Video Game / Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Wolves hunt together.

"We were born to kill Nazis!"

— Sophia Blazkowicz

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a First-Person Shooter developed by MachineGames and Arkane Studios, released on July 26, 2019. This Wolfenstein entry is a standalone Spin-Off to 2017's Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. The game is also the first installment since the Microsoft Xbox port of Return to Castle Wolfenstein to include Co-Op Multiplayer.

Set in 1980, Youngblood takes place 19 years after the second American revolution, though the Nazis still have power in parts of the world. The game follows twins Jessica "Jess" and Zofia "Soph" Blazkowicz, members of the global resistance, on a personal mission into the still Nazi-controlled city of Paris as they seek to locate their father, the famous resistance fighter William "B.J." Blazkowicz, who went missing in the city on a mission of his own.

Unlike The New Order and The New Colossus, Youngblood is designed primarily as a two-player co-op game, although playing single player with an A.I. partner is possible. It has a more non-linear, hub-based open world design, as well as noticeably more vertical levels akin to Arkane Studios' Dishonored series. It also introduces RPG mechanics reminiscent of Looter Shooters like Borderlands or Far Cry: New Dawn.

A teaser can be found here; a story trailer can be seen here.

The game also features its own Spin-Off for VR devices that was released on the same day, called Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot.

Tropes hunt together. Including the following:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Right before the final boss, the girls gain the power to catch bullets and fling them back at enemies. While it's great for the first phase of the fight it's useless for the second one since Lothar instead uses lasers and rockets.
• The '80s: Complete with Neon Signs, cassette tapes, and architecture in spite of the Reich's influence.
• Action Bomb: One of the new units are German Shepards strapped with explosives that run at you and explode.
• Action Girl: The Blazkowicz sisters take after their father as badass Nazi-killers.
• Always Someone Better: A Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs when General Lothar handily defeats Soph in a fistfight after revealing he's wearing a power suit of his own, showing that once you remove the augmentation disparity a hardened military veteran is going to have the advantage over a teenager who first saw real combat literally yesterday. The twins do much better in the rematch by upgrading their suits with the God Key and fighting together.
• An Arm and a Leg: You can blast the zitadelle's arms off (one of which is a flamethrower, the other is a rocket launcher). If you succeed in destroying both the robot will automatically break down and be considered destroyed no matter how much health it has left.
• Armored But Frail: Medics have very high soft armor, but very low health, being practically a One-Hit-Point Wonder once you shoot away their armor.
• Artificial Brilliance: The enemy pathfinding in the game is actually reasonably impressive. If you open fire on a squad of Nazi troops from a fourth floor apartment window, the enemy A.I. is perfectly capable of navigating all the way across the map, up the stairs, through the apartments, and right into your sniping spot.
• Artificial Stupidity: Trying to play stealthily in a solo run is practically impossible, since your AI-controlled partner will almost always find some way to catch the enemy's attention and put them on alert. Also, the AI-controlled partner will constantly die and waste your shared lives. This was somewhat addressed in later patches which gave your A.I. partner a cloaking device and had them hold fire until you opened fire.
• Artistic License – Military: The Micro-Uzi/P08 hybrid is referred to as the "Maschinenpistole". This is the German term for a sub-machine gun (which the hybrid isn't, strictly speaking). The German term for what English speakers refer to as a machine pistol, somewhat confusingly, is "reihenfeuerpistole".
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Nazi Generals have access to the same power suit technology the twins do, making them very tough in a fight. This is demonstrated handily in the Starter Villain boss fight against General Winkler, the Nazi leader in charge of Paris. And at the end of the game in the Final Boss fight against General Lothar.
• Badass Adorable: The twins are only 18 and cute as buttons, yet no less deadly than their father.
• Badass Family: The Blazkowicz family; a One-Man Army, a former Serial Killer turned resistance fighter, and their twin daughters, who show every sign of taking after their father.
• Battle in the Rain: The final battle with Lothar takes place in the rain.
• Beam Spam: The Laserkraftwerk can be modified into a laser assault rifle with a Tempo Automatic Transformer. With that and all other parts being Stier, it has a DPS stat that's three times that of a fully-upgraded Laserhammer.
• Beef Gate: Early on, the girls are told to Juju that they'll need some training before taking on the Towers. Grinding and leveling is necessary since if your level is lower than the enemy then you'll deal scratch damage at best.
• BFG: Four, all connoted by the suffix "-hammer." While the girls need a Perk to do so, they can be pocketed and modded like any other weapon (although with only three parts each). Comes in sustained-fire laser beam (Laserhammer), fireball shooter (Dieselhammer), quad-barreled automatic shotgun (Kugelhammer), and nuclear-powered Plasma Cannon (Überhammer) flavours.
• Big Bad: General Lothar Brandt, the leader of the Fourth Reich. Initially appears to be a case of Villainous Legacy, as while he's the one who constructed the infrastructure the twins need to dismantle, he's also been long dead by the time the game takes place. Then it turns out he was hiding in plain sight the entire time.
• Big Damn Reunion: A very downplayed example. While the girls eventually find their father alive and well in Paris it's far from a happy occasion as he's learned that Hitler set up a weather control machine to destroy the world in the event he's killed as well as him learning that multiple universes exist, and in one (implied to be ours) the Nazis lost and he and his family have a happy life.
• Bigger Stick: In an unusual version, the heroes have the more advanced Powered Armor compared to the villains. Lothar Brandt is far more skilled than the girls in combat, and when he fights Soph in equally-strong power armor, she loses. The twins can only defeat him with the God Key and a two-on-one fight, and even then he's the Final Boss.
• Blood Knight: While the twins are freaked out after their first kill, they come to like following in their father's, er, occupation pretty quickly.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Jessica, Sophia, and Abby decide to stay behind in Paris to fend off an inevitable Fourth Reich counterattack and buy time for their parents to rally the rest of the world to put an end to the Nazis once and for all.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: The panzerhunds ("tank dog"), due to their massive armor and hp, fortunately you can destroy them relatively easily by shooting their fuel tanks (located on their torsos right in front of their hind legs.) There's also usually a laser turret with infinite ammo nearby you can use on them.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Paying an extra $10 for the Deluxe edition upgrade gives you a Pep that completely restores your armor, which is significantly more powerful than the default starting Pep which restores 50 units of health. However, due to the game's poor reception, the Deluxe edition is often priced at the same price as the standard edition when the game goes on sale.
• Checkpoint Starvation: Checkpoints are relatively rare or inconsistently placed. All of the Tower Raids are especially bad since if you die at any point (including during the boss fight) you are sent back to the very beginning of the stages.
• Clothes Make the Superman: The twins utilize a pair of Da’at Yichud Powered Armor suits made by Abby, to compensate for the fact they're still teenagers and not a hulking mountain of muscles and righteous fury like their father. Besides giving them strength and durability to match that of B.J.'s, the suits also give them a few special abilities B.J. didn't have, such as a cloaking device and a double jump.
• Cosmic Deadline: After taking down the three "Brothers," the game becomes a race to get B.J., which wouldn’t be an example if not for The Reveal of the true identities of the Big Bad and The Dragon, who have their heinous acts told by way of Offscreen Villainy as the plot shifts to quickly taking them down, instead of giving time to show their actions between sections.
• Critical Existence Failure: Enemies with barely a sliver of their health left are still just as capable in the fray as they were seconds before taking a shotgun blast from a distance, as is common to the genre.
• Dark Action Girl: The Jäger unit of the Wehrmacht stationed in Neu-Paris is an all-female force of Nazi light infantry specialist Elite Mooks, serving as an Internal Homage to the SS Elite Guard troops of pre-Machinegames Wolfenstein games, sans the paranormal abilities. Though they're not as stripperiffic as their Elite Guard predecessors; their features are more severe, they wear a full torso armor cuirass, and their black bodysuits are more akin to diving suits or Future Spandex rather than the Spy Catsuit worn by the originals. They have above-average health as well as a decent amount of soft armor (making them resistant to armor-piercing rounds) and are noticeably faster and more agile than normal troops, though they don't use the Unnecessary Combat Roll the Elite Guards did.
• Deadly Rotary Fan: This is how General Winkler dies: during the first phase of the fight he will Teleport Spam very frequently. Once you do enough damage he decides to teleport onto the wing for some reason. You then have to fight him some more till you do enough damage that he falls down, gets blown back and is hanging on to the edge of the wing trying to get back up. the twins shoot him anyway and he loses his grip and is sucked into the engine and chopped up.
• Degraded Boss: The first Super Soldier you fight (on the Zeppelin just immediately before you fight General Winkler) is extremely tough, capable of soaking over a hundred rounds of hard ammo before going down and essentially being a full mini-boss fight. Later Super Soldiers you encounter on the streets of Paris are much easier to take down, going down after only a few dozen hard ammo shots, similar to the ones from Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Jacques, the mute resistance fighter who's often in the background during meetings with the resistance leader, is actually the Big Bad General Lothar Brandt.
• The Dreaded: By 1980, Terror Billy has left such a deep impact in the public consciousness that German teenagers write Creepypasta on Reichnet forums that say he will kill you in your dreams.
• Eleventh Hour Super Power: During the final mission, B.J. uses the God Key to upgrade the twins' power armor. This gives them the ability to capture and redirect enemy gunfire as well as a powerful charged melee attack that can open certain doors.
• Embedded Precursor: Wolfenstein 3-D once again makes an appearance, this time in the form of a pair of arcade cabinets in the catacombs the twins can interact with to play the game. However, this version of the game is a role reversal, with Nazi soldier "Elite Hans" attempting to escape from the Resistance base, "Castle Wolfstone".
• Enemy Civil War: The disintegrating Nazi regime finds itself battling The Ascension, a faction of the government that considers themselves the true heirs of the Nazi Party following Hitler's death at the hands of B.J. years before and intend to become the founders of the Fourth Reich. Their leader was General Lothar, the original commander who was in charge of Paris but was deposed under mysterious circumstances and presumed dead. He's actually been hiding as a member of the French resistance alongside his wife Juliet, AKA Juju, planning to use the Resistance, and later the Blazkowicz family, as pawns to weaken the Nazi regime in France and clear the way for their own schemes.
• Elite Mooks: Snipers, Shotgunners, Flamethrower troops, Hammer soldiers, and Jäger are all listed as Elite level units by the game. The Jäger are particularly elite, being noticeably faster than normal enemies while having relatively high health and armor.
• Evil Gloating: After they believe they have drugged Sophie, Jessica, and Abby, Lothar and Juju openly celebrate and boast about their plan to start the Fourth Reich and how they tricked the French Resistance and B.J. into helping them.
• Eye Scream: Abby loses her left eye due to a betrayal.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The Dieselsoldaten, one of the Nazi's Elite Mook troopers, are armed with flamethrowers.
• Genre Shift: From a linear First-Person Shooter to a hub-level objective based co-op First-Person Shooter slash RPG, similar to what happened to Shadow Warrior 2.
• Green Aesop: Due to the Nazi regime's rapid industrialization and complete disregard for the environment, climate change is ravaging the world much faster in this timeline, with catastrophic floods now being reported in Brazil and France every year. Official sources are quoted as saying this is perfectly normal, that Aryans aren't going to let "a little weather" bother them, and that a new fifth season, "Sturmzeit", has been created to mark the occasion. Played with in the late-game revelation that Hitler created a machine to render the planet unfit for human life that would activate after his death — the metaphorical epitome of not caring what world you leave behind.
• Happy Ending Override: The ending credits of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus depict riots rising all over the Earth and Nazi spaceships fleeing the planet, implying the rousing speech the Resistance gave led to a world-wide revolution that defeated the Nazis. Come Youngblood, set almost two decades later, the Nazis still maintain a firm hold on Europe despite having been driven out of the rest of the world, due to B.J. being unable to unite the rest of the world against them.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Several different Nazi infantry types wear armor (Namely shotgunners, snipers, combat medics, flamethrower troopers, Combat Commanders, and Jäger Elite Mooks); they have their armor represented by grey squares next to their health bars that must be depleted to kill them. Armor is also either "hard" or "soft" which are vulnerable to different weapons (soft armor vs low-caliber weapons and hard armor vs high-caliber weapons). The most typical non-Supersoldat example are the Hammer Soldiers, who have Heavy with a capital-H levels of armor, are slower moving, armed with automatic shotgun cannons, and quite similar to the Fire Troopers from The New Order.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: The Stier Transformer for the Elektrokraftwerk allows it to shoot 4 targets at once.
• Humongous Mecha: The game has two main types: the Zitadelle ("citadel") and the more powerful Zerstorer ("destroyer"). Both are about 30 feet tall and quite powerful (although you can destroy the zitadelle fairly easily by blasting it's arms off.) Each of the "Brother" fortresses also has a more powerful Zerstorer-like robot with some special attacks as a boss.
• Hollywood Silencer: All weapons save for the shotgun and the Signature Weapons can be slapped with a suppressor that nullifies all sound.
• Lensman Arms Race: In the 20 year gap between New Colossus and Youngblood, the Da'at Yichud power suits have gone from a single unique centuries old prototype to limited produced technology. They're still expensive enough that only Nazi Generals have access to them, though. Abby, being a Gadgeteer Genius, built two of them on her own for the twins to use.
• Lightning Gun: Returns as the Elektrokraftwerk.
• Merging the Branches: Both the Wyatt Lives and the Fergus Lives timelines from the prior games are reference. When the sisters find an example of a Laserkraftwerkr in Brother I, Soph mentioning that BJ told them stories of vaporizing nazis with his example. While Jess mentions that BJ told them stories about sticking grenades to nazis with the Dieselkraftwerk when they find an example in Brother II.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: Similar to series like Far Cry, Crysis, Borderlands, etc., Youngblood is heavily based on the previous game in the series, The New Colossus, with much of the same assets and code and thus the same weapons and enemies. There have been enough additions to the roster, coupled with the Genre Shift into an Action-RPG co-op shooter, to make the game experience feel different.
• Money Spider: All enemies drop a container with a handful of silver coins when killed. With human enemies, this could be rationalized as money the soldiers had on them at the time, but why would the various robots have or need money?
• Monument of Humiliation and Defeat: After the Nazis took Paris, they encased the Eiffel Tower in uberconcrete and renamed it the Siegturm. It serves as the main command center for the German military and the Gestapo in the city.
• Mood Whiplash: Whenever the girls take an elevator ride, it cuts to the elevator security camera and shows them dancing or doing something else cute while elevator music plays. The whiplash comes in due to the event taking place before and after they enter the elevators usually being deadly serious.
• More Dakka:
  • The starting maschinepistole can just about carry the game if upgraded properly. Its fast fire-rate lets it munch through most heavy armor in a few seconds. Add to that the game's RPG Elements adding 2% to your global damage bonus every time you level up, and 3% to its specific damage bonus whenever you kill enough nazis with it, and it gives most of your arsenal a touch of the old Can't Catch Up. What it can't handle well are Ubersoldaten, and giant robots like the Panzerhund, Zerstörer and Zitadelle.
  • The Laserkraftwerk, if given all Stier parts except for a Tempo transformer, has a DPS three times that of the Laserhammer.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Prior to the events of the game, General Lothar was completely censored out of the Reich's national Intranet. Juju's plan to hack into the three Brothers' mainframes around Neu-Paris, ultimately for the benefit of Lothar and herself by locating Lab-X and B.J., had the unfortunate adverse effect of revealing to Abby the last remaining information about Lothar, including his likeness..
• The Multiverse: Yep, it's a thing now. B.J. glimpsed hundreds of alternate dimensions after reaching the Da'at Yichud vault under Paris, including one where "everything was alright" - heavily implied to be our own where the Nazis lost World War II - leading him to have a Heroic BSoD before the twins find him.
• Mythology Gag: Jess and Soph's nicknames for each other are "Arthur" and "Kenneth", taken from their favorite adventure novel series. This is a reference to the Commander Keen games, where B.J.'s grandson is named Arthur Kenneth Blaze.
  • Sometimes one of the things the sisters say to each other to hype each other up is "Get Psyched!"
• Nerf: The girls can only dual-wield the pistol weapons unlike their father despite wearing power armor, presumably to avoid trivializing the armor system by carrying around two weapons for each damage type.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • B.J. killing Hitler. This is presumably being saved for Wolfenstein 3.
  • The U.S is apparently completely liberated, the Second American Revolution was a total success.
• One-Steve Limit: The previous two games' sub-machine gun has been renamed the "Blitzgewhr" to made room for a new "Maschinenpistole", this one based on the IMI Micro-Uzi that operates on an open bolt rather the real weapon's closed-bolt operation.
• Powered Armor: The Blazkowicz sisters wear armor very similar to the Da'at Yichud suit that Caroline and their father both wore in previous games. The Nazis also have access to this technology, though it's expensive enough that only their Generals wear them.
• Plasma Cannon: The Überhammer heavy weapon fires a blast of orange plasma that explodes twice; once on impact, and then again three seconds later.
• Previews Pulse: The teaser trailer has the throbbing sound effect. Listen.
• Put the "Laughter" in "Slaughter": A rare non-evil example: When the twins make their first kill, they are freaked out at first but then suddenly burst out laughing. It's probably more to relieve tension then them thinking "killing people is so much fun" or the like.
• Recursive Ammo: An optional upgrade for the Dieselkraftwerk is a cluster grenade that packs three submunitions into each bomb.
• The Remnant: Most of Russia past the Volga is irradiated wasteland where people simply cannot live. Oleg, a Russian Resistance member, vows that the Russian nation will live on in the survivors.
• Rewatch Bonus: When Julie Brandt betrays the teens by drugging them, it's possible to see that Soph's eyes don't roll back in her head like they should when she goes "unconscious", because as is revealed shortly, none of the girls actually drank the drugged wine.
• Salt the Earth: When forced to retreat in 1971, the Nazis destroyed most of Russia via saturation nuclear bombings, just to ensure the resistance couldn't have it.
• Shout-Out:
  • You can find a rune on an Outsider shrine.
  • One of the door codes spread throughout the game is 0451.
  • The Robotermörder boss is described as both "the future of law enforcement" and "German engineering is the best in the world."
  • A collectible newspaper article speculates how the 1936 Berlin Olympics opening ceremony broadcast may be the first contact aliens might ever receive of humanity decades later.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Soph is hot-tempered and reckless, and just like her dad relishes getting up close and personal with the Nazis. Jess is calmer and more analytical, and a crackshot as well.
• Spam Attack: Tempo-brand aftermarket parts for the Twins guns increase their firing rate, and they produce high-capacity drum magazines to offset their bullet-hosiness.
• Superboss: The Robotermörder is a unique King Mook version of the regular Robot Soldiers, commissioned by General Lothar as a special anti-terrorist unit roaming the streets of Paris eliminating terrorists. Of course, given the Nazis' very loose definition of what a terrorist is, it's basically just a glorified State-sanctioned serial killer. The thing is basically a Shout-Out to 1980's cyborgs such as RoboCop or The Terminator; the mission to fight it only becomes available after finishing the main quest, and it's an incredibly tough Lightning Bruiser that's tougher than even the Brother Ubergardes, requiring several hundred bullets to bring down. It also stalks you throughout the city streets (the game completely clears out the entire level of enemies specifically so you can fight it one-on-one) instead of being fought in a typical boss arena.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As important as the assassination of Deathshead, the destruction of Roswell, the Resistance's televised message and the assassination of all those commanders was, each of those blows ultimately took out only one small cog in the greater Nazi war machine; none of them was a true killing blow, and so of course the Nazis are still a strong presence even two decades later. Blazkowicz may be a Nazi-killing machine, but he can only be in one place at a time, and even he can't defeat them all singlehandedly. Even the death of Hitler isn't enough to end the Nazi regime outright, though it does cause enough internal strife that rival Nazi factions begin fighting each other for legitimacy.
• Taking You with Me: The massive climate change being reported worldwide is actually caused by a doomsday device Hitler created to activate upon his death, which it did upon B.J. killing him.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: One of the new mechanics is that certain enemies will wear different types of armor that are resistant to certain guns but vulnerable to others.
• Time Skip: Takes place 19 years after the first two games. A lot has changed in the past two decades.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The launch trailer gives away the final scene of the game (interestingly, one character is removed, because their presence would itself be a spoiler).
• Vestigial Empire: The Nazis have been driven out of all their colonies across the globe, being forced to consolidate in Europe. That said, they're firmly entrenched in their remaining territory, to the point that not even B.J. can put a dent in their war machine.
• Volleying Insults: When on their way to fight the Big Bad, the girls start calling each other things like "shit for brains" and "barf bag". Considering the two of them are grinning widely and laughing at as they insult each other, they are likely insults of endearment.
• Womanchild: Downplayed with the twins: while they take the war and their mission to find B.J. seriously, they still do act like stereotypical teenagers at times.
• World Half Full: To an extent. While the Nazis are still active in this game, B.J.'s action had made it viable enough for the world to put up a fight against them. Furthermore, the United States was able to restore its federal government, and Grace Walker became the head of the FBI as well, which was able to muster itself to put a fight against them.

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