Wolfenstein: Youngblood Review – Oofenstein

It’s been a hot minute since we last saw our favorite Nazi killing mountain of muscle, B.J. Blazkowicz, but instead of getting to see what he’s been up to, Wolfenstein: Youngblood brings the Nazi killing fun to a younger generation.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Developer: MachineGames
Price: $30
Platform: PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review

Taking place twenty years after the events of The New Colossus, Youngblood puts you in the shoes of B.J. Blazkowicz’s twin daughters Jess & Sophia. America’s been liberated atin that time but B.J. has suddenly gone missing causing his daughters to go to Paris to find him. You’re told he’s hiding at a place called “Lab X” and you have to get the keys from three separate towers to open the doors. This is where the plot grinds to an immediate halt until kicking back in much later into the game, and normally I wouldn’t mind the plot taking a backseat in an FPS, Wolfenstein is different, however. What differentiates this series from other shooters is how itsit’s world is rich in character and the cast is full of realized personas. You don’t get any of that here as the Blazkowicz sisters barely comment on anything besides the occasional goof or elevator dance, and the world itself just seems super uninteresting. You could argue this being a more “budget” release would excuse the lesser effort on a plot, but The Old Blood didn’t have the same issues, at least not on the same level. It’s, admittedly, a bit frustrating considering the game sets up what could potentially be 3 sequels and where I had nothing but enthusiasm for the future of the series after The New Colossus, it’s now replaced with hesitance.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood feels like a testing grounds for pushing forward elements that were established in the previous games. Whereas mechanics like side-missions and upgrades were merely toyed with, Youngblood dips its toes even further into the RPG pool. After the initial tutorial mission, you’re thrown into the catacombs which function as your base of operations. Similar to the ship in The New Colossus, here you’ll accept new missions and play around with the minor activities scattered around its almost labyrinthine hallways.

Immediately new to the series is the inclusion of a player level. Everything you do from completing objectives, picking up collectibles, and killing Nazis is rewarded with XP. Where before you upgraded your skills by simply performing them in-game, you’ll now earn skill points when you level up that you can dump into various abilities like increased health or faster-crouchingfaster crouching speed. I’d be a bit more invested in this change if the majority of these abilities weren’t just the same ones brought over from The New Colossus. Enemies as well have their own levels you have to pay attention to, as encountering one higher than your own level will most certainly lead to your immediate death.

Upgrading your arsenal can help with the increasingly difficult enemies, but the entire system seems kind of superfluous. Each gun has five upgrade slots that can increase a gun’s damage, fire rate, or accuracy. Equip three of the same type of upgrade and you’ll get a bonus to that type and you can purchase these with silver coins you’ll earn by completing quests or just killing Nazis. The issue here is that there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t just be dumping for the damage bonuses because you’re never far enough from an enemy to need to worry about accuracy and the guns already shoot pretty fast already. Along with this, the economy is out of whack because it just drowns you in coins. I had most of the guns unlocked with all of them completely upgraded just a few hours into the game, which then makes you wonder why they bother selling these coins as micro-transactions when you get well more than enough.

Another new addition to the series is the inclusion of “armor” types on enemies. Along with a health bar, you’ll also see a few silver pips indicating an enemy’s armor and these come in two flavors: soft and hard. The idea here is that you’re forced to change up your guns during fights as a shotgun is best used against an enemy with soft armor while the assault rifle will quickly take down anyone with hard armor. This is a fantastic new mechanic because when people mention how bullet spongey the enemies in your previous games feel, obviously the correct course of action is to double down on this. Firefights in this series can already get pretty hectic as rooms fill with Nazis eager to get shot, so this just feels like an incredibly unnecessary change that just adds tedium to what should be these giddy, power-fantasy shootouts.

The next major change is the move from a strictly linear game world to a more slightly open-world structure. From your hub base, you can open up a map that will let you travel to four locations that are meant to be explorable areas but are still fairly linear. From the get-go, the game is pretty open about letting you go wherever you please. If you want to run into an area full of high-level enemies then, by all means, go ahead; oddly enough you’re even given missions that are well above your level so your journal tends to get packed with things to do that you can’t quite actually do yet. The levels themselves aren’t particularly big, but it does seem odd that there’s no map to pull up (just a zoomed-in minimap) so it’s hard to get a good sense of where you’re going most of the time as you’re just following a marker on your compass in a vague direction. Adding to the RPG flavor, certain areas of the map are just straight-up called “raids” and are multi-stage levels with no checkpoint that has a big boss at the end. It’s another move that hints at grander plans for the next game in the series, making Youngblood feel more like a half-step testing ground for new ideas than its own game.

Along with the various side-quests you’ll accept, you’ll also encounter emergent quests that’ll pop up while in the level that’ll have you rescue civilians or kill a high-ranking Nazi general. At first you wonder why this is even here considering you’re really only in an area for maybe a few minutes as you walk towards the next section (more so when an emergent quest pops up on the opposite side of where you’re at), but then when you realize grinding out levels is a part of the game it (and lots of other game elements) starts to click into place. I wish that I could say that these or the side-quests themselves were any fun but they’re really not; you’ll go through the same beats over and over as repetition quickly rears its ugly head.

A slight frustration with this change in level structure is how some missions will have you bouncing between multiple maps, which builds on annoyance as the levels themselves aren’t very large so you’re loading into a map to walk through it for maybe three minutes before having to walk back to the subway station to load into another map and do the same. This change also means that you lose the benefit of a tightly scripted, linear game in that you don’t get to experience any ridiculous set-piece moments; at least not any to the same degree as previous games. The levels themselves also don’t feel designed for a firefight since they’re these wide-open streets you’re trudging through and enemies tend to quickly respawn in them, catching you off-guard, as you’re cleaning up a previously finished shootout.

The Final Word
Wolfenstein: Youngblood succeeded in doing something I didn’t think possible: killing all enthusiasm I had for the series. Sure, the gunplay still feels great but that doesn’t matter when the entire product is hampered by tone-deaf mechanics that are trying to fix a game that wasn’t broken.

– MonsterVine Review Score: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre