SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
Two great leads and chaotic co-op gameplay can’t quite save Wolfenstein: Youngblood from a wide array of technical issues and a lacklustre story.
Fiction where the Axis won the Second World War and proceeded to dominate the globe isn’t rare, but Wolfenstein has always set itself apart. Alongside the unnerving, and unfortunately politically relevant, sight of SS officers roaming the streets of America conversing with members of the KKK, it’s also over-the-top and silly, offering hours of fun and mayhem. But Youngblood is not over-the-top enough, it’s not silly often enough and perhaps most importantly, it’s not fun enough. In fact, that’s probably the best way to sum up everything that’s wrong with this game: it just isn’t enough. The franchise enters the 1980s for the first time, with an entry that, despite its period-appropriate synthwave soundtrack, can’t quite reach the heights of its predecessors.
The year is 1980. Series protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz and his wife Anya have raised their two daughters Jessie and Zofia in the relative safety of a liberated America. However, after B.J. slips out of the country without warning and disappears without a trace, Jess and Soph, and their friend Abby, travel to Nazi-occupied Paris to link up with the French Resistance and find their father.
The plot is paper-thin even for a spinoff, serving as an excuse to unleash B.J. Blazkowicz’s daughters on a city populated entirely by Nazis. The main story offers very little on its own. Solely focusing on that, you can finish the game in an afternoon. There are side quests, which represent a not-insignificant bulk of Youngblood’s content, where Jess and Soph aid the resistance. Early on, Jess and Soph figure that the best way to track down their dad is to raid Paris’ three Brother towers, which serve as the headquarters for various elements of the Nazi occupation force, and steal information from their main computers. A few of these side quests, if completed, allow the sisters to enter these towers via alternative, easier routes. The vast majority however are filler, though without them there wouldn’t be much of a game to play.
Jess and Soph are the stars of this spinoff. Valerie Rose Lohman, who voices Jess, and Shelby Young, who voices Soph, are stellar. The game’s lead characters are undoubtedly sisters, bantering endlessly and chatting about their surprisingly pedestrian home life: about hobbies, their favourite spy novel series Kenneth and Arthur, and about all the crazy things their parents have done. They’re perpetually in high spirits, with a youthful, charismatic energy that makes them compelling characters. In the game’s elevator loading screens, they can be seen pranking each other and joking around. The scene of their surprisingly gory first kill is, as you might expect, played for laughs. That scene is one of the few moments where Youngblood succeeds at replicating the silly Nazi-killing joy of its predecessors. These moments are rare, but Jess and Soph are responsible for all of them.
Characters of this quality are unfortunately exceptions to the rule. Youngblood’s well-designed environments bring to life an alternative timeline where Paris is under Nazi control well into the 1980s but fails to populate it with interesting characters. The game’s antagonist is forgettable, and returning characters can barely get a shot in. The game world divides Paris into varied, well-designed fully open zones with impressive attention to detail, but they all feel devoid of human life. The game’s hub in the Paris Catacombs stands up poorly against Wolfenstein II’s mission hub, which had NPCs with some semblance of personality.
Still as co-op games go, Youngblood isn’t that bad. The experience of playing with another human being is mostly seamless. Though the exact workings behind the game’s Shared Lives system can be obtuse, lag is infrequent when joining a game session and it’s easy to take down enemies in tandem. On top of that, added mechanics such as the Pep system, which allows you to boost your sister with various effects like healing or adding armour in combat via emotes and quips, mean that co-op is a key element of this game’s design, rather than a tacked-on afterthought.
The gunplay is fun and chaotic; guns remain powerful and Nazis still explode in traditionally gory fashion. It’s not long before you get access to experimental firearms, including a ridiculously powerful laser gun that turns enemies into clouds of sparks which is hard not to use all of the time. Despite the standard guns, which do plenty of damage already, I still wish that the game just opened with the sci-fi gear. Stealth now serves more as a prelude to combat than a viable approach to enemy encounters, which is fine. Youngblood constantly plies you with new side objectives, and they can get tedious. It’s hard not to want to liven things up by diving in guns blazing straight away. Special powers, such as an invisibility field and the ability to crush your enemies into pulp by running into them, only add to the fun. The light RPG elements, including skill points and perks, help your character feel more powerful, even if they’re not strictly necessary additions.
Overall, it lacks fluidity. Unhelpfully, there are different types of enemy armour and melting them depends on you squinting at the pattern of an armour bar before choosing the most effective weapon for that type of armour, or just using the laser gun for a one-hit kill because it’s too hard to tell and you can’t be bothered. Enemies also have a tendency to spawn in all over rather than appearing organically. Having enemies suddenly appear behind you and riddle you with bullets because you haven’t managed to track down a commander summoning reinforcements is infuriating. Couple that with odd technical shortcomings, such as the lack of a full world map, and bugs, including a particularly persistent glitch where the audio cut in and out sporadically over extended periods of time, and you have an experience that you might describe as uneven.
And uneven is the best way to describe this game. Jess and Soph make for great leads, but they’re not enough to carry the player through a thin plot, a ton of mediocre side quests and a bevy of technical shortcomings and issues. Youngblood is less of a substantial spinoff, and more an awkwardly constructed bridge to a sequel to Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Hopefully, that future game will do these characters even better.
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