Wolfenstein: Youngblood (2019)

I wanted to give this a game a neutral review but Steam does not want to give that option for some reason but i'm gonna slide to the yes even though I really, really wish it could be neutral.

You can play as either Jessie or Zofia who are the daughters of the hero of the previous Wolfenstein games, B.J. Blazkowicz. So this game looks and acts like a Wolfenstein game in the sense that you still shoot people, run around in a magical power armour suit and have missions to do. You still have the perk system but it is now tied to increasing your level - so its not too bad, until you later realise you want a perk and you need to grind out a few levels to get that perk. The setting is the city of Paris and you aim to liberate it form the Nazi's. While the graphics is beautiful and the setting is a fun new one to see, it all feels too familiar if you played the previous games. The characters you receive missions from (the Paris underground resistance) I can't remember anyone's names. They exist to give you missions, something to do.

You can level your guns by killing enemies which increase the stats a bit (mostly just deal more damage). This is annoying to do cause your guns are good vs a certain enemy type (like the pistol works great against normal enemies and the bigger guns work better against heavy armour enemies). I managed to get one gun to level 10 (for the achievement, it can go up much higher) from start to finish, seeing as you are swapping guns all the time. The guy who was suppose to play with me abandoned me so I had to make do with the bot. Now the bot ain't the smartest but I have seen worse over the years in other games. The first big boss fight (not the "tutorial" boss) had me pulling my hair out cause the bot could not dodge the attack, went down and it cost me to rush over to try and save her. Speaking of, you have 3 shared lives, if it reaches zero I guess its game over - mine never got to zero but it got close a few times.

You can feel the grip of modern gaming as you play this. You can buy gold bars with real money and use it to buy different armour skins - that's all you can buy with gold - I would say i'm ok with this but it's really not needed, you don't need a skin to play this game, and you only gonna flex to your co-op partner you play with or the bot (which is even worse). You can collect coins to buy gun upgrades or suit skins, but holy hell the coins are a grind to get. I recommend you only buy gun upgrades with it - don't waste it on suit skins. There is an achievement to buy all gun unlocks and after looking up how to get that achievement I just laughed. You get these chests in game you can open that give about 50 to 100 coins and they can be opened once a day - once a day meaning you run all the maps and come back tomorrow to do it all over again for many weeks. Normal coin pickups are 1 to 3... so yeah. There are daily and weekly missions you can completed but they give out such piss poor exp and coins why bother with it. There are collectables to collect, I thought to myself if I clear out all the enemies first and then start the search it would be nice and quite and I can take my time - no, they magically respawn over time, which was really annoying.

Is this a game that needs to exist? Hard to say. I enjoyed a different perspective, that was nice to see. I won't say it's a bad game to play. There are fun things to enjoy in the game. But once the end boss hits the ground there is little to no motivation to go on with the game. You are done, You saw it all. After that it becomes a chore, a painfully obvious one to do. Daily missions, daily coins, real world money gold to buy - this sums up the entire game for you. Did I had fun shooting stuff? Yes I did. But any of the previous Wolfenstein games also provides this experience and it does a much better job at it.

6/10

"Jump!"
―Zofia

"Can we make it?"
―Jessie

"How the ♥♥♥♥ should I know?"
―Zofia shows her recklessness when she forces her sister to jump out of the burning Zeppelin