Wolfenstein: Youngblood (2019)

What should i write about this game... well this is the worst Wolfenstein game i've ever played. This is really embarrassing. I have to notice that i played this alone...maybe it's better or funnier in co-op. I think this game isn't work without a co-op partner, the AI is dumb as hell as your sister and as your enemies as well. The gun play isn't that bad...but i think it is way worse than the previous episodes. The story is a bit meh...and there wasn't too much cut scenes...and the whole game (mainly the main mission is pretty short) I made a few side missions but those wasn't too fun. The graphics was fine, but Paris was a bit too sterile, but i loved the Dishonored like mechanic...that was cool.

I'm sad, i really try to love this game...but it's just boring and below the average. (I hate the sisters...sooo much)

Maybe it is unfair to review a co-op game that I played alone. Then again, the game does provide you with an AI companion in that situation, so why not? Aesthetically and conceptually, I think, this is quite the cool game. Does it succeed similarly as an action shooter? Not so much.

Let me start with the good bits. 80’s Nazi-occupied Paris is a very compelling setting. Not only is it super detailed and beautifully rendered, but the devs really leaned into the whole 80’s thing. There are floppy disks and personal computers with CRT screens everywhere. There is also a lot of 80’s media culture but instead with Germany as the global cultural hegemon. My favourite bit is the Nazi-pendant to the first Wolfenstein game in which you play as a Nazi soldier killing US-American military personal. The protagonist looks eerily similar to the real world protagonist that finishes the game by killing mecha Hitler. Blond, blue eye, muscular. It’s a somewhat tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that despite Blazcowitcz’s appearance ironically perfectly resembling Aryan physical traits, it is also a game that aesthetically Nazis would have probably liked. This is not really helped by the game continuing to play into the myth of Nazi tech supremacy, but the third game into a rebooted series is probably the wrong place to discuss this at length. And credit to the creators for making a game that despite that does a lot to repel fascists. The Nazis of this game are portrayed as being weakened by infighting, which is just historically true, and also a sure way to repel Nazi sympathisers, who are drawn to fascism by its false promises of strength and national unity. But much more important to this are the game’s sister protagonists. They are immature teenagers, one with long black and the other with radically short military style hair—counter to the aesthetic conservative ideals of their father. And hilariously to piss off US conservatives, they both have a noticeable Southern accent.

So this is all cool. It’s unfortunate then that the shooter part of this first-person shooter does not fare nearly as well in comparison. To start, this is a co-op game. I’m sure that with a good friend there is much fun to be had here, but isn’t that generally true about multiplayer games? But beyond that, this game carries some elements from singleplayer Wolfenstein games that just don’t work in a multiplayer setting. For example, this game features the obligatory Bioshock-style lore files. Completely appropriate for a story-laden game like the New Order or The New Colossus, but for this co-op game it feels entirely out of place.

Regarding the gameplay itself, I don’t want to frontload all the bad stuff, because there are some good ideas in this one. However, for every good idea in Youngblood there is always a bad counterpart that massively undercuts it. Starting with enemy drops, getting an immediate resource refresh on killing enemies encourages aggressive play which is a tonne of fun—until you encounter bullet sponge enemies, which are quite numerous and become an ever greater presence as the game goes on. These tough enemies all pack a punch so that’s that with fun aggressive play and the reluctant sniping, running, and peeking around corners makes for a poor substitute.
Right so that’s a perfect application for stealth, right? Just take out the annoying tough guys by sneaking behind them and taking them out in one hit. That would be a somewhat fine solution, except the open levels of Youngblood are sectioned into action bubbles with enemies all over the place since you could be coming from everywhere. This completely ruins the potential utility of stealth. When arriving on the scene, you can maybe take out the first Nazi that you see stealthily and with that it’s over already, some other soldier having spotted you in the act. There is a similar story with weapon upgrades, which are a fine idea for rewarding extra player efforts like doing quests with a limited weapons arsenal. You don’t have to do it like Borderlands, in fact, please do not with an action shooter. But there has to be something more interesting here than getting to choose for every part of the weapon between bonus headshot damage, higher fire rate and greater damage output. The upgrades are boring and forgettable, but you better not actually forget about them, because otherwise the bullet sponge enemies will be even more agonising to fight. The fact that these upgrades have to be bought from a boring and sterile menu otherwise divorced from the game makes the cynic in me think that this was merely put in to implement a separate premium currency system to provide an additional revenue stream for the game.

Lastly, the level design is not too bad. The environments are beautifully detailed and not having these levels serve a linear narrative structure has clearly unshackled the level designers in many ways. But like the rest of the game, it isn’t that easy. The free structure of the game makes you revisit the same places in the game over and over. The level design could be completely fantastic, but the fifth time through in quick succession would even ruin that significantly. The best levels are the so-called Brothers, the towering boss layers. They are aesthetically unique, feature some great verticality, but most importantly, you will probably only visit them once. In stark contrast to that is the underground. Here it’s dark where any visual distinction disappears, you revisit it many times and you can only use a handgun in combination with a flashlight—just horrible.

So to close this off, conceptually, there are some great ideas here, but they are undone in practice by other conflicting decisions. The overall composition here is simply lacking. What remains are some cool and memorable aesthetics, but no fun game to go with it. Being a virtual Nazi hunter has never been this boring.

What I liked:

Payed 20 bucks to play a game with a friend. He did not need to pay anything.

The world. 1980s Paris occupied by Nazis is a nice setting.

Collectibles. I mean, I 100%d it for a reason. The collectibles are awesome and passionate: Multiple fictitious movie posters for cineastic mile stones but made from a German perspective ("Der Frosch" as a Cronebergian take on The Thing and so on and so on), performed songs fitting for the setting, and most importantly concept arts which I'm now using as inspiration for Warhammer 40k terrain. Furthermore, you get a map on how to find everything and as soon as this happens, I feel acknowledged with my desire to 100% a game. (Someone needs to make a game where the collectible map is in itself a collectible)!

German soldiers shouting orders at each others. "Sie sind nur zu zweit!" was exactly what I hoped for this game. Two Jewish hitwomen killing Nazis. Why didn't they make the last soldier of every encounter fleeing or begging for his live? Showing how small and craven German soldiers are? "Oh nein nein, bitte lasst mich am leben!" would have been even better.

The resistance: That they come to your place of operation once you free them from labor camps just feels right. When I was telling a Dutch resistance fighter that heir French friend died in a German detention, she started crying while a Beneluxian chason was playing on the radio. That really gave me goosebumps.

The level design: Some people say, you can not feel the influence of Arkane on this game and they're wrong. The level design is good! Political detention area 4 needs to be mentioned as especially beautiful and well thought through.

The implication that Doom and Wolfenstein share the same universe!

What I did not like:

Side quests, bosses and respawn mechanics – and you know what, this is all Destiny. That's why I gave Destiny 1 only one star because, even tough, I've spend hundreds of hours into it and met my best gaming buddies in the Tower (by chance, like it was the player group meeting in a D'n'D marketplace), it had such a negative impact on game design and game monetization in general. Anthem, Marvel: Avengers and Wolfenstein: Youngblood also need to be examples of games that have been ruined by Destiny's lazy but addictive game design. It saddens me so much that Activion's bad practice has become a desirable approach on game development by other studios.

Abandoned.

The first two Wolfenstein games were fairly basic FPS games with some mostly trash stealth sections. But the story good was enough to pull them through.

In this game, the story -- the thing that made the previous games good -- feels entirely nonexistent. You're supposedly trying to rescue your dad, the protagonist of the previous two games. But to do this, you're expected to do completely uninteresting fetch quests, over & over, in the same handful of recycled maps. You often don't even realize you completed an "objective" until you look at the top of the screen and it's telling you to go back to the catacombs to collect your XP reward. And when you collect that reward, there's no interesting cutscene. The person just starts giving an extended "thank you" speech. Probably the only good part of the game is that you can walk away while they continue to talk.

The last straw for me was the completely abysmal, sewer-trash, syphilitic checkpointing system. There's no manual save game ability, nor do you really even know when the game is being saved. You're entirely at the mercy of the garbage checkpointing system. On my previous session, I was playing one of the major "Brother" missions. I'd been playing for over an hour, and had seen two loading screens when I entered various areas. I thought for sure the game would save at one of those loading screens. Nope. The next time I started the game, it put me back at the beginning of "Brother 3".

This game is nowhere close enough to actual fun for me to replay that again. I'm out.

This game is crap. Avoid at all costs. Utter crap.

Wasn't a fan of this one. I don't like the level scaling and you pretty much need to grind some side quests to make it to the right level to take on the Brother 1, 2, and 3 towers. The side quests are highly repetitive: go to 1 of a handful of places, shoot everyone, get a thing or destroy a thing. That's it.

The whole thing felt a bit uninspire and getting all the collectibles requires a lot of backtracking. They also don't always feel meaningful. Like 70 3D glasses scattered around... um okay?