Wolfenstein: Youngblood Review (PS4)
The new Wolfenstein surprisingly and comically combines everything that Bethesda mocked and made fun of just a couple of years ago in their advertising campaigns. The bastion of big-budget single-player games, as the publisher has positioned itself quite recently, is bursting at the seams, and Younglbood is another herald of this destruction.
There must be something wrong with Bethesda. After Doom, Prey and the Wolfenstein dilogy, it seemed that fans of single-player entertainment had someone to count on and a stream of great games awaited them ahead without microtransactions and other modern tinsel. But then there was a disastrous Fallout 76, disappointing with its uselessness Rage 2, TES: Blades full of loot boxes and timers came out on mobile devices, and the new The Elder Scrolls is at the concept stage. With the release of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, things only got worse.
It is clear that Youngblood is not a full-fledged new Wolfenstein, it costs half the price of its predecessors, and indeed it is largely an experiment. But experiments can be different: either they want to please the players with interesting innovations, or they become test subjects and they are tested for strength, trying to understand how patient they are and whether they eat a half-baked dish without seasoning and cutlery, or they still have a sense of self-esteem. New Bethesda belongs to the second category.
Forget about memorable characters and interesting situations – Youngblood is not a linear shooter, but a set of large locations that you will constantly return to, exploring their individual areas. Therefore, as such, there is no plot here – after lengthy introductory videos and a well-placed first mission, you set off for free swimming, listening to dialogues only on the radio and in the central zone where tasks are given out. The main characters this time were the daughters of BJ Blaskowitz, who are looking for their missing father. At first, they seem like interesting characters, constantly supporting each other, but the further they go, the more they become annoying.
Every second murder of a Nazi is accompanied by exclamations of encouragement, while riding the elevator they constantly make faces, and about five of these faces are recorded and sometimes they are repeated within the same task. And the dialogue in the original English version is sometimes so bad that even the localization sounds better. It is very easy to explain – since there is practically no plot here, and it is necessary to develop the characters in some way, Machine Games tried to humanize them with the help of such meaningless conversations. Girls discuss their childhood, talk about their favorite books – sometimes it’s interesting to listen to all this, but this is just a drop in the ocean of pointless chatter, due to which the gunfights should seem to become more exciting.
The most interesting part of the story ends about an hour later, after which the sisters are sent to search for three Bruder towers in the streets of occupied Paris. In each tower you can find a server with data that will help you find BJ. It’s just that getting to the commandants and taking the keys to the servers from them is far from immediately given: in order to enter at least one of the towers, you need to earn two dozen levels, improve your weapons, increase your health and armor — and this is done by completing a bunch of monotonous side assignments. You go to the central location, approach the characters, they say something, you move to the “open world”, complete the task and come back.
And here all the shortcomings of Youngblood come out. There are catastrophically few locations, so you will walk around the same places, sometimes completing the next quest in the same building as the previous one. The assignments themselves are also far from outstanding – in all seriousness they may ask you to go somewhere and press a button, after which you can pick up a reward. While this is better than the squalid mini-objectives that appear in the open world as if it were some kind of Destiny, you are informed by walkie-talkie about some important Nazi who needs to be killed, or about a car that needs to be booby-trapped. But since the locations are tiny, all this happens in the same place as last time – I killed the damned Nazi with two guards four or five times, remembering their route by heart.
Not without RPG elements, which are now added to every second game. In order not to let us immediately into the story locations (because otherwise Youngblood will be completed in a few hours), they were populated with very powerful opponents, destroying the sisters with a couple of shots. You have to gain experience on weaker enemies, at the same time getting acquainted with one more innovation – the Nazis now have not only health, but also armor cells, and how they look depends on which weapon is better to eliminate them.
This feature greatly spoils a good combat system – you are literally forced to upgrade guns for all occasions and use not only what you want. And how slowly the character switches between different types of weapons does not fit very well with the idea of enemies dressed in shields – you start shooting, you quickly realize that you will not achieve anything with this pistol or machine gun, open the “wheel” with guns, try to figure out the situation and lose half your health during this time.
Another role-playing element is character leveling, on which you spend the earned currency. You cannot buy all the desired skills at once – a large part of them are closed for higher character levels. It is especially strange that the perk that shows collectibles on the minimap (of which there are, apparently, a couple of hundred) is not available until level 30. That is, those who want to collect everything will then have to return to the old zones simply because there is such an inconvenient system here and no one thought about them in advance.
And these items are well hidden – the locations are literally full of secret passages, branching corridors, closed doors and boxes with combination locks. It is immediately clear that the Arkane Studios team responsible for the Dishonored series was involved in this component – as you go from one door to another, over and over again you are distracted by all sorts of drawers and lockers. Although sometimes the interior decoration of buildings seems monotonous, basically there are no complaints about the design of locations – it is interesting to study the environment and receive rewards for it.
Although there are misses here too – too often the player finds himself in the dark catacombs, where nothing is visible and you have to use a flashlight. There are two options here. The first is to take a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other, but in this case, this (not always useful) weapon will have to invest a lot of resources in order to successfully shoot back from armored enemies. The second option is to attach a flashlight, for example, to a shotgun and walk like that, but in this case, your eyes will literally start to hurt – when the character runs or reloads the weapon, the beam of light starts to twitch and jumps around the screen, because of which passing through these “blind” levels is terribly uncomfortable.
For every virtue in Wolfenstein: Youngblood, there is a drawback, if not more than one. Locations are full of secrets, but there is no normal map – only a mini-map in the corner. Shooting is fun, but switching between the right weapons is awkward. Also, enemies regularly appear out of thin air right in front of your nose. Of course, it is desirable to go through everything in a cooperative, otherwise there is a great chance to get bored after a few hours. Here, for two players, they introduced special gestures that you must use by agreement to restore health and armor, as well as combination locks that open only with the participation of two users.
Youngblood has been designed with co-operative play in mind, so much so that purchasing the Deluxe Edition nets you a Buddy Pass that allows a friend to play with you for free. It’s a great incentive that takes advantage of the dynamic of the twins, as they’re never apart during the entire campaign. Inviting a pal along for the ride does help the experience somewhat when it comes to its grindy and repetitive nature, but that’s only because you’ll have someone to play off of.
Conclusion
Surely some players will want to purchase Wolfenstein: Youngblood just to pass the time before the release of the full-fledged Wolfenstein 3, but even in this case, it is hardly worth wasting time on it. There is no storyline that you expect from this series, but only a set of boring tasks and a meaningless open world that forces you to visit the same places to complete the story. They also introduced microtransactions, with which you can quickly unlock weapon skins, but they all look so terrible that you don’t even want to discuss this element. All in all, the experiment failed.
