Wolfenstein: Youngblood
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Zofia and her sister teeter on the edge of a burning zeppelin, the scene of their first Nazi assassination and five minutes of subsequent cheering, vomiting and picking brains from each other’s hair. “Jump!” says Zofia. “Can we make it?” asks Jessie. Zofia throws herself backward over it, yelling, “How the fuck should I know?”
This reckless leap into the unknown perfectly captures the spirit of the Terror Twins, protagonists of
Youngblood. They’re freewheeling renegades, giddy with the excitement of finally getting to follow in their daddy’s footsteps and shoot them some Third Reich. Their incidental dialogue says so much about their relationship – not to mention their unusual upbringing by a renowned Nazi hunter – without ever feeling like flagrant exposition, and their exuberance motors the game along. The tone of their exchanges couldn’t be further removed from BJ’s whispered monologues in
The New Colossus, and they own that departure. ‘Jes’ and ‘Soph’ Blazkowicz are Youngblood’s strongest asset, whether they’re taking down Supersoldaten on the streets of occupied Paris, playfighting in elevator rides or leaping from exploding blimps.
Youngblood springs free of The New Colossus’ linear singleplayer formula in favour of something entirely separate: a co-op loot game. And not just that, but a co-op loot game developed in collaboration with Arkane Studios – master of the cunning alternate path, artisan of incidentally placed bric-a-brac that tells you more about the game world than any NPC could – set in an alt-history 1980s Nazi-ruled Paris, with an all-female leading cast. Needless to say, this is a very much a roll of the dice for the two studios.
You are, at least, eased into this new vision of
Wolfenstein. The opening airship level was designed by MachineGames itself, and you get a sense of that immediately. It’s a sequence of spacious layouts, each more implausibly well-suited to gunfights than the last, taking you from industrial back rooms to casino floors with robotic croupiers and red-curtained Third Reich opulence. Here, you need only devote one per cent of your brainpower to the new. There’s someone else on your side, and she occasionally boosts your health or you hers. Thumbs-ups are exchanged. Switches now come in twos and require synchronised operation. Yes, there’s a boss fight with a general who can turn invisible and heal himself. Yes, those are the cheapest tricks in the boss-battle book. But otherwise this is the flowing, cathartic shooting you remember. The health bars do seem more robust. But you’ll just whack the difficulty down if it gets a bit much later on, won’t you?
And then the game begins in earnest. Missions take place across a series of hub areas within Paris which you move between via a map of the city’s Metro network. Deep in the catacombs where La Résistance has set up
base camp, your comrades dole out missions whose objectives lie across those hub areas. Venture out, tick off objective, return for XP payout. Repeat to fade.
And every time you step out of the catacombs, you face a barrage, not just of Nazi supersoldiers and their accompanying mechanised horrors, but of questing and grinding, picking up silver coins every five paces and almost spending them on an in-game hat before snapping out of your stupor. You’ll retread the same handful of hub-levels to complete side missions until you’re sufficiently high-level to complete story missions (which feel broadly like the side missions) in those same areas, and drop the difficulty level much earlier than you thought you’d have to, yet get vaporised anyway. You face Laserhunds with eight health bars, and chase map markers that appear impossible to reach. It all feels a long way from that zeppelin.
The reality of an Arkane-designed Destiny featuring ’80s Nazis is that of disparate elements that can’t knit together. Arkane’s level design worked well in Dishonored, the sheer volume of clutter in every corner of every room gently encouraging you to slow down and smell the roses. Its eye for verticality and multiple routes rewarded patient level explorers and promoted stealth. Most importantly it blended perfectly with your powers, always setting you up with opportunities to pull off something that felt ingenious.
It’s like fighting for your life in a pop-up storybook filled with swastikas
That same unmistakably Arkane level design informs the hub worlds of Paris – nine or so of them, many containing sub-levels. And they all have their own way of telling the story of living in this nightmare of fallen Paris. Brutalist Albert Speer angles break up the tenements where the Nazis have installed checkpoints, and black, pulsing screens of early computers sit among throngs of wires in intelligence rooms. What the design doesn’t do is let you read or navigate levels easily, or fight efficiently within them. The absence of simple things – a full-size map, quest markers that give an indication of routes – too often makes traversal a chore, particularly given that this is a co-op game in which both players are free to roam wherever they like on the map, but which frequently demands they collaborate to open a door. The many hubs of Paris would be a fine setting for a stealth game, but going quiet in Youngblood will only ever get you about three enemies deep before a 20-person brawl breaks out. And when that happens, the angles never seem to line up quite right for a satisfying shootout. It’s like fighting for your life in a pop-up storybook filled with swastikas.
All of which could be viewed much more charitably if Youngblood wasn’t so punitive about its difficulty. Each mission indicates a recommended level when you select it from the HUD, and woe betide you if you attempt it before you reach that level. It’s an exercise in
one-hit knockdowns from swarms of aerial drones and losing shared life after shared life (an otherwise neat co-op conceit) trying to revive each other in impossible chokepoints. This happens at every difficulty setting, and occasionally even when you’re at the appropriate level for the task at hand. Familiar Wolfenstein enemies who are now endowed with layer upon layer of health bars simply aren’t as enjoyable to fight as Youngblood’s developers think they are, nor does the attritional combat they produce gel with the environments.
There are exceptions, of course. The raid missions, each a bombastic journey into the Brother districts where top SS officers run the city, have the advantage of taking place in bespoke environments. In the Brother One, Two and Three districts, you get the best sense of being swashbuckling sisters out to overthrow an insurmountable foe with sheer chutzpah, rather than jaded level-janitors sweeping each district clear of bullet sponges before handing your paybooks in for XP back at the catacombs. Here in the innards of the city, infrequent cutscenes are triggered and Soph and Jes can shine, bringing levity to the slaughter. It’s just a shame you have to grind through so many forgettable missions to reach an adequate level before taking them on.
Still, Youngblood doesn’t stumble at its most fundamental level: as a shared experience. PS4 servers have been robust throughout testing, the fledgling community generally good-natured, and the mechanics introduced in order to encourage collaborative play are as effective as they are simple. Best of all are ‘peps’, which temporarily buff the health or armour of both players on a cooldown timer. Smart deployment of peps makes all the difference in a tricky fight (so, every fight, then) and triggers an volley of empowering dialogue between the Terror Twins. All is right with Youngblood in these moments. Elsewhere are basic puzzle elements that require one player to stand at a keypad while another finds a decrypter and sends the correct code to them, or two switches to be flicked in sync. Hardly
Portal, but satisfying in their own way.
Then it goes and forgets to make levelling up any fun. When the game first encourages you to choose a sister, along with a weapon, skill and pep you’ll begin with, it infers this will be an exercise in specialisation as you progress. As the two sisters grow, you imagine, they’ll go deeper into their specialities, and those radically different approaches will complement each other in inventive ways. Instead the skills within
Youngblood’s upgrade menus are a mixture of essential – increased health, armour, ammo capacity – and inconsequential. Charging into an enemy to stun them might save your hides a few times, but it won’t inform the way you work together as a duo: skills don’t run broad or deep enough to allow for that.
When Wolfenstein: The Old Blood arrived in 2015, it allowed MachineGames to throw around new narrative and conceptual ideas. The reputation of the main franchise would remain intact, however much of The Old Blood stuck or fell flat, and whatever worked might find its way into the next sequel. That’s that sense here, too: an experiment which doesn’t land on firm ground conceptually but finds something worthwhile in character-driven, collaborative play. The Terror Twins don’t get the platform they deserve, but they put on quite a show with what they’re given.