When it was first announced, there was something about the very existence of Youngblood that
felt unbearably grim—and that excited the hell out of me.
It had me spinning all these ideas in my head of where the narrative could go from here; I always
found the exploration of BJ’s declining mental state—his relationship with others
as he tried to maintain the will to fight—more compelling than the fight itself, and while
I wasn’t a fan of the way The New Colossus just kind of ditched that story at a certain
point in favour of complete grindhouse shlock, Youngblood’s very existence seemingly brought
that aspect of BJ’s character back into stark focus.
It would seem from those initial trailers that the promises BJ made—to fix the world
so his babies didn’t have to grow up under the Nazi scourge—ultimately amounted to
nought; with his daughters now having to take up the fight that he seemingly couldn’t
win, and him struggling to make sense of that fact.
It reminded me of The New Colossus’ intro, and how it always felt like kind of a cruel
joke played directly on its protagonist; with its cold opening immediately following the
events of The New Order, with a seemingly fatally wounded BJ thinking his job was done
only to be further torn apart by his friends reminding him that he still had work to do;
sending him into an existential spiral beautifully illustrated by that game’s opening sequence.
It was funny to see BJ tearing up Nazis while wheeling himself around, being woken up to
grumpily swat at them like bothersome, idiotic flies.
It was also poigna nt though; sowing the seeds of Colossus’ exploration of BJ’s bodily-mental
disconnect as he considered himself a failure, a liability, all the while his unwavering
drive to protect Anya allowed the writers the excuse to forgo lengthy exposition for
the sake of Nazi-killing action.
It was mechanics and dialogue working in tandem to efficiently establish the game’s themes
in a period of twenty minutes.
It was brilliant.
This was the kind of multi-layered writing that the team at Machine Games had proven
themselves more than capable of over the course of two full games and that pedigree had me
unbelievably excited for what was to come in their most recent release.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, that first twenty minutes of The New Colossus has more
heart, wit, subtlety and bombast than the entirety of Youngblood’s ten-hour campaign—which
throws away its potentially fascinating concept in favour of painfully tedious open world
missions that leave the game feeling like a baffling afterthought.
And this feeling of disposability is perhaps most noticeable in the characters we spend
the most time with, the twins themselves—the wisecracking, prank-pulling, totally righteous
duo this game hangs its threadbare story on.
A lot has been made of the cringeworthy banter between these twins, as we repeatedly get
treated to the same elevator animations of the pair dancing for no reason or you hear
the same refrain of “this Nazi’s toast” and the response “hell yeah you’re slaying
it sis”; with more than a few critics pointing out how little resemblance this bears to actual
sibling interaction.
And look, I get it—it certainly isn’t how my family would react to situations such
as these.
That said, I don’t think this argument holds much water in this case; we’re operating
in a heightened reality here—anything goes and the duo’s youthful energy could act
as a neat change of pace from BJ’s brooding nature.
See, this is a series that, through incredibly touching moments of quiet between the shlocky
action-packed missions, has been able to take what initially seemed like unbearably cringeworthy
characters and very quickly redeemed them as remarkably complex individuals as we see
them deal with loss, love, survivors guilt; the wide spectrum of human experience as magnified
through the lens of Wolfenstein’s surreal post-apocalypse.
That said, the problem with the patter here is that, thanks to the dearth of curated story
missions, outside of three, maybe four cutscenes and sparse idle conversation that seems to
come out of nowhere… those elevator scenes, the plucky one-liners that begin repeating
fifteen minutes into a ten-hour game are the only insights into these characters we get.
No comedic irony of BJ ruminating that he’s somehow going to die while simultaneously
slaughtering wave after wave of Nazis; no subtle relationship development as Fergus’
refusal to let Grace win gradually earns her respect.
No, thanks to the fact that the game’s open approach has to allow for players to tackle
its structurally identical missions at any given time, there’s no room for gradual
character development here; so all we have are the constant shouts of “hehe I’m going
to wreck this dude over here” that are as useless tactically as they are narratively.
And it wasn’t just the twins that suffered from the game’s change in focus.
I was slogging my way through one of the game’s seemingly infinite hordes of bullet sponges
at a fairly late stage, and was genuinely shocked to hear a voice over the radio I couldn’t
remember hearing before, speaking as if we were old buddies.
I think it was one of the many mission-givers strewn about what you could loosely deem this
game’s “hub”—the catacombs.
I knew everyone in The New Order’s bunker; I partied with them in The New Colossus.
By comparison, I’ve played through this game more than twice and still have zero idea
who any of these people are; these objective-spouting automatons that, spoilers for game’s loose
narrative hook I guess, after the woefully executed twist (that should shake the very
foundations of the resistance), are less than unbothered—they refuse to react to anything
that isn’t directly related to the fetch quests they send you on.
You get transported to another area, with the writers seemingly forgetting that you
cou ld just transport right back.
The open world mission structure still had to function somehow.
It sucks because there really is a fascinating story to be told in this period of the new
Wolfenstein timeline—one in which the girls try to assert their maturity in a world whose
realities they simply aren’t ready to face; learning just how “liberated” this America
really is; indulging in the pre-apocalypse delights they were raised without and importantly,
learn about their dad’s legacy as mythologised by both sides, contrasting it with the BJ
they’ve known their entire lives.
These all play into the same slice-of-life tone that made the previous titles as charming
as they were gut-wrenching, and at points we get hints of the game lightly pulling on
each of these narrative strings.
It’s just that the unbelievable thematic potential of said strings is wasted on such
a tedious grindfest of an actual game; focusing instead on what most titles would treat as
meaningless side-missions that, here, serve as the main event; as you frustratedly run
in circles trying to find the one specific path to your vague objective marker; navigating
grey street after grey street broken up by the occasional identical sewer or military
checkpoint (doing away with the visual flair of prior titles), all filled with quickly
respawning enemies that after a while saw me exploiting the abysmal partner AI by simply
running to the door at the other end of the room ignoring all enemies and hoping the sister
would transport over rather than get stuck looking at a wall or something.
It leads to a situation where a series that previously had me gasping at the sheer audacity
of its action as chunks of BJ’s enemies cooked on his smoking dual shotguns, now had
me carelessly fumbling about directly in front of enemies as I cycled through my arsenal
because the ammo types didn’t match up between my weapon and the enemy’s completely arbitrary
armour bar; that saw me taking on these behemoths before me with the silenced pistol because
it was somehow more effective than a massive laser rifle.
Giant enemies in prior titles were set pieces—here they’re little more than random health bars
getting in the way of your purely numerical progress.
All this speaks to a wider issue with the game’s focus on weapon and character customisation.
The effects of each weapon upgrade feel so slight in the game’s moment-to-moment encounters
that the emphasis placed on these options in terms of level grinding feels like yet
more fluff getting in the way of both the Nazi-slaughtering action and a more careful,
well-thought out story.
I don’t want to be thinking about DPS in a goddamn Wolfenstein game—the extent of
my character customisation should amount to whether I want to use one or two shotguns
at once.
It's worth noting that many of the issues in terms of spongey enemies and the baffling
inability to pause offline will be addressed in upcoming patches, but the things wrong
with this game as I see it go so far beyond that.
You fix the technical minutiae, sure, you have at best a functional (if mechanically
unremarkable) shooter.
But very few of the people I know come to Wolfenstein specifically for its shooting.
Many, I would argue, love these games despite the fact you have to actually play them (even
though I’m not one of those people).
So it’s not just that Youngblood is a “different type of game” that’s the problem here—it’s
that Youngblood takes one of the most narratively bold, rich re-imaginings of a franchise ever
and uses it to justify some truly baffling design choices.
I was fully on board to love this game—even when others were criticising it, I remained
steadfast in my resolve to see it through to the end based purely on the strength of
the team’s prior work.
As it went on though and ten hours began to feel like forty, it seemed as if every choice
made—from the basis of the story’s broad strokes right down to the details of every
single gameplay system—was specifically engineered to make me hate my time with Youngblood.
As much as it pains me to say it, I’ve gone from being endlessly excited about any instalment
in a series that managed to turn BJ Blaskowicz into one of gaming’s most sharply-written
and fully-realised characters, somehow catapulting me all the way back around to full-blown scepticism
about whatever we get next to fill in the blanks.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Youngblood.
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Yang.
And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.