Wolfenstein: Young Blood has quite a bad reputation and knowing this going into it, I was pretty apprehensive. all of the promotional advertisements for the game were offputting and the recent trend of stealing the Wolfenstein franchise and turning it into some overly 'woke' progressive political agenda does indeed leave a bad taste in my mouth. Well are the rumors true? is it as lame as first impressions would seem?
For starters, the first thing you will notice is how truly awful the cast is. They have no depth, they are generic cliche stupid characictures of coming of age, slice of life, teenage girls constantly making horrible Disney channel type jokes at eachother, fist bumping, saying "Bro, dude man" and being so lighthearted and goofy that it feels toxic and offensive. Every single cutscene, dialogue interaction, and line of writing will make you want to puke or just fall asleep. Besides the main two characters, the rest of the cast isnt any better. It's all the same super political constantly trying to shove its agenda down your throat, It has nothing to do about if I agree with the message or not, its the fact that I'm playing Wolfenstein, like what the fuck? If you showed me this game 15 years ago with two lesbian feminist marxist politically correct obsessed , lame joke cracking, Dude bro culture, teenage lighthearted sit-com footage, if you showed me that, and said "Hey man its the latest Wolfenstein game!" I'd think you were making a cruel joke. Imagine if they did this to doom. Imagine if the next Doom game had 10 hours of transgender rights cutscenes or about how unfair and evil the patriacy is or something.
Anyway, the shit story and characters out of the way; how does the rest hold up? Admittedly, the gameplay is pretty fun. It's a co op campaign, so that alone almost makes it better than the previous shitty wolfenstein game. It has an open world feel, with a hub world, where you can collect a ton of side quests (that youll never want to do) and it puts you into this mostly big, but linear feeling city streets , where you progress towards these 'Brother' missions, which always involve finding some military base, invading it, and killing the boss. There are always tons of enemy types flowing towards you, and the gunplay feels polished and smooth, the physics system is fun, blasting enemies sends them flying with gore and collectibles popping up, automatically being picked up and giving tons of satisfying notifications on your hud such as XP, ammo, armor etc.. and searching the enviorment collecting pickups feels rewarding because of all the popup notifications and colorful hud. You have high mobility suit so you can do crazy acrobatics like huge double jumps and frequently when trying to progress through the enviorment you wont know what to do and the answer is almost always do some Mario platforming bullshit double jumping climbing up then crawling through a vent or hole in the wall.. its OK, jumping around can be pretty fun. So thats the main cycle of the game. Theres a boost system called 'pep' where you hit a button for an ability on a cooldown, that instantly gives you and your partner +life or +armor, or other things you select but mostly those two.
The core gunplay and mechanics of the game feel quite polished and tripple A, and its definitely its strongest point. The enemy variety is cool, you have normal soldiers, huge robots, Dog robots , terminator type dashing guys, heavily armoed soldiers with huge weapons, etc. Unfortunately some of them can be massive bullet sponges, maybe due to the psuedo RPG mechanics where you may not have leveled up enough, but even after you crank up all your upgrades, some of these enemies can be just a joke to fight. Youll sit there behind a corner, aggro one of the huge enemies, and just keep popping out over and over unloading ALL of your ammo into them for minutes on end. Sometimes the AI is so bad for these big enemies that they just dont know what to do and stand there as you peek out unloading your ammo into their arm or something, for like 2 minutes straight. That didnt feel very satisfying or enjoyable. Also another drawback is there is not that big of a variety in the guns. You basically unlock every gun in the game just an hour or two into it, and for the rest of the campaign youre just putting upgrades onto these guns to make them do more DPS within the rpg stat mechanic.. so really for most of the game I just used the assault rifle and shotgun and ignored the other guns because those were the ones I upgraded.
Another drawback is the difficulty can feel uneven and strange. Up until the point where you can give yourself some upgrades , every enemy is an annoying massive bullet sponge thats a chore to get through the most mundane encounters, but after a few upgrades suddenly you can take out a shotgun and blast the most heavily armored supertroops in like 4 bullets. just weird. Thankfully it isnt like other games in the psuedo fps RPG genre where youre forced to grind side missions just to be high enough level to do the main campaign.. I never really did any side missions and on the default difficulty I always felt decently equipped to tackle the main missions, it was just challenging enough, but also kinda easy. having to grind side missions just to be able to play the main campaign sucks and im glad it wasnt a problem here.
The lack of variation in the main missions is pretty awful. As mentioned previously the main campaign consists of these 'Brother' outposts, and theres only FOUR of them in the entire game. Yes, there is basically only four main missions in the entire game. They are all the exact same thing basically. Start in some city street, find the outpost, enter the outpost, kill waves of enemies, find the same robot boss, kill, mission over, Repeat until last mission, slightly different because final boss - game over. So the lack of variation in the missions sucks.
Is the game as bad as people make it out to be? not really, it could potentially be a 7/10 just because of the fact its a co op campaign and the gunplay feels really polished and blasting enemies is fun, but theres just so many drawbacks such as the horrible characters/story, the lack of mission variation, the limited weapon selection, the spotty bullet sponge AI and difficulty, but on the other hand the upgrade system and gaining XP and loot and going through the skill tree for the next unlocks and upgrading your weapons was a pretty enjoyable loop as well .
6/10
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