Conclusion

Wolfenstein: Youngblood departs slightly from the typical Wolfenstein shooter gameplay by sprinkling on some RPG elements. You have character development and weapon unlocks that can be bought with looted in-game currency, but of course also through micro transactions. While gunplay is solid, it's nothing to write home about, and we've seen similar concepts in a lot of other titles. The cooperative multiplayer mode is nice even though it requires free registration at Bethesda.Net—playing single-player is indeed possible without registration.

As mentioned before, the game revolves around the two twin daughters of B.J. Blazkowicz. You play one of them and the other is AI controlled, or by a multiplayer buddy of yours. The AI is terrible though as it often attacks the wrong enemies even if you told it not to (with the Q key). It also takes forever to resurrect you when you go down. In other games, this hasn't been a big deal—just let the stupid AI die and fight it out on your own. In Youngblood, however, a timer starts as soon as one player is down, and if that player doesn't get resurrected in time, one of your three shared lives is gone. This means that when the AI fails yet again, you have to stop shooting, run to your downed sister and resurrect her. The shared life concept would have been tolerable were it not for the game's save system, which is non-existent. There are no checkpoints, and once you've used up all your three lives, you're right at the start of the level with all enemies respawned and objectives undone. This is extremely annoying during boss fights, particularly at higher difficulties, because it'll take you almost an hour to reach the boss, a route which you have to repeat in case you die. It also makes short gaming sessions impossible because quitting the game puts you right back at the level start. A fast travel feature is included though, which reduces the time to get around after you've unlocked that zone.

Not all is bad about Youngblood—the maps are large and complex and have tons of hidden secrets for you to find. Level exploration gets a new twist with a double-jump ability no doubt inspired by Doom (2016), Metroid, and Castlevania. If you've looked at our screenshots, you'll have noticed that some levels are very plain in design, resembling environments from several years ago, while others look great and feature more detailed models and textures. The variety of enemies is low and models get reused all the time; the only difference is that the enemies have more hitpoints and do more damage—they're mostly still bullet sponges. I would have liked to see a heavier focus on stealth, maybe depending on which sister you choose, which would improve replayability of the title, too.

Being based on the IdTech 6 engine and using Vulkan exclusively, Wolfenstein Youngblood looks good and has surprisingly low hardware requirements. We tested the game's public release version (not the press beta) at the highest "Mein Leben" preset, using game-ready drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA, and were impressed with how well it runs. Even the aging GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB achieves 60 FPS at 1080p despite its serious memory deficit. On the AMD side, a RX 570 4 GB will get you 70 FPS at 1080p, which is very good. Moving on to 1440p, the requirements barely go up with an RX 580 or GTX 1660 being plenty for that resolution. If you have a high-refresh-rate monitor, then the Radeon RX Vega 64, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2070, or Radeon RX 5700 will have you covered for 120 FPS or more.

While most titles today will have difficulties reaching 60 FPS in 4K, achieving that goal is no problem in Youngblood if you have a half-decent graphics card. Everything faster than the RTX 2060 or RX Vega 56 will run faster than 4K60—very impressive. On the other hand, this means that gamers with high-end graphics cards could definitely run at even higher settings, so it would have been great to have options for improved visual quality, especially as the resolution on some textures looks a little bit low.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is confirmed to have support for NVIDIA's RTX Raytracing technology, but the problem is that the feature isn't supported at launch and will be added at a later date. This happened with Tomb Raider, too, and I simply find it unacceptable to add RTX months after release. At that point, most people who are interested in the game will have finished it already and moved on. I seriously doubt people will replay games just for the RTX experience. Wolfenstein does feature another extremely impressive NVIDIA technology, though: variable rate shading. Using clever algorithms, the rendering engine can detect if certain areas on the screen would look just as good if they were rendered at lower resolution, which of course boosts FPS. I gave it a quick spin and went from 138 FPS to 159 FPS, a 15% improvement with no visible loss in quality—I did take screenshots and compared them side-by-side. We'll have a follow-up article on this technology, soon, but so far, it looks like it can deliver what DLSS originally promised: higher FPS rates without loss in quality.

Overall, I'm not terribly impressed with Wolfenstein: Youngblood from a gameplay perspective, mostly because of the thin story and tacked-on RPG features that really only make your life more complicated, but not more enjoyable. I do have to praise Bethesda for pricing this title at a mere $29.99, which is half that of other AAA games.