Wolfenstein Youngblood Review: A stain on an otherwise great franchise

The Wolfenstein series has always just been about one thing: BJ Blazcowicz killing Nazis. He might be killing Nazis in New Orleans, or he might be killing Nazi zombies in King Otto’s vault. It doesn’t matter because Wolfenstein does this one thing, and it always does it right. BJ might brood enough to make Batman jealous, but he’s an interesting, layered character with a journey worth experiencing. Killing Nazis in the game always felt fast, fluid and above all, fun. 

Wolfenstein Youngblood takes all of this and throws it out the window, and along with it goes everything that made developer Machinegames’ revival of the franchise so well received in the first place. How? With poor writing, absurdly bad game design and RPG mechanics that belong in a Wolfenstein game about as much as multiplayer belongs in a Fallout game. That’s not even the half of it.

Is there anything good here?

This is a straight up bad game, and as such I’m going to be focusing on the many, many negatives on show here. However, I’ll start off with the positives, if only for my own sanity. Firstly, this is definitely one of the most beautiful first-person shooters I’ve played yet. Youngblood is set in summertime Paris, which is brought to life gorgeously here. 

Environments are packed with visual detail and it’s an absolute blast to explore and take in what Machinegames has built. Whether you’re going through Nazi torture chambers or a nice Parisian riverside, it’s always a treat to see the sights. Whatever engine they’re working with, it’s clearly an absolute winner in the technical department. 

Secondly, there’s one thing Wolfenstein has been nailing for the past three games in a row, and it’s gunplay. Every gun looks differently and acts differently, but they all function spectacularly in their own roles. My personal favourite is a weapon added from Wolfenstein: The New Colossus’ big final bossfight, which basically functions just like the infamous BFG from Doom. 

Unfortunately, any sense of enjoyment the weapons might bring is swiftly crushed by a couple of new mechanics that Youngblood introduces. And now we’re onto the bad stuff. That didn’t take long, did it?

How to destroy good gunplay (with dumb ammo mechanics)

Youngblood introduces two different things that absolutely destroys how good shooting feels in this shooting game. The first is its new weapon switching mechanic. Characters with armour now have a portion of their health bar that are populated with either big white squares, or smaller white squares. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. 

These squares tell you, as the player, what weapons will be most effective against that specific enemy. For example, Panzerhunde (Wolfenstein’s famous giant metal dogs) will usually require assault rifle fire while smaller armoured enemies might require shotgun fire to damage them. If you deviate from the necessary ammo type, you’ll find yourself doing next to no damage and worse, wasting the little ammo that you do have. 

This is an absolutely garbage mechanic for a couple of reasons. First, anyone who’s played a Wolfenstein game knows that enemies tend to swarm you during fights, which turns any environment into a shooting gallery with very little time for you to think. You usually just run and gun and it feels great. 

This game changes that. Now, everyone you fire at, and I mean every single one, will force you to stop and squint at their health bars to figure out which one of your weapons might work against that particular enemy. This simply doesn’t work when you’re constantly in danger of dying during firefights. It’s insanely annoying and goes entirely against the run and gun combat of the Wolfenstein series. 

How to destroy good gunplay (with terrible RPG mechanics)

The second thing Youngblood introduces are some light RPG mechanics. This basically means that players can now level up and use XP to upgrade skills, and coins to upgrade weapons. This is actually a great improvement over the terrible ‘perks’ system the Wolfenstein games had before. 

The unfortunate thing is that the light RPG mechanics also include level gating enemies and story missions. Now, certain enemies and questlines are blocked from completion for the player until you level up enough to take them on. You might stumble onto some Nazis while trying to complete a mission and not realise that they have ‘skull’ level difficulty, which essentially means that they will kill you in just one shot. 

It sucks when you just want to progress in the story, but get absolutely stomped on by enemies that happen to just be a couple of levels above you. You could find an enemy literally just wearing a singlet and pants, and they would still shrug off a headshot because you haven’t grinded enough on other quests. 

This wouldn’t be so bad if the quests you have to grind on were actually somewhat interesting, but they’re not. Youngblood has a small hub area populated with NPCs that give you sidequests to take on. These sidequests are always either boring fetch quests or ‘go here and kill this’ quests, with no exceptions. They’re dull, but you’re forced to do them for the XPs.

On the story

Wolfenstein Youngblood is set about 20 years after Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, centering on BJ Blazcowicz’s twin daughters, Jess and Soph. BJ has gone missing, and so his twin daughters set out on a mission to find him and kill as many Nazis as they can while doing so.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, in terms of being interesting, that’s as far as the story gets. The main story quickly devolves into three main ‘raids’ where you go in and kill three different bosses. After that, you go and kill the final boss, and then the story ends. It’s by far the shortest and most uninteresting Wolfenstein story I’ve played through yet (Besides Old Blood, but at least that had zombies). 

The writing is really, really bad here, which is so far off from the Wolfenstein games I’m used to playing. The New Order and The New Colossus both had a really compelling story, featuring absolutely ludicrous events contrasted by BJ’s gloomy, emotional nature. Characters were really memorable, and I can recall specific story beats and shocking plot twists that I loved right off the top of my head. 

Youngblood is, at best, forgettable. The twins are alright, although they’re written like a bunch of dumb rednecks with guns (which to be fair, they are), but every other character is utterly forgettable. 

About game design

Youngblood has some really badly designed story quests. The main ‘raids’ for example, are some of the most generic gameplay I’ve seen in a Wolfenstein game yet. They essentially boil down to going around killing enemies, finding codes to doors, opening doors, and then finding codes to more doors. This applies to every single one of the raids, which all culminate in fighting a frustratingly difficult boss.

The absolute worst part of all of Youngblood’s gameplay are its lack of checkpoints. You can scale an entire tower during one of these raids and fight its boss - which could take anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes - but if you die, you go right back to the start. Those 30 to 40 minutes? Wasted. I was in stunned disbelief the first time I realised exactly how much content I had to replay simply because the developers didn’t think to add checkpoints. 

Conclusion

I was really looking forward to Wolfenstein Youngblood, and it let me down in, frankly, a very impressive number of ways. There is so much that this game gets wrong, that it makes me wonder if The New Order and The New Colossus were flukes in the first place. If this is the way the Wolfenstein series is headed, we might never get a good Blazkowicz game again. 

Between an absurd lack of checkpoints, unnecessary RPG mechanics, level gating and so on, I really can’t recommend playing this game. Maybe wait for a deep sale sometime. Choosing to play this game otherwise is masochism on a level that would scare even Fromsoftware fans. 

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