Wolfenstein Youngblood is defined by absence.
That’s probably obvious from the marketing. This is a Wolfenstein game without B.J. Blazkowicz. The famed Nazi slayer — who has starred in every single-player-focused outing since 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D — is missing. His twin daughters, Jess and Soph, have stepped up, donning scaly power suits and flying to Nazi-occupied Paris in search of Lab X, a mysterious site they believe is connected with their dear old dad’s disappearance.
If you’ve followed the game since its announcement at last year’s E3, you already knew a lot of that. You also probably know that Wolfenstein Youngblood is set in the synth-drenched ‘80s, 19 years after Blazkowicz, his then-pregnant wife, Anya, New York resistance leader Grace, and the rest of the freedom fighting gang dealt a fatal blow to the Nazi’s American leadership on live TV.
In the intervening years, BJ and Anya have settled into life on a ranch in Mesquite, TX — BJ’s hometown. Grace — a former member, it should be noted, of the Black Revolutionary Front — has traded her leather jacket in for a pantsuit as the head of the FBI — an organization that, it should be noted, attempted to discredit the Black Revolutionary Front’s IRL ‘60s equivalents as “subversive.”
That’s a political wrinkle that Wolfenstein Youngblood just doesn’t have time to dig into. Because, what you may not know, is that this time around, MachineGames (joined by Dishonored developer Arkane Lyon) has transformed Wolfenstein into a loot shooter without the loot. Fans who have come to expect expertly framed cutscenes and gorgeous cinematography may be disappointed to discover that Youngblood shares more than a little DNA with Borderlands. Instead of watching an endlessly twisty story unfold, you will collect forgettable missions from bored NPCs in the Catacombs beneath Neu-Paris — the resistance’s neu hideout in the absence of Eva’s Hammer.
In the transition to supporting co-op, MachineGames has leaned fully into the RPG elements that have been present, to some extent, since they took the series over with 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order. After an opening cutscene sends Jess, Soph and Grace’s daughter, Abby, off to France, the story takes a backseat as the girls tackle a trio of main missions (which the game dubs “Raid Missions”) in search of evidence that will help them find their dad. Those main story missions are pretty tough — and in a bafflingly bad decision, lack mid-mission checkpoints — so you’ll need to accept side quests from the resistance fighters in the Catacombs to level up.
Wolfenstein: The New Colossus had a pretty brilliant skill system that awarded points for completing playstyle-specific actions. So, you couldn’t just decide you were going to spec into stealth; you had to actually play stealthily in order to unlock better stealth skills. Youngblood tosses that out in favor of a more traditional experience-based progression system. You’ll gain XP for completing main missions, finishing side quests, killing enemies — you know, RPG stuff. And, the enemies you’ll find in main missions are overleveled enough that you’ll want to horde all the XP you can.
Fortunately, there are plenty of side quests, and there are even daily, weekly and monthly challenges to encourage players to engage with the levels in new and interesting ways (one tasked me with blowing up five fire extinguishers so that Nazis couldn’t put themselves out when they went up in flames). Arkane Lyon has brought some of their Dishonored level design magic to Youngblood, helping MachineGames build city blocks that encourage repeated exploration. Youngblood is presenting itself as a live game (in a similar vein to Anthem and The Division 2), but the hook here isn’t loot. That’s where Arkane’s famously dense approach to design comes in. You won’t keep playing Youngblood for loot; you’ll keep playing it to find the myriad collectibles squirreled away throughout the short list of levels on offer.
That’s a pretty old school approach to replay value and it probably isn’t enough to keep players coming back for the long haul. As dense as the levels are, they are finite — unlike the endless loot grind that defines Youngblood’s contemporaries. As a result, Wolfenstein Youngblood is an odd platypus of a game. Not quite a loot shooter; not quite a story-driven FPS; not quite an immersive sim. Youngblood attempts to combine three different kinds of shooter and ends up falling short of each.
That isn’t to say it’s bad. It’s not! The shooting feels as good as ever (though dual-wielding, a series staple, is conspicuously absent for all weapons except handguns). The gunplay is impeccably tight. Shotguns still blast away with that deafening firecracker-going-off-right-next-to-your-ear roar. It will never not be fun to blast Nazis with this impressively calibrated arsenal.
However, this is another area where the game’s core appeal has been altered in the pivot to co-op. The Nazis that once exploded like Gallagher’s watermelons after a shot or two have become significantly more resilient. But, hey, it’s the ‘80s — it makes sense that the Nazis would have developed better armor since The New Colossus. The problem is that every enemy takes too long to bring down. Even armorless grunts can take a few shotgun blasts to the face and keep on trucking. It’s a change that has obviously been made to account for the presence of an additional player, but it slows the action down and makes those very nice weapons feel slightly ineffective.
Youngblood, like this year’s Rage 2 and 2018’s Fallout 76, is another example of Bethesda fundamentally misunderstanding what makes its IP tick. Two years after its “Save Player 1” campaign — which debuted after a stellar slate of single-player Bethesda-published games, including, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Prey and The Evil Within 2 — the publisher, intentionally or not, has altered course; adding players or open worlds, but changing the identities of their series in the process.
The story and characters and shooting that make Wolfenstein shine are still all here. But, the structure has shifted those elements around, producing something that just doesn’t feel like Wolfenstein anymore. If you like loot-shooters and would like to play one with a Nazi-killing coat of paint, Wolfenstein Youngblood is basically that. But, if you come to Wolfenstein for well-realized characters and pulpy stories, Youngblood is defined by their absence.
Wolfenstein Youngblood review code provided by the publisher.
Wolfenstein Youngblood is out now on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.