The ESRB rating for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus went up on the rating board’s website, and it’s not surprising that the hyper-violent first-person shooter received an M rating. However, it did reveal new details about the story, drug usage, and the use of racial slurs.
Here’s the full ESRB listing:
This is a first-person shooter in which players assume the role of an American soldier (B.J. Blazkowicz) in an alternate universe where the Nazis won World War II. As players help B.J. and his comrades escape various situations, they use traditional and futuristic firearms (e.g., pistols, shotguns, laser blasters, grenade launchers) to kill enemy soldiers and larger mechanized units. Combat is frenetic, with realistic gunfire, explosions, screams of pain, and large blood-splatter effects. Some weapons allow players to blow off enemies’ heads or cut off their limbs; cutscenes sometimes show decapitations and/or acts of disembowelment. One scene briefly depicts a clothed couple engaging in sexual activity (a character straddling another); moaning sounds can be heard before the couple appears on screen. A handful of scenes depict female characters with exposed breasts: a woman breastfeeding a baby; a woman’s shirt getting torn off during a firefight. During the course of the game, a character is seen ingesting a hallucinogenic drug (e.g., sheet of acid, tab of LSD); both sequences involve instances of hallucination. The words “f**k,” “sh*t,” and “n*gger” appear in the dialogue.
Obviously, the one big red flag that pops up after reading that description is the use of the n-word. It’s not exactly hard to imagine the scenario that it’s used in, as Nazis are horrible racists without a single redeeming quality, and the previous game starred a character based upon Jimi Hendrix (who most likely is the character ingesting sheets of acid and LSD tabs). If the prior game is anything to go by, I’m sure MachineGames will be able to handle mature themes well.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus launches on October 27 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It’s coming to Nintendo Switch in 2018.
