Youngblood is fine. It plays like the last couple Wolfenstein games, which addmittedly, I didn’t love.
Like the previous two games, the enemies here are major bullet spounges. So much so that I eventually lowered the difficulty down to Easy so I could advance and even then I was still getting downed and occasionally killed. It is co-op focused so you have an AI partner if you choose to play solo (and offline) but my take away from the AI partner is that they were pretty stupid. With the game seeming to be balanced for co-op play with someone with an actual brain, rather than solo play, I’m not sure how anyone would find this enjoyable on harder difficulties.
The story, which is the only thing I’ve really enjoyed about the new Wolfenstein games, is more barebones than either of the past two. A lot of it is told via radio communications between BJ’s daughters, Jess & Soph (BJ being the main character from previous Wolfenstein games), and their handler/friend back at the Resistance base. Basically though, BJ goes missing,his daughters go looking for him in Paris and you kill nazis as you try to find him. Over nine hours there is maybe 30 minutes of storytelling, most of which is part of the opening movie.
The first mission in the game is pretty great. Simple premise of landing on a zepplin to take out a nazi general. It is linear but designed in such a way that you can approach it stealthly or guns blazing and is segmented in such a way that if you were trying to be stealthy but messed you get another crack at stealth later in the level. It ends with a pretty piss poor boss fight but for the most part it is a great level.
Sadly, most of the game isn’t that. Instead the game is hub-world based where you can run different missions for the resistance before you are powerful enough to do the actual missions that will progress the story. There are a fair amount of missions to choose from but this process kind of annoyed me because the end goal is generally pretty simplistic and the level design (open as opposed to authored) isn’t as engaging to me. It doesn’t help that most of these mission play like slightly better New Colossus side missions, whcih I thought were the worst part of New Colossus.
The story based missions (of which there are five) are the best parts of the game. Yes, all five are generally similar in structure (linear in approach with a super bullet spongey boss at the end) but the environments are great and the general combat/stealth is well designed (even if I’m not a huge fan of the bullet spounges). But these missions only account for maybe three of the nine hours I put in to the game to finish the campaign. So six hours are spent leveling your chosen sister and playing mediocre side missions to prepare for the story ones.
In the end, Youngblood is just OK. There are good parts to it and there are bad parts to it but its enjoyable enough shooting nazis, even in the bad parts, that its perfectly acceptable. There are worse ways to spend nine hours, especially when you are sick (as I was while playing) and with the general price of the game being $30, I can’t argue against it, especially if you are a fan of Machine Games Wolfenstein run.
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