Wolfenstein: Youngblood was one sour batch of sauerkraut. Marinated in a noxious and ill-fitting live-service-adjacent brine, this troubled spin-off (and the mediocre virtual reality title it launched alongside) left a bad taste that has lingered for almost seven years. Developer MachineGames’ adventures with another famous Nazi-killer and increasingly longer AAA development cycles have meant Youngblood’s aftertaste has stuck around longer than it should have.
This drought is reportedly almost over, though, since reports forecast the streets will once again run red with Nazi blood sometime soon in a new Wolfenstein game, further backing up light teases from the MachineGames team itself. There’s a lot riding on Wolfenstein 3: a game that has to meet the moment in more ways than one–and can’t follow in Youngblood’s footsteps.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the fourth entry in MachineGames’ alt-history Wolfenstein series and sets the franchise in the 1980s. But instead of controlling longtime series hero B.J. Blazkowicz in a single-player adventure, Youngblood puts players in the power armor of his twin daughters, Jess and Zofia, and, to its downfall, focuses more on co-op and RPG mechanics.
The mere inclusion of another player fundamentally throws off the balance MachineGames had gradually honed over its three previous Wolfenstein games. Scores of armor-clad true believers randomly litter each of Youngblood’s environments, which are more open than the ones in the previous games, forfeiting the tighter pacing that comes with designers being able to craft encounters around a singular viewpoint in a more linear stage.
The forced implementation of shallow yet omnipresent RPG mechanics also turns enemies into bullet sponges and completely deflates the fantasy of being an all-powerful Nazi-slaying machine. The adrenaline that fueled almost every encounter in the prior three titles has been diluted so it could be doled out in tiny increments in a feeble attempt to artificially keep players on the grind.
Overhauling its systems so they could more cleanly adhere to a more generic structure harms the curated gameplay loop of the prior installments and will forever plague Youngblood. It was designed to be more replayable than its forebears (and has the greasy microtransactions to show for it), yet its looser design makes it the least enticing one to return to by a fair margin. And while that alone is damning, the more pressing issue here is how toothless Youngblood is.
The New Order, MachineGame’s 2014 foray into the Wolfenstein universe, kicks off MachineGames’ series and sees a comatose B.J. wake up to a world where Nazis conquered the globe following a victory in World War II. Its 2017 sequel, The New Colossus, shifts the focus to the Nazi-controlled United States, a country that has, by and large, either capitulated to its new masters or been bombed into submission. But even though there’s plenty of high-octane action set to a thumping Mick Gordon score, both games are remarkably grim.
Seeing everything from the morals you cherish to the people you love get crushed under the cold boot of fascism and dealing with constant, overwhelming defeat are heavy themes B.J. doesn’t quietly shove into the back of his brain. B.J., a man whose previous emotional range was mostly confined to a pixelated portrait reacting to different difficulty options, grapples with hopelessness and those feelings spill out through poetic internal monologues the player is lucky enough to overhear.
Despite looking like a linebacker with the emotional complexity of a feral raccoon, B.J. delves more deeply into what a ruthless assault from a hostile force like this actually means for the people involved and the anguish that comes with perpetual loss. Players see what the Nazis have done to strangers by trekking through desolate cities and watch their inner circle of allies dwindle through barbaric executions, too, so the stakes are explicitly laid out. The violence of the empire is all-encompassing.
Youngblood is not nearly as thoughtful, as clearly shown when protagonists Jes and Zofia murder their first Nazi. The Blazkowicz twins stumble around and weigh what to do before impaling a jackbooted thug and blowing his head clean off. But instead of playing this as a big and serious point of no return, the two let out celebratory screams, parading around in the fresh vomit and viscera as a synthy 1980s jam blaring from the nearby cassette player becomes the impromptu soundtrack for this execution. This antifascist version of Beavis and Butt-Head giggle and snort in the wake of their inaugural kill, before hyping themselves up to continue their journey.
It is undeniably silly, but this goofier tone is only one thread in Wolfenstein’s vast thematic tapestry. Nazis aren’t portrayed as anything less than evil in Youngblood, but they’ve been demoted to standard video game villains here, since there’s barely any inspection of the surrounding ideology. Swapping them out with mutant chimpanzees would have little effect on the actual narrative. A decent chunk of the collectibles, often building out the world through notes and letters, paint a more dire picture of the Nazi regime and the people it tramples. But intricacies in a game’s narrative can’t be almost solely derived from a few paragraphs buried in optional notes scattered around. Collectibles should enrich the existing text, not be put in a position to do all of the heavy lifting.
The New Order and The New Colossus are much more consistent with their storytelling and not only have more biting collectibles, but sharper core tales with more meticulous, context-rich worldbuilding. The New Order and The Colossus explore the structures around the goons with guns that make this sort of heinous system a reality. Players infiltrate a death camp and break dissidents out of a prison with dehumanizing propaganda on repeat. The resistance’s headquarters are tucked away in a massive city filled with towering Sieg Heiling statues, an uncountable amount of surveillance cameras, and intimidating Brutalist structures built from the Über Concrete churned by prisoners held in the aforementioned death camp. From the land to the people, there’s little the Nazis haven’t razed or perverted.
But the most insightful moments in The New Order and The New Colossus come when they unload both barrels–or, in this case, every shell in their metaphorical Schockhammers. The New Order’s J, a revolutionary inspired by rock legend Jimi Hendrix, points out how, for its nonwhite citizens, the United States is hardly different from Nazi Germany in many ways. It’s an uncomfortable truth bred from how the Nazis took inspiration from Jim Crow laws that’s meant to get players to think more critically about how Nazi-style ideologies don’t always come adorned in swastikas.
This poignant speech acts as a warmup for The New Colossus, which mainly focuses on how US citizens react to Nazi occupation. So much of white America rolls over for these oppressors, often gleefully celebrating their new Aryan overlords and reinstated ability to own slaves. Bystanders outside of a theater praise Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films. Newspaper op-eds thank God for the Germans who “liberated this country from the moral degeneration that was going on.” Letters between Nazis mention how surprised they are at how smoothly the transition is going and how receptive its new subjects are. SS troops goosestep in the street to raucous cheers. “Look at you people,” B.J. snarls as he witnesses the elated crowds. “Celebrating your own destruction.”
The powerful imagery of pointing the mirror back at the US and its predilection for white supremacy became even more loaded because of the game’s launch window in 2017, a year fraught with political tension. It came out around two months after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which saw newly emboldened neo-Nazis, fascists, white nationalists, and many other sorts of losers B.J. would shoot on sight, march in the streets screaming slurs and bigoted chants. This ugly display bruised the nation and got a counter-protestor killed . Even though this country has always had a white supremacy problem, a game with Nazis shamelessly marching in the streets of an American town suddenly didn’t seem so farfetched.
Bethesda Softworks leaned into this with its “Make America Nazi-Free Again” trailer–a direct shot at the rally using Donald Trump’s inherently regressive slogan–and its post saying Nazis were not “fine people,” another reference to Trump’s own words. Pete Hines, former VP for public relations and marketing at Bethesda, spoke to this, too, saying it was a coincidence that Nazis were marching in the streets in the real world, but stood by the messaging since it was consistent with the franchise’s DNA. He was more blunt in a later interview, directly saying “f–k those [Nazis]” who didn’t like the spicy tagline.
While its alignment with contemporary American politics was unintentional–The New Colossus’ story was started in 2014–it was cathartic to have a game that spoke to the moment. It demonstrated without any room for misinterpretation that Nazis were bad and how violent ideologies must be met with violence, and boldly pointed the finger back at the US and its many hypocrisies. It would be hard for any game to follow that up, but it’s even more disappointing that Youngblood didn’t even attempt to build on that message, when that message is what has given its predecessors such staying power.
Wolfenstein 3 cannot make the same mistake, because that’s not what this moment of ratcheted-up fascism needs. Immigration & Customs Enforcement goons are snatching people off the streets and shooting people, acting in ways that directly invite comparisons to Nazi Brownshirts or Gestapo officers. Trump has repeatedly called people of various groups “vermin,” a word that’s impossible to separate from the Nazi regime. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller’s whiny speeches are often spiritually identical to the ones Irene Engel screeches in Wolfenstein. Official government social media accounts regularly post undeniable Nazi or Nazi-adjacent dogwhistles. Twitter has devolved into a Nazi safe haven, with its AI assistant even going so far as to call itself “MechaHitler,” as if it were the final boss of Wolfenstein 3D.
These types of events keep happening as the US continues to run down the 14 points in Umberto Eco’s famous “Ur-Fascism” essay with each passing week. And if things have only gotten more Hitlerian in the real world, Wolfenstein has to keep up.
The New Colossus’ bite clearly didn’t save the world and Wolfenstein 3, no matter how sharp it is, won’t either. But it’s going to be immensely disappointing if the next entry errs on the side of appeasement and doesn’t meaningfully inspect this demented ideology and its effects as intimately as its predecessors. In an environment with fewer AAA games and even fewer AAA games that take any sort of stance, Wolfenstein’s boldness and clarity is even more necessary.
It’s unclear how Wolfenstein 3 will play out. While it’s a franchise with different focuses, MachineGames allowed players to punch both Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts and Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, while also lightly touching on the manipulative iron grasp of fascism and the insecurity it requires. Art director Axel Torvenius also recently said the team still wants to “stay bold, dare to push the envelope, [and] not back down.”
But even though there are signs of hope, Wolfenstein 3 will also be the first Wolfenstein under Xbox, and it remains to be seen if this new publisher will interfere, especially one under a parent company being scrutinized and boycotted for aiding in an ongoing real-world genocide. However, one thing is clear: Wolfenstein is at its best when at its punchiest, so the next game better punch hard and decisively for its sake as well as our own.