Wolfenstein Youngblood: Review

Should You Buy Wolfenstein: Youngblood

An exercise in bad game design.

                   

Sigh. It just had to happen. There was definitely going to be a video game release that didn’t live up to the quality of, say, Devil May Cry 5. But for Wolfenstein: Youngblood to be the game, and also being much worse than it had any right to be is what makes me sad. Sure, you might be thinking I’m being hyperbolic; surely Anthem takes that top “bad game of 2019” spot, right? You see, I didn’t have any expectations in Anthem to begin with; BioWare hadn’t made a competent game in a while, and to think they’d make a long-running Game-as-a-Service title and completely nail it was a laughable idea at best. Join me, reader, as we spend a few hundred words talking about why Wolfenstein: Youngblood is not only not worth your time and money, but also a prime example of some of the worse game design decisions you can possibly imagine.

What not to do in your video game

Wolfenstein: Youngblood doesn’t really have one giant thing wrong with it that I can point at; instead, it suffers a death by a million cuts. Every game design decision made harms the overall experience in some way or another, and even more so if you opt to play through Youngblood’s campaign solo. On a basic level, Youngblood makes a grievous error by becoming a pseudo-RPG. Not only is this terribly unsuited for the kind of gameplay the Wolfenstein games have featured all this time, it’s also some of the worst aspects of RPG design that have long been abandoned by other games. Mirroring many of the same problems Far Cry New Dawn had, Wolfenstein Youngblood also level gates you in missions, where enemies will start getting impervious to damage, regardless of how many bullets you pump into them.

                         

Speaking of enemies, a lot of them will have big armour bars that you have to whittle through before you can start killing them. But then even that starts sucking once you get to the point where weapons will start varying wildly in how effectively they can take out the armour. It gets absurd sometimes, to the point where pumping more than 10 shells into someone with your automatic shotgun barely puts a dent in their armour. All of these “RPG” mechanics shouldn’t have been added to a Wolfenstein game to begin with, and the fact that these elements have been added in a haphazard, downright terrible way bring the overall experience down.

Non-cooperative

Youngblood is primarily sold as a co-op shooter, and as far as that aspect goes, the only problems you’ll face tend to be issues with the core gameplay that I’ve already talked about. Playing solo, however, opens up an entirely new can of bad game design decisions that push Youngblood over from simply being flawed to being downright laughable. The AI-controlled partner Youngblood saddles you with is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever had to face in a video game. With no real way to play completely solo, your AI-controlled sister will ruin basically every single combat encounter in some way. If you’re trying to sneak around, the AI couldn’t care less and will get guards on full alert almost instantly.

                       

Don’t care about stealth and just want to kill everything in your way? The AI would like to have a word with you as it stares off into the distance, randomly shooting at a building or a cloud, and being about as good as a paperweight in encounters that have clearly been designed for two players. I could swear old bots from Counter-Strike: Condition Zero were more helpful. Youngblood has clearly forsaken every lesson learned from designing AI companions in older games like Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Left 4 Dead, and even The Last of Us.

Maybe the story’s good?

Nope. The story has consistently been some of the best stuff about the last Wolfenstein games, and Youngblood wants to distance itself from that too, for some unfathomable reason. The premise is alright: series protagonist BJ Blazkowicz has gone missing in the 80s, and his daughters decide to don some power armour and try to find him. Sadly, that’s about where the interesting bits of the story ends. There’s no real bad primary antagonist to look forward to facing like, say, Frau Engel from New Colossus. And while the ending has some interesting implications for the future of the series, there’s no real driving force behind the game’s plot aside from random Bill and Ted-esque quips the protagonists love to spout. For a franchise that mostly has the idea of storytelling in an action-packed FPS figured out, Youngblood takes several steps back, almost to the point of parody.

So, should you buy it?

Honestly, it would be downright irresponsible of me to say Wolfenstein: Youngblood is worth your time or money. There are plenty of games out there to play, and with recent games-as-services constantly vying for your limited time, there’s just no reason to give Youngblood a look. From the gameplay, right up to the story, Youngblood gets almost everything wrong, and if you’re looking for a fun co-op shooter to play with a friend, you’re going to find more fun playing something else entirely. Do not play Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Seriously.

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