Wolfenstein’s reboot by MachineGames several years ago has been a rousing success, reminding anyone that needed it that single player only FPS experiences are both desirable and profitable. Two full games have been released as well as the excellent standalone expansion The Old Blood. In the last couple of weeks, two new Wolfenstein experiences have been released, one is a VR-only title I have yet to play, and the other is Wolfenstein: Youngblood, which I have been playing lately on PS4.
It’s important to note that Youngblood is not setting out to be a full-blown sequel. It’s more of a side project or expansion, as it takes a vastly different approach, in some key areas, to what we have come to expect from Wolfenstein, while in other ways it’s exactly as you might expect, or at least very much so. Something else to note is that Youngblood MSRPs for $30, half the price of a typical game. I realize that pricing on games drops much quicker these days than they did a few years ago, but a launch price of $30 should catch your attention for one reason or another. On the one hand, it’s an acknowledgement that the experience is best-played with a friend, although thanks to the Buddy Pass, you can actually let someone else play the whole game with you even if they didn’t buy it. Furthermore, and while this might not have been a factor in the pricing, the game does have microtransactions, but they’re cosmetic-focused, though there are certain boosts upgrades you can buy that speed up some mechanics, like in-game currency accumulation, which can directly lead to skills boosts.
All that aside, I was eager to fire up Youngblood and see what MachineGames had come up with. Oh, it’s important to note that another Bethesda studio was heavily involved with the development of Youngblood — the skilled folks at Arkane lent a major hand in the game’s design, from level design to the RPG elements, their influence is apparent. Anyway, the game is set in 1980, about twenty years after the events of The New Colossus. The USA is free of Nazi reign, but other parts of the world are still under their control, including Paris, France. BJ and Anya have been raising their twin daughters, Soph and Jess, on their farm in Mesquite, TX. The opening cutscene shows the daughter duo undergoing training by their parents on hunting and open hand combat. Soon enough, as the cutscene reveals, BJ has gone missing, with his last known whereabouts being in France. Soph and Jess make their way to Paris to meet up with the local resistance. With their Powersuits on, they’re ready to help turn the tide against the Nazis and figure out what happened to their dad.
While you can play Youngblood in single player, it’s intended for online co-op. That said, the AI help in single player, which I played several hours with, does a pretty good job. It’s good that they level up in sync with your character, too. During the heaviest encounters, they’re liable to get themselves exposed and killed, and that makes your job tougher being that you have to get out and revive them. Of course, the AI is pretty darn good at doing the same for you, and they revived my character on quite a few occasions. A three-heart shared life system is used here, meaning that both Soph and Jess can die simultaneously during a mission up to three times. Certain, fairly rare crates offer a replenishment of one of these shared lives, so keep an eye out. What you definitely do not want to do, naturally, is fail a mission — checkpoints are practically non-existent, and some of the longer encounters of the game approach an hour long, depending on your play style and so forth, of course. Regardless, having to restart all of that mess and do it all over again is a gross misuse of your time and I’ll admit that a few of my play sessions with Youngblood ended earlier than I anticipated simply because I did not want to go a lot of the same repetition again.
Repetition is, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the bigger issues with Youngblood. After a couple of pretty long opening missions that see the sisters bring down a Nazi blimp and get into the catacombs under the streets of Paris, a semi-open world design becomes available to you. You can travel to four or five districts within Paris, carrying out story and a host of side missions, which are given to you by NPCs that live and work with the resistance in the same catacombs that you temporarily call home. These missions have some pretty neat backstory, but boil down to your basic fetch, rescue, press-this, type of routine. Those types of experiences are fun in spurts, but they tend to get pretty grindy, especially if you have to start over. Furthermore, these missions overlap a lot, meaning you will be revisiting the same areas with respawned enemies, your tolerance for which may vary.
The run and gun gameplay in Youngblood closely resembles that of previous Wolfensteins, and that’s a good thing, with ammo and armor chunks plentiful (nearly too plentiful) and an appreciable variety in enemies. The weapons have a lot of ‘weight’ in both their physical appearance, sound, and sense of impact. New to the mix are enemies that have special armor and life meters, which is a change for the series, for better or worse. An icon next to the armor lets you know what kind of ammo works best against them. Paying attention to this, as well as the enemy’s level number, and the level number of the mission you’re embarking on for that matter, is important.
New with Youngblood are several other major changes to the action such as the ability to double jump and crush enemies and weaker floors, as well as running into weaker enemies. Pep Signals also give both sisters a temporary performance perk, such as +50 health, full armor, and things like that. There are whole lot of Peps to unlock, as well as weapon upgrades that change their accuracy, speed, and damage dealt (in a RPG-esque balancing type of way), and abilities, like being able to go invisible for a brief time. Lots of cosmetic options for your Powersuit and weapons abound too. Upgrades require you to reach a certain level and to have various collectibles like Silver Coins, which are littered in small quantities all over Neu Paris. Going a bit off the beaten path and opening or smashing every crate you can may or may not prove worthwhile to you to collect these coins and extra ammo and armor.
id Tech 6 does a great job of presenting a visually compelling game. This is a small consolation perhaps given the amount of retracing you might find yourself doing as many side missions overlap. The game looks, sounds, and runs very smoothly. The sisters banter a lot back and forth, and that builds some character, and they’re ultimately ‘ok,’ though nuts. The story leads interestingly into the inevitably Wolfenstein 3, which, if I were to throw a prediction out there, is going to be a next-gen launch title.
But for the here and now we have Youngblood. It is what it is — a reasonably priced spin-off of the series that is not bad, it’s just limited in its scope and replay value, though your mileage may vary greatly depending on who you have to co-op with.
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