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Wolfenstein Youngblood Review: A stain on an otherwise great franchise

By Tim Augustin - 28 Aug 2019

Conclusion

How to destroy good gunplay (with terrible RPG mechanics)

You can upgrade each one of your weapon's components with silver coins.

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

At least these sibling get along, right?

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

You can explore the hub area and collect quests from NPCs.

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

In summary: shooting good, everything else bad.

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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5.0
  • Playability 7.5
  • Graphics 10
  • Sound 8
  • Addictiveness 3
  • Value 5
The Good
Extremely pretty graphics
Great gunplay
The Bad
Terrible mission design
Bad writing
Bad RPG mechanics
Bad ammo-switching mechanics
Repetitive
Lack of checkpoints
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