 One of my very first videos on this channel was a review of Wolfenstein 2. I was a fan of both the reboot and the smaller old blood expansion and I've been looking forward quite a bit to the new Colossus. Ultimately, I ended up finding the game a mixed bag. Fantastic characters and a kind of mediocre story. Top flight voice acting and production values and a game that featured very long cutscenes. Fantastic level and mission design but not enough variety in how you go about doing them and very linear objectives. And combat that was less refined and more at odds with itself than the earlier titles for machine games. The game had a horrendous habit of not letting the player know he was about to die and it was just a nightmare of press X to loot. You literally spent a quarter of your time trying to aim your reticle at a 1 millimeter square patch of ground to pick shit up. Well, Wolfenstein Youngblood is the first game from a big studio to release in a while and though you'd be forgiven for not even realizing it came out because I had no idea it was already out when I happened to stumble upon a YouTube video two days ago. I'm not done with it yet. I've played about 25 hours and I'm ready to tell you some things you should know before you decide to buy this. After the logo. So before we go further have out a quick synopsis of what's to come. I said in the opening that I found Wolfenstein 2 to be a mixed bag. Well, Youngblood is also a mixed bag, but strangely it inverts almost everything I said about the new Colossus. It's almost as if machine games identified most of the problems of the last game and fixed them while also allowing all of the positives of that game to regress into problems. I am one of the few people who really loved Rage 2 and that's because even though it was repetitive in its world and missions and its story was an afterthought, its combat was so uniformly great that it was able to totally carry its mediocre aspects. Now in some ways the same is true here only less so. What kind of game is this? First off it is important to realize what this game is because I have to say I didn't really understand what I was buying here. Yes, I had heard that the game could be played co-op and online, but I didn't realize that the entire thing was designed around being a co-op games as service to player left for dead with Nazis instead of zombies. Wolfenstein Youngblood is a confused game. It's quite clear its creators weren't fully willing to commit to whoever mandated this strange multiplayer focus. So instead of going full games as service left for dead style, Youngblood tries to split the difference leaving a game that fails to excel at either aspect while still being overall pretty alright. Yes, it is meant to be played co-op, but it's also a single player game. Yes, you're meant to grind levels and currencies, but there's also a discrete ending. Youngblood ends up feeling like Xenomax asked all the studios to come up with a games as service title and machine games did everything possible to minimize the impact of that decision. So before we get further in, understand that this is not the new Colossus. This is not death of the outsider. This is not even old blood. This is very much a games as service Wolfenstein. It has the great characters and voice acting I've come to expect of machine games, but in service to a story that barely exists. Let's get to the combat where big steps forward clash with baffling issues to once again keep Wolfenstein from being the game it could be. Combat. The original escape from Castle Wolfenstein was a stealth title. It was THE first stealth title. Though the series' fame is a result of the id reboots that became the world's first FPS hit, the original game was all about stealth. Machine games managed to homage to both with their re-reboots by making a stealth-focused FPS. There's always been a strange dichotomy in the machine games Wolfensteins. You can dual-wheel the assault rifles and shotguns, but BJ was ridiculously squishy. So while the music was pumping and dual-wielding seemed to scream rip and tear to the player, the actual game would get very angry at you for playing the way the title seemed to encourage. Dooms, movement speed and enemy design encourage aggressive play. Enemy attacks are never hitscan and fast movement allows you to escape damage. That's not Wolfenstein. All enemy attacks are hitscan. And while the game doesn't actually have much of a cover system outside of a lean mechanic, if a player is out in the open for more than like 5 seconds they are dead. You can go from 200 armor and 200 health to dead in literal seconds in the reboots. Full frontal assault with your two shotguns is impossible on anything other than the easiest difficulty and even there it is just not very effective. Now there's nothing wrong with that, that's just the way the game is, but it's important to keep that in mind as we go on further. The new Wolfensteins lean heavily into their stealth systems. It becomes very clear, very fast that machine games want you to take out as many enemies as you can before the gunfight starts. Because this has been the most important aspect of the previous title's combat system, one would assume that that is the case in Youngblood. In fact, the sisters now have a full invisibility power to make moving about unseen even easier. Ah, but here's where the multiplayer problems begin. How does slowly sneaking around a level for 35 minutes carefully taking out each grunt and all the commanders line up with matchmaking with a random dude who is trying to finish as quickly as possible? It doesn't. At all. Period. In fact, it's a totally ridiculous oversight that would even be considered. I only played online a few times because I have no friends and have to go with matchmaking before I quit because the other person would immediately run in guns blazing to kill everything in sight. Are you the kind of person who likes to do the stealth thing? Don't play online. The levels here are tremendous, full of stuff to find and really, really well designed. Are you the kind of person who likes to slowly explore the entire map? Well, the multiplayer makes that totally impossible. The very things that make Wolfenstein good are basically broken by the multiplayer unless you are playing with friends. But luckily, I guess the stealth mechanics in Youngblood are totally broken and useless, so running gun away? Previous games had two important things that made the stealth totally viable if a bit wonky and inconsistent. First of all, almost every single enemy could be killed by a single silenced headshot or a thrown knife or hatchet. In Youngblood, the opposite is now true. The overwhelming majority of enemies here take at least two and sometimes as much as five or six shots with a silenced pistol to the head to kill. Many require two thrown hatchets to kill. It makes stealth insanely frustrating. What is the point of sneaking around if someone is going to be alerted because a hatchet thrown into their skull almost but doesn't quite kill them? The second important mechanic was how the game gave you a clear indication of where the commanders were on each level. It didn't always lead you directly to them and you needed to be very careful but the previous titles gave you clear arrows that pointed towards each of the levels' commanders. If you alerted the guards before killing these guys, enemies would repeatedly spawn until they died. It led to a satisfying feeling of either taking out the two or three commanders and disabling the alarms or killing one before being seen and then making a mad dash to kill the others while under fire. Youngblood seems to have decided that that wasn't needed. Commanders are represented on your kind of useless mini-map as diamonds if you've seen them and if they remain close but aside from that tiny help there's no way to know where or even if there is a commander in an area. These two changes have dramatic impacts on the gameplay. Stealth is now basically useless in most situations aside from a couple of small missions and levels. As they almost all turn into firefights by the third enemy when you shoot a guy twice in the head and he manages to sound the alarm anyway. That's disappointing. Luckily there's a balancing improvement in the combat. Gunplay is vastly improved. It is now totally clear when you're taking damage and the actual shooting itself has never felt better. I'm not really sure why it feels so much better but without a doubt it feels better than any of the previous games. Added to the much more fluid and fun combat and movement system are levels that are exceptionally well designed to be fun to explore and fun to fight in. I can't state enough that Machine Games deserves big credit for making the shooting so damn fun here. The movement abilities make the game feel extremely fluid, double jumping and sliding feels ripped straight out of Titanfall. And when mixed with a huge variety of weapons at your disposal the minute to minute shooting and combat feels really good when everything is well balanced and working which it usually but not always is. There are a few problems with the combat scenarios that can occasionally make the game extremely frustrating. One of those is as a result of the annoying and pointless co-op system and the other is just because the game has some rough edges and strange decisions. Because this is not a single-player game except when it's totally a normal single-player game there are a bunch of systems in place to ostensibly keep you playing this otherwise perfectly acceptable single-player game. A game as a service has to keep you grinding and it has to be online which means enemy and player leveling, skill and upgrade grinding, no saving, no pausing and no checkpoints. This is a colossal mistake as when played on hard this game is already quite challenging. Because the game is really dreadful letting you know how difficult the mission is it's easy to end up 30 minutes into one before coming up against enemies who are like 4 or 5 levels above you take 125 shots to kill and put you down in 3 seconds. This might not be a huge issue if you had saves and checkpoints but it's online so you can't save and for a reason I cannot possibly understand there are no checkpoints. So if you and the other AI or human controlled sister die, game over and you start from beginning of the mission. Sometimes this can literally mean 45 minutes to an hour of lost mission progress. Missions can take you all over huge sprawling interconnected levels. While you're in there you'll be slowly looting shit and looking over every nook and cranny. To have an enemy literally spawn behind you and kill you before you even know he's there and then have to spend another 45 minutes getting back to where you were is monumentally bullshit. Why? What is improved by this system? I have already explained all the mechanics that were previously in place to make you go slowly and carefully are undermined or removed to make way for new player 69 your team. Stealth and care are gone meaning that the game is clearly designed for frenzied full on assault and it feels best when that is how you're playing unlike the previous titles. So if everything in your combat design is based around pushing players to be aggressive, why would you possibly design fail states that brutally punish that behavior? This is what I meant when I said the game is at conflict with itself in many places. It improves some things tremendously while either regressing or only partially fixing other important things. I mean they've got a kind of half-ass progression system in here and the leveling of enemies and none of that feels necessary. For instance, while I'm happy to say the range to automatically pick up ammo and armor from fallen enemies is greatly improved so that it is finally after three games seamless and easy to hoover that stuff up, picking up ammo and coins from crates and shelves is as infuriating as ever. You'll spend a bunch of time trying to find the perfect angle to get a coin from a half broken crate because again your dot reticle must literally be directly over the item you want to pick up. Why? What is improved by that system? The ability to overcharge your health and armor is gone so the only possible excuse for making me press X to pick something up is also gone. Why do I suck up ammo from the ground but not from a shelf? That right there is a good anecdote about this game. Improvements in one area but a failure to really round it out and finish it. You might have noticed before I said have an enemy spawn behind you. That was not a figure of speech. Enemies literally spawn out of mid-air and immediately begin shooting you. If you play this game pay close attention. You will see it constantly. This is, to put it mildly, not a fair gameplay system especially when stealth has been so heavily nerfed. There are also several levels that have an annoying mechanic that seems to be popping up more and more often in gaming lately. Darkness. Listen man, maybe I'm just too old and my eyes are bad but not being able to see isn't fun. It's stupid. I want you to look at this. If you use a flashlight in these levels you immediately alert everyone to your presence totally neglecting the point of the level which I guess is stealth. But ask yourself this, ready? What are these enemies doing here? Are they really just standing in a pitch black darkness? Why? It's silly and ridiculous. For someone like me it's almost impossible to deal with. It's one thing to have a darkened level. It is another to have a lack of all light in a level. It's really poorly thought out and although the lighting system does look cool and corridors are illuminated by your muzzle flashes that few seconds of interesting tech doesn't overcome the tedious nightmare that these levels can be. You can either brute force your way through them with revives or take forever creeping around blindly. And if you die, 38 minutes in, do it again. The Sisters. As always, the characters and dialogue is really great here in Youngblood which makes it all the more frustrating that instead of a smaller but still full on machine games Wolfenstein with the story and cutscenes you've got basically a sprinkle of that here. And that's the stuff that Machine Games does best. What you've got is that just kind of toss on top of a multiplayer combat game. There's not enough story to even really get into. The Sisters are really likeable. I really enjoyed them. But the story is minimal and it's only there to give you a reason to stop shooting every few minutes. Wrapping. So, Youngblood, it's $30. When I bought it I assumed that was because it was going to be a smaller affair like old blood was. But actually it's because it is a totally different thing. After a few hours I gave up playing online and played it as a single player game with an AI partner. A reasonably decent AI partner to be fair. And if you play this game like I did, you'll probably get your $30 worth. Production values are as high as ever. Gunplay is better than it's ever been. The level design is fantastic. The characters are great. And as a straight up shooter, it's pretty darn fun. But if you were expecting a machine games Wolfenstein title, that is not what you're getting here. You're getting a mishmash, a hodgepodge of micro-transaction infested games as service co-op combat game. Now, you can ignore all that and play it as a stripped down version of the previous ones. And I suppose that is worth $30. Still, even though I liked it and I'm recommending it, I can't help but be disappointed. I really love the setting and the characters here, so I wish there was a story. I wish what I'd gotten was an actual machine games Wolfenstein with these sisters in the 80s. Instead, they're just kinda what's left after trying to combine Prey Moon Crash and Left 4 Dead and Wolfenstein New Colossus. As a 25 to 45 hour diversion, yeah, it felt worth my money. And I'd recommend it if you're looking for a shooter to play, but just realize what this is. It's a game that feels like two sides of a studio were making two versions of the same game. And instead of perfectly sanding it down and getting it just right, they just sorta split it down the middle and smashed them together. Alright, I've got a short little video actually done about five indie games that I played the last two months. I'll get that up soon. And thanks for waiting for this one. I've been busy at work and I was on vacation and then I've been building a bedroom for my daughter in the garage. And there really hasn't been a lot much going on in games, so... Anyway, thanks for sticking around. I'll see you next time. Bye.