WOLFENSTEIN YOUNGBLOOD / DEVELOPER: MACHINEGAMES, ARKANE STUDIOS / PUBLISHER: BETHESDA / PLATFORM: PC, PS4, SWITCH, XBOX ONE (REVIEWED) / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Set in 1980 – 19 years after the events of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus – series hero BJ Blazkowicz has settled down with his wife and spends his days teaching his teenage twin daughters Jessica and Sophia how to defend themselves in the event of another invasion. When BJ mysteriously disappears one night, one single clue leads his daughters to the conclusion that he’s gone to Paris to help the French Resistance rid the city of Nazis once and for all, and the twins decide the only course of action is to head there themselves to track him down.
Arriving in the Parisian underground, now a Resistance base, the Catacombs act as a hub from which missions can be picked up, supplies can be replenished, or there’s even chance to play a bit of Wolfenstein 3D on the base’s arcade machine (with a handy save feature so you can go back to it later). The entire city of Neu-Paris is accessible right from the start via a Metro map, but certain places are inhabited by high-level enemies that you might not be able to get past until later in the game.
The Metro allows access to various districts, all filled with hidden paths, collectibles, and tons of Nazi soldiers. It almost feels like a fast-paced Fallout game at times, with the amount of secrets dotted around the crumbling city ruins. Co-developed by MachineGames and Arkane Studios, both companies’ influences can be clearly felt, with MachineGames utilising their experience with all of the other post-2014 reboot Wolfenstein titles and Arkane bringing the emphasis on exploration from their own Dishonored series.
Along the way to finding their dad, the twins become stronger thanks to a couple of levelling systems that work really well together. Killing Nazis and completing missions and side quests rewards players with silver coins and experience points – gain enough experience and you’ll level up, earning points which can be spent on upgrading various abilities. Coins are spent on weapon upgrades, and there are plenty of ways to customise your arsenal to your liking.
Intended to be a co-op game, players control one of the twins while the other is controlled by an online human player (there’s no option for local offline co-op). Owners of the Deluxe Edition will greatly benefit from the unlimited-use “buddy pass”, which allows friends who don’t even own the game to join you (although progress won’t carry over into their own game, if they end up buying it themselves). If co-op isn’t your thing though, playing alone is perfectly acceptable – your twin will still follow you around, but the computer will take control with its pretty clever (sometimes even God-like) AI.
Youngblood might be something of a departure for Wolfenstein – almost like a huge expansion / spinoff rather than a fully-fledged game – but fans of the series will find it’s well worth their time. The series as a whole has become known for cinematic set pieces, well-developed characters and deep narratives, all of which, admittedly, are maybe slightly lacking here (despite spending 20 hours or so with the twins, all we really know of them is that they love calling each other “dude”), but the world design and combat are as good as they’ve ever been, there’s some really excellent songs on the soundtrack and, of course, killing Nazis never gets old. Especially when Nazi robots and exploding Nazi suicide dogs now exist.
