Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Not great not bad. For the TL:DR it's misguided and the result of corporate greed. Youngblood takes the legendary nazi slaughtering simulator and asks the bold thought provoking question, what if we made it a multiplayer game with rpg elements that seems to echo the idea that it's a live service game that no one asked for? The answer is it become a boring decentely well playing game that spends its runtime confused at its own existence. Gameplay is spent running through boring shooting galleries a fair few of which you will have to run through multiple times through out a rather brisk playthrough making the reuse of these arenas all the more confusing. Of course the reason is for a semi openworld rpg shooter with live service systems such as daily and weekly challenges as well as skins and weapon upgrades you appear to need to grind kills and quests to eventually own. And of course the game being a weirdly live service game means you need a live to be servicing. Meaning wolfenstein becomes a coop shooter desperately throwing in mechanics that require a second person (or ai controlled character) to justify this. It really feels like the game was working backwards to make it fill a list of boxes. It rarely does anything interesting with this concept and instead adds a pep talk mechanic to heal you and your companion. And that's about it, push buttons with them, pulls levers and do nothing of interest to avoid making it a game that can only be played cooperatively. So Youngblood more or less culminates in a game trying to justify it's coop mode but failing to commit tampered by weird rpg and live service decisions. It's story is find enough with dialogue which feels like an older mostly male team writing teenage girls. The game itself is fine enough. It's biggest crime is well and truly just that it fails to deliver something really new to the Wolfenstein series, it just plays like the previous games Machine Games made but with coop and rpg systems that don't interact with each other amazingly.