YMMV / Wolfenstein: Youngblood

• Awesome Music: Carpenter Brut's "Turbo Killer" on the reveal trailer, as well as "347 Midnight Demons" on the E3 trailer, is a high-pounding barrage of Synthwave.
• Critical Dissonance: Game critics largely agree that the game is So Okay, It's Average, with the Metacritic score in the high 70s. However, the Metacritic user scores are at around 2.9 while Steam user reviews only have about 40%^note as of August 2019 of players recommending the game.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Thanks to it's divisive main characters, frustrating gameplay changes detailed below in the Scrappy Mechanic examples, having a far simpler plot compared to its predecessors that many fans of the previous games find forgettable at best and controversial worldbuilding (including pulling Happy Ending Override on New Colossus's ending, inexplicably making the proudly anti-establishment Grace Walker the head of a revived FBI, killing Hitler offscreen and the bizarre multiverse plot twist that many felt came right out of nowhere). Many Wolfenstein fans like to pretend that Youngblood never happened.
• Heartwarming Moments: It's a small detail but according to the icon when you help out your sister you hold hands with her briefly.
  • There's also a shot at the end where the twins, Abby, Grace, Anya and B.J all have a group hug/arm link.
• Narm:
  • Some of the frequent swearing feels rather forced and unnatural, making it sound less edgy and more of a halfhearted attempt to be edgy.
  • The fact that the devs have made constant emotional validation into a key gameplay mechanic is somewhat jarring, to say the least. Especially after your character and their co-op partner throw the exact same lines at each other for the 500th time.
  • Sophie and Jessica's over the top and silly interactions in general don't come off as natural, as if the writers don't actually understand how teenagers, let alone siblings, interact with each other.
  • Juju's extremely thick French accent makes it difficult to take any of her dialogue seriously.
  • After The Reveal, Abby's constant refrains over cutscenes about how evil Lothar and Julie are for various counts of Offscreen Villainy, coupled with ending each one by saying how monstrous they are for their actions, comes across as a ridiculous case of averting Show, Don't Tell, rather than actually showing them engaging in heinous actions. Overall, it seems as though the writers didn’t allot enough space in the story for events after said revelation and wanted to make the Big Bad seem far worse to compensate, instead of being a relatively run-of-the-mill Nazi villain.
• Obvious Beta: The last update to the game adding post-campaign content introduced a couple of new areas to explore, namely the Little Berlin Cistern, and Detention Area 4 Engineering Lab. The two maps clearly feel like repurposed old demo maps or vertical slices from the game's earlier development, featuring environments and gameplay flows at odds with the rest of the game. Features, but isn't limited to:
  • The Seine River being an explorable area, and features the Brother 1 complex visible on the other shore, while it was behind the player one loading screen ago.
  • A new square area features a distinct uncanny feel to it, a non-functional subway station normally used as fast-travel, and is unusually linear. Parts of this area are were even recycled later on in the Brother 1 map from the main game.
  • Both new maps feature an unusual color scheme for their mini-map, and worse, were not designed to be revisited multiple time. Entering these areas from the exit can even result in causing enemies to respawn in the wrong order and breaking the music entirely.
  • Blast doors in the Engineering Lab, closed as part of set pieces, completely lack collision and will let enemy sightlines, bullets, and characters pass through freely.
• Older Than They Think: Youngblood is not the first Wolfenstein game to not feature B.J. Blazkowicz as a playable character. The Freedom Chronicles from Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus didn't have him either. Nor did Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, the multiplayer-only spinoff of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The same goes for Muse Software's Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, which both predate B.J. Blazkowicz's debut in Wolfenstein 3-D. But unlike those other games, at least B.J. still plays an important role in Youngblood.
• Ron the Death Eater: The twins themselves have acquired this reputation, mainly due to how during their first kill they burst out laughing, as well as their incredibly obnoxious personalities throughout the entire game.
• The Scrappy: Tons of hate has been thrown the way of the twins and their "obnoxious frat bro" personalities.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • A lot of disdain has been thrown at the even greater amount of RPG-like mechanics that have been added into Youngblood. Both Jessica and Sophie level up like RPG characters. All of the enemies have their own listed power levels, with higher level enemies being literally impossible to defeat if your own level is too low. Missions are level gated requiring you to grind levels to advance the plot. There's even timed daily and weekly missions that reward you with ingame currency. This has baffled many hardcore Wolfenstein fans who see the addition of these RPG mechanics making Youngblood look more like a watered down version of The Division or Destiny than a true Wolfenstein game.
  • The armor system in general. Some enemies have different types of armor that require different types of weapons to counter. However, this system isn't particularly intuitive and it can be difficult to figure out which weapon corresponds to which type of armor. In addition, it doesn't take into account the possibility of you not upgrading the "right" weapon or running out of ammo for it, forcing you to engage enemies with the "wrong" weapon meaning you have to consume even more ammo to take them down. As a result of this system, you don't have the freedom to switch up your weapon loadouts however you like based on your playstyle, instead having to pay constant attention on saving the right weapon for the right enemy.
  • In combination with the levels and the armor, this makes many Mooks Incredibly Durable Enemies, making it very unfun to fight them. Later patches would reduce the damage reduction effect of the armor system, so that enemies are now reasonably killable even with the "incorrect" ammo type, though using the correct ammo is still more effective.
  • The invite system wasn't working properly at launch, preventing many friends from playing with each other. Unfortunately, considering the game is intended to be a co-op experience, this has hampered the gameplay experience significantly.
  • If you die, your ammo doesn't refresh when you are sent back to a checkpoint, and you respawn with the amount of ammo you had when you died. This means you can potentially restart an entire level or boss fight with no ammunition. Later patches would give you a reasonable starting amount of ammo after a checkpoint restart.
  • And as is becoming tradition in recent Bethesda games, the introduction of an ingame store and currency has led to criticism of Bethesda inserting microtransactions in a story-based co-op game.
  • The game doesn't actually pause when you enter a menu, even in single-player mode. In a game like Dark Souls it's more tolerable due to plenty of opportunities to go AFK with relative safety, and the ability to suspend your game any time, but in a fast-paced game like Youngblood with plenty of Respawning Enemies and that only saves at checkpoints it's less forgivable. Menu pausing in single player was eventually added in a patch.
  • The enemies now respawn in areas you cleared immediately after you leave them. This means that when you leave the hub to go to your mission, you have to fight some enemies, and then fight those some enemies again when you come back. However, the respawning can sometimes go overboard, with enemies immediately respawning directly behind you, which becomes a huge issue because you have nowhere to fall back to if you need to time to take a breath. Since enemies keep constantly respawning, many players have little incentive to go through the trouble of actually killing them and just run past them instead.
  • The poor checkpoint system has received numerous complaints since checkpoints are few and far between, and it's not uncommon for players to restart an entire mission, even if they were on the final stage of said mission.
  • The side missions in general. They are often indistinguishable from story quests since they basically have the exact same objectives, and there is the annoying tendency for side quests to be issued in story areas you had already just cleared, meaning you will have to immediately backtrack to complete them. Then there are the randomized missions that may be issued to you while you are in the open world, which have the unfortunate chance of spawning in areas that are too high level for you to venture into. If leveling up wasn't such a core part of the gameplay, most players would have just completely ignored these side missions.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Remember when B.J first met Horton Boone and told him the whole reason he was fighting was so his kids didn't have to grow up in a world run by Nazi assholes? Despite everything B.J fought for, everything he accomplished, poor Jess and Soph still had to. The twins were forced to become Child Soldiers to put an end the Nazi regime. Only a literal Cosmic Reset Button will undo the horrors and give the Blazkowicz family and their allies a measure of peace.
  • This has been mitigated somewhat as the Blazkowicz sisters are confirmed adults and thus not Child Soldiers. Also, the story trailer indirectly confirms that America did indeed liberate itself from the Reich, with the FBI being set up to help the twins, and despite their advanced tech the Nazis are starting to lose their grip on the world. Nonetheless, his daughters are still fighting the Nazis, in spite of his wishes otherwise.
  • Because of a significant amount of time passed, Set Roth is now gone due to old age. While it's only slightly touched upon, this means that the last official member of the Da'at Yichud is now dead. Fortunately, it seems like Set took on Abby as a protege before his death, so the order might survive through her.
  • Late-game, B.J reveals that Set's "God Key" allowed him to see into different dimensions, one of which is implied to be ours. It's revealed that the twins would have been born regardless but they would have lived normal lives and grew up in a world not ravaged by the Nazis. This fact deeply saddens B.J, who had worked so hard in the past two games hoping he could avert his children growing up in a Nazi world.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Adolf Hitler, the Greater-Scope Villain of the entire series, is killed off between The New Colossus and Youngblood, without so much as a flashback. Unless this is touched upon in the next Wolfenstein, it is very unlikely that we'll ever get to see BJ Blazkowicz fight Mech Hitler again in a modern game. The fact that the assassination is spoken of as if it were some enormous triumph in spite of what was seen in the previous game just makes the effect even worse, as there is no way to show how he possibly regained a bit of his senses.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • When the game was first announced, the twins were officially described as having differing skillsets: one a weapons expert and one a brawler, which implied variety in gameplay and perhaps even certain missions only accessible for one twin (such as target shooting for Jess or unarmed combat for Soph). While these do have a small effect on gameplay, the twins are mostly identical otherwise, and the story never makes use of their unique skills outside Jess and Soph's introductory cutscene.
  • The New Colossus ends with B.J. and his allies essentially kicking off the Second American Revolution to liberate America from Nazi occupation. However, Youngblood skips to 20 years in future where the Second American Revolution has already succeeded. As a result, players never get to see or experience the actual Revolution to expel the Nazis from America.
  • There was an opportunity to explore the tragic consequences of B.J. and Anya basically raising their daughters to be Child Soldiers in a world where the Nazis remain a constant, existential threat. This could lead to potential situations where the children privately resent their parents for their strict upbringing, the parents realizing too late they turned their own children into weapons, or even the children gaining an inflated sense of their own abilities and getting horribly in over their heads when they confront the true horror of the Nazis in person. This would all come together perfectly with the later plot reveal that B.J. witnesses an alternate timeline where the Nazis lost World War II and his family lives a perfectly normal life. Instead, any sort of philosophical or ethical concerns about how Jessica and Sophia were raised are never brought up when it becomes clear everybody is fine with them jumping into the conflict against the Nazis.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Somewhat strangely, a lot of people seem to sympathize with the Nazi Mook who is the twins' first kill. This may be because they show him listening to a cassette tape just beforehand, which humanizes him somewhat. That the girls burst out laughing afterwards certainly doesn't help, even if it was intended to be Mirthless Laughter. It could also be argued that the twins themselves are so obnoxious and unlikable that they make an actual Nazi seem sympathetic by comparison.