Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a fun if slightly buggy shooter, made more interesting with the addition of a friend to help you punch Nazis to the face.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood provides a decent co-op experience for friends to indulge in. It’s like going to a place where you know the service is fine and you wouldn’t look for anything unusual.

In the end, I feel like I’ll continue to struggle with how I truly feel about Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Its strange and uncomfortable structure, or rather my reaction to it, clearly stems from my love for the “normal” games. It isn’t more of what I loved; therefore, it’s scary. At the same time, some of those scary things are legitimate frustrations that seem to compromise the game to make it more gimmicky. It’s still as charming as ever, and is full of fun characters and dialogue, which makes it harder to really be disappointed. Wolfenstein: Youngblood comes off as a big experiment, and attempts to take something people like and do something new with it. I’m glad MachineGames was afforded the creative leeway to make it.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a hit and miss co-op experience, doing well in some areas and failing in others, weak AI being the most important of them. On the good side, improved level design and gun play help to save the day. In the end, if you can try the co-op experience with a real person, go for it. Otherwise, you probably want to stay away from it.

Using everything Arkane can do in terms of level-design, Wolfenstein Youngblood offers an interesting new take on what’s a Wolfenstein game. But for a co-op game, it doesn’t have substantial co-op mechanics.

In the end, Youngblood is a budget priced spinoff that works in the gameplay department just like the previous games, but lacks in a lot of other areas. I would suggest it to players that have a co-op partner to play with and with the Deluxe Edition, a co-op pass code is available. Even then, players may find themselves burned out on this one much faster than the mainline games that came before it.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood falls dramatically short of its predecessor in most ways and feels like a missed opportunity for a great focused, story-driven co-op game. That said, killing all of Hitler’s best friends with a co-op partner at your side isn’t without its enjoyable moments.

As a budget, somewhat unambitious retooling of the Wolfenstein engine, Youngblood offers impactful shootouts that showcase some truly brilliant guns. Yet by aiming for co-op grind, this offshoot loses the charm of BJ’s blasters. A slight misfire, then, but the sisterly slaughter on display still has its moments. [Issue#181, p.75]

On paper, Wolfenstein: Youngblood should be completely brilliant. A stellar shooter imbued with RPG depth and open-ended level design? How could it possibly fail? By making the RPG elements meaningless; that's how.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a spin-off with big ambitions let down by lacklustre execution.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood feels less like the story-driven co-op shooter that it should have been, and more like a product made to cash in on the legendary IP.

If you are, looking for a straight forward co-op shooter with plenty of customization and collectibles, you might enjoy the game with friends or random online players. Solo players should probably avoid this one though.