstoppable nazi-killing machine that everyone in the story thought I was.

The shooting was never the draw of the new Wolfenstein. You should be playing this for the stellar writing and story.

Others have talked about damage feedback, but another huge problem is the stealth. The stealth is abysmal. They've added a new mechanic where enemies notice dead bodies and go into a high alert mode. High alert mode extends enemy detection range to ludicrous levels, I've been spotted from over a 100 yds in a dimly lit street. When the Nazis spot you in high alert mode they'll instantly start shooting and trip all alarms. Here's the kicker though, unlike every other stealth game you can't move/hide the bodies. Also there's no radar, no way of knowing where the enemies are, so you can peek around a corner and get instantly spotted if you dropped a Nazi in the wrong spot. Its trial and error stealth at its worst.

My advice is, play on baby mode, mow down Nazis with dual shotguns, see the great story and call it a day.

After finishing the campaign on the the highest available difficulty, there are really only two tips:

1. Use stealth whenever possible, prioritising commanders before they can call in reinforcements

2. Maintain line of sight with as few enemies as possible and start shooting enemies before they see you

This! Too many times at the start I thought I had cleared a room and then randomly die from some guy standing behind me and you're dead before you even realise where the shots are coming from. Took a bit of time to adjust to.

@qrowdyy: I'm playing on Normal and have noticed something regarding Stealth. What you said is totally true - they'll go on full alert and shoot you so fast, but you can totally brute-force stealth if you're fast enough. Dual silenced pistols, crouch, and just murder like it's not stealth. With two pistols you can pump enough rounds into a Nazi so they go down instantly. I once cleared a whole room by crouching around, gunning down the officer and his two guard dogs all at once, and then just crouched around and shot each Nazi I found. You can probably do that with the SMGs, too. It's hilarious, and it even works on the smaller mechs. As long as the enemy doesn't shoot or yell, you're in the clear, and if someone hears and goes to investigate? That's just another Nazi to unload on.

That said, when it goes loud, yeah pull out those dual shotguns / assault rifles and go to town. Never not dual wield. When it's popping off, it's best to get some kills and then run to a new place, maybe grab health and armor if it's there. Also, abuse those heavy weapons. Recharge and refuel whenever you can. Hold on to them as long as possible and it makes so many things utterly trivial. Whenever those heavies come out with the dual heavy weapons it makes me happy because I can just gun them down with two assault rifles and pick up what they drop. They're like weapon delivery systems.

Also get AP rounds for the assault rifle and shrapnel (or is it Ricochet?) for the shotguns. And maybe skip the rifle scope - I regret wasting an upgrade on that when I could've done anything else.

Edit: Also I agree with everyone mentioning the lack of feedback while being hit. It's real bad.

I echo what a lot of people here have said so far, but I'd also like to add that no matter how "clear" I think an area behind me is 4 outta 5 times enemies will find their way to my 6 o'clock. This makes it occasionally really confusing to figure out what killed me.

The aiming felt way to loose by default so I turned it down to around 15 on the x and y. It's much better to shoot, but it sure is a pain to turn around when you get flanked. I think I need to fiddle with it some more.

For me both the shooting and stealth are fine, but the game is way to hard on you and piles enemies on top of any situation that has gone to shit. Especially those small robots that do alot of damage and sidestep your shots. The game doesn't comunicate especially well where you are being shot at from either, wich doesn't help.

But then you dual wield the shockhammer and everything around you is a red mist.

Late to the party, but yeah. I wish the feedback for taking damage was better, its there it just gets lost when you’re in a big firefight.

It might also help if I didn’t keep trying to play it like doom...I died so many times because I was rushing enemies or trying to “glory kill” them. It made me play the game safe which I didn’t like because that’s not what I feel like Blazko does.

I do regret not taking the Dan way out sooner though. I played through the game on Bring it On and didn’t turn it down to the level below that until about an hour and a half of dying to the final bosses but it definitely seemed much more enjoyable after that. Something about the game just rubs me the wrong way though...I finished the game and have no desire to do any of the Ubercommander missions or the DLC that came with the game when I bought it on sale. Maybe I just ruined myself by not turning the difficulty down sooner though

Concentrate on killing officers.The reinforcements they call are a real bitch. Stealth killing is the way to go, but sometimes alright most of the times it is real difficult

Keep moving at all times during a fight. Standing still=death

I feel your pain brothers. This game is ridiculously hard. I beat the previous Wolfenstein on Uber mode...I can't even get past the first level on the New Order. In the first level, you blow up a tank and drop to the bottom floor...I die with 30 seconds-always. I bumrush the main guard to remove the alarm and always die. I've tried every strategy. Run 'n gun, stealth. Sorry if it seems like I'm whining. I'm just really, really disappointed. This is the only game I'v ever played that's too difficult. I just traded in for store credit, lol. If you're skilled enough to enjoy the game, awesome! I envy your ability. I'm going back to D2, the new expansion comes out next week.

@gorillaguy916: I didn’t find it THAT hard, but I agree that the superlative design of the first game is nowhere to be seen.

Also, if you bailed on the first stage, it’s for the best. I personally found most of the game balanced okay enough for difficulty. The level design and some of the “just survive” segments are pretty damned bad.

I’m surprised they didn’t go back and touch that stuff up, frankly. The difficulty spikes are astounding.