Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Online)

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: ZeniMax Media Inc

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Review:

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the third game in the rebooted Wolfenstein First-Person Shooter franchise that began with 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order and continued with 2017’s Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. This game follows after the story of those games, which took place in an alternate history where Nazis succeeded in their quest for world domination and the player takes the role of resistance fighter B.J. Blazkowicz as he fights to push back against the Nazi oppressors. However, in Youngblood, players take the role of one of Blazkowicz’s two teenage daughters, Jess and Soph, as they search for their missing father in Nazi-occupied Paris in this alternate-world’s version of the 1980s.

Graphically, Youngblood looks pretty impressive on the Switch, though it is clearly compromised compared to other versions of the game, with 720p dynamic resolution in docked mode (540p in handheld) with a framerate that sits somewhere between 25-30FPS. This version of the game also has frequent instances of reduced texture resolutions, reduced shadow detail, and character animations that occasionally become so choppy they looks like a century-old stop-motion animation, with some of the game’s cut scenes looking particularly bad. None of these are game-breaking issues, and overall the game still looks pretty good, but it’s clear that a lot of cuts needed to be made to fit this game on the Switch’s hardware.

However, while the technical parts of the presentation didn’t mar my enjoyment of the game much, another element of the presentation did – the story, or more specifically, its characters. The earlier Wolfenstein games were charming in their cartoonishly evil Nazi villains and their testosterone-fueled protagonist, but this time around the villains are less prominent and the protagonists… honestly, I strain to think of another First-Person Shooter with a protagonist I’ve hated more, and then Youngbloods doubles down and copy-pastes the character so I can hate both my own character and my teammate at the same time.

The Blazkowicz girls both seem to have an identical personality (I swear, after hours of playing I couldn’t tell the two apart if it wasn’t for their different hairstyles), and that personality is that of the try-hard poser immature dork. And you know, you can make a character like that loveable, or you can make them compelling, but these girls are neither of those things. They frequently jabber on about how much they hate Nazis and love killing them, and while I’m not opposed to Nazi-hating, it all comes across like they’re trying wayyyyyy too hard to sound impressive, and there’s a disconnect between their youthful innocence, terrified at the prospect of their first kill, to immediately plowing through hundreds of Nazis and giggling about it like a child who just heard a fart joke. I hate hate hate these characters, and while the game gives you an option to play as one or the other in the beginning (why? they’re both the same), the option I really want is to make them both shut the hell up.

In terms of gameplay, while this game bears many of the series hallmarks of its two predecessors, while I was playing it I found myself repeatedly comparing this game to the Borderlands series. While Youngblood does not feature the same sort of open world or “looter shooter” mechanics of those games, it is extremely focused on its co-op play, having multiple ways to play this game in co-op, including having random online players drop in, or simply having an AI take over the second character. This game makes full use of this mechanic by having various assist abilities, as well as checkpoints that require both characters to be present to pass.

The Borderlands comparison doesn’t end there. While this game doesn’t have that franchise’s huge arsenal of variable guns, Youngblood does tout a pretty extensive RPG-style upgrade system with multiple ways to alter every gun you own, as well as numerous character upgrades, giving players a potentially large amount of malleability when it comes to how they want to play.

In addition, this game deviates from the earlier Wolfenstein titles by having larger, sprawling maps with multiple paths players can take to reach objectives or outmaneuver enemies. After the game’s earliest mission, players will find themselves in a central hub area from which they can choose to visit one of numerous districts in Paris, each with various goals to accomplish, with more as the story progresses. And should players feel adequately prepared, brave, or foolhardy, they can opt to assault one of the heavily-guarded “Brothers” towers in three of these districts to progress to the final part of the game, although the high difficulty of these areas pretty much guarantees that players will want to keep some distance from them until they’ve built up a good amount of upgrades.

I like the way pretty much all of this works in theory, but in practice, this formula is flawed in multiple ways. Firstly, having levels with branching pathways only helps to highlight how open these levels aren’t, with the maps frequently feeling extremely mazelike even in areas where that makes no sense. And as many others have pointed out, the game’s structure absolutely requires re-treading these same labyrinthine areas over and over again, which gets tiresome and repetitive.

Also, while I appreciate the RPG-style upgrade system this game has, it’s laughable how ineffective players feel right from the start, with bullet sponge enemies, even the weakest of enemies often requiring multiple headshots to take down, and shots at enemies a mere half a block away missing entirely even if you aim dead-center with your most accurate weapon. It’s immensely frustrating because I really enjoy the way movement and gunplay feels in this game, right up until the point where a bullet should hit an enemy and doesn’t, or does hit them and takes off only a tiny portion of their health, even if you get in a headshot.

It’s even more disappointing because the way the game’s levels and RPG-style progression is set up, it makes it look like stealth is a viable option in this game (and that’s often my preference), but firing silenced shots at enemies from the shadows is often so ineffective I felt compelled to charge in guns-a-blazin’ anyways after emptying all of my ammo for one weapon into one enemy without taking them down.

On top of that, the RPG-like systems mean that you’ll be doing a lot of grinding, and wasting a lot of time looking around the levels for any spare coins you can scoop up to buy upgrades. And as I often say, my policy regarding grinding is, it’s wonderful when what you’re doing to grind is fun, but terrible when the stuff you need to keep doing is tedious or boring, and more often than not grinding in this game ends up being the latter.

Before wrapping up this review, I should point out a few things of note when buying the Switch version of the game. Firstly, because I know there are those who value this sorta’ thing, Youngblood does have gyroscopic motion controls for aiming, and they work pretty well (though I preferred the traditional controls). Also, be aware that there are two versions of the game, the Standard Edition and the Deluxe Edition, the latter of which allows you to play the game in online co-op with someone who doesn’t own the game (they do so using the free demo of the game), as well as including some extra skins and an optional ability. Despite that I saw conflicting information elsewhere, I found no option to play this game in multiplayer in any way other than online (though the drop-in, drop-out online options are nifty).

The other warning I’ll offer is that no matter which version of the game you get, you’re getting the digital version, as the physical copies of the game just come with a code to download the game to your Switch. And we’re talking a download that’s over 20GB big, so you’ll want to have a lot of clear space on your MicroSDXC card to play this game.

Okay, so after all is said and done, Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a First-Person Shooter with a lot of ideas I really like, and it’s impressive that it works this well on the Switch, even in greatly-reduced form. However, it is flooded with gameplay issues and game structure issues, and saddled with not one, but two of the most unlikeable protagonists I have encountered in a very long time. The result is a game that feels like it has a lot of elements of a truly great game, but ends up playing as only a mostly okay game.

tl;dr – Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the third First-Person Shooter in the reebooted Wolfenstein series, having you play as the two daughters of B.J. Blazkowicz as they try to rescue their dad in Nazi-occupied Paris. It’s a decent port to Switch, but the game itself has some serious flaws – the gameplay mechanics are busted, the game structure is flawed, and the two protagonists are two of the most unlikable game characters I’ve ever been made to play as. The result is a game with a lot of good ideas dragged down to just being “okay”

Grade: C+

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