YoungBlood

Game 2019 Wolfenstein: Youngblood

To put it mildly, something is wrong with Bethesda. After Doom, Prey and Wolfenstein dilogy, it seemed that fans of solitary entertainment had someone to rely on and a stream of great games awaiting them without microtransactions and other modern tinsel. But then there was a failed Fallout 76, which disappointed Rage 2 with its uselessness, came out on mobile devices full of TES: Blades lootboxes and timers, and the new The Elder Scrolls was at the concept stage. With the release of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, the situation only worsened.

Forget about memorable characters and interesting situations - Youngblood is not a linear shooter, but a set of large locations that you will constantly return to, studying their individual areas. Therefore, there is no such plot here - after lengthy introductory videos and a well-posed first mission, you set off for free swimming, listening to dialogs only by walkie-talkie and in the central zone where tasks are given.

The main characters this time were the daughters of B.J. Blaskowitz, looking for the missing father. At first, they seem interesting characters, constantly supporting each other, but the farther, the more they annoy. Every second murder of the Nazi is accompanied by cheering, during a trip on the elevator they constantly grimace, moreover, there are about five of these grimaces and sometimes they are repeated within the same task. And the dialogs in the original English version are sometimes so bad that even localization sounds better.

To explain this is very simple - since there is practically no plot here, and somehow it is necessary to disclose the characters, Machine Games tried to humanize them with the help of such meaningless conversations. Girls discuss their childhood, talk about their favorite books - sometimes it's interesting to listen to all this, but this is just a drop in the sea of meaningless chatter, due to which the shootings seem to become more exciting. It looks especially funny when playing alone, when a partner openly “slows down” and shouts something at the same time - you better help, not push speech!

The most interesting part of the story ends about an hour later, after which the sisters are sent to search for three Bruder towers in the streets of occupied Paris. In each tower, you can find a server with data that will help you find B.J. It’s far from immediately getting to the commandants and taking the server keys from them: to enter at least one of the towers, you need to earn two dozen levels, improve your weapons, increase your health and armor - and this is done by performing a bunch of monotonous side tasks. You go to the central location, approach the characters, they say something, you move to the “open world”, complete the task and come back.

And here all the shortcomings of Youngblood are twisted out. Locations are catastrophically small, so you will walk along the same places, sometimes completing the next quest in the same building as the previous one. The instructions themselves are also far from outstanding - in all seriousness they may ask you to go somewhere and press the button, after which you can pick up the award. Although it’s in every way better than the miserable mini-tasks that appear in the open world, as if it’s some kind of Destiny, they tell you by radio about an important Nazi who needs to be killed, or about a car that needs to be mined. But since the locations are tiny, all this happens the same place as last time - I killed a damned Nazi with two guards four or five times, memorizing their route by heart.

Not without elements of RPG, which now add to every second game. In order not to let us go directly to the plot locations (otherwise Youngblood will be completed in a few hours), they were inhabited by very powerful opponents, destroying the sisters with a couple of shots. We have to gain experience on weaker enemies, at the same time getting to know one more innovation - the Nazis now have not only health, but also armor cells, and it depends on what weapons they are best eliminated on how they look.

This feature greatly spoils a good combat system - you are literally forced to pump guns for all occasions and use not only what you want. And the fact how slowly the character switches between different types of weapons is very poorly combined with the idea of opponents clad in shields - you start shooting, quickly realize that you won’t achieve anything with this gun or machine, open the “wheel” with guns, try to figure out the situation and lose half your health during this time.

Another role-playing element is the leveling of the character on which you spend earned currency. It is impossible to buy all the desired skills at once - a considerable part of them are closed behind higher levels of the character. It is especially strange that a perk showing collectibles on a mini-map (of which, apparently, a couple of hundred) is not available right up to level 30. That is, those who want to collect everything will then have to return to the old zones simply because there is such an uncomfortable system and no one thought about them in advance.

And these objects are well hidden - the locations are literally filled with secret passages, branching corridors, closed doors and boxes with combination locks. You can immediately see that the Arkane Studios team, responsible for the Dishonored series, was involved in this component - as you walk from one door to another, you are distracted again and again by all kinds of drawers and cabinets. Although sometimes the interior decoration of buildings seems monotonous, basically there are no complaints about the design of locations - it is interesting to study the environment and receive rewards for this.

Although there are misses here - too often the player finds himself in dark catacombs, where a damn thing is not visible and you have to use a flashlight. There are two options. The first is to take the flashlight in one hand, and the gun in the other, but in this case, you will have to invest a lot of resources in this (not always useful) weapon in order to successfully shoot from armored enemies. The second option is to attach a flashlight, for example, to a shotgun and walk like that, but in this case, in the literal sense of the word, your eyes will hurt - when a character runs or reloads a weapon, a ray of light starts to twitch and jumps across the screen, which is why to pass these "blind" levels is terribly uncomfortable.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood has a flaw for every virtue, if not just one. The locations are hidden with secrets, but there is no normal map - only a mini-map in the corner. Shooting is fun, but switching between suitable weapons is inconvenient. Enemies also regularly appear from the air right in front of the nose. To go through everything, of course, is desirable in a cooperative, otherwise there is a great chance to get bored after a few hours. Here, for two players, they introduced special gestures that you should use by agreement to restore health and armor, as well as combination locks that open only with the participation of two users.

Surely some of the players will want to buy Wolfenstein: Youngblood only in order to pass the time before the release of the full Wolfenstein 3, but even in this case it is hardly worth wasting time on it. There is no storyline that you expect from this series, but only a set of boring tasks and a meaningless open world that forces you to visit the same places to complete the story. Microtransactions have also been introduced here, with which you can quickly unlock coloring for weapons, but they all look so nightmarish that you don’t even want to discuss this element. In general, the experiment failed. Please come back to the old formula.

Advantages:

  • nice graphics;
  • excellent design of most locations, with a bunch of secrets and branches;
  • shooting is still fun.
  • Disadvantages:

there is practically no plot, as well as memorable characters;

monotonous senseless missions in the same locations;

role elements did not make the game more fun and look redundant;

in the dark catacombs eyes begin to hurt.