Back 4 Blood

Back 4 Blood represents a bit of a homecoming for Turtle Rock Studios, the original developer behind the Left 4 Dead series that this game spiritually succeeds. Though the title might give the impression that it's highly derivative, Back 4 Blood brings a few interesting ideas that actually change the experience quite a bit. It's not a perfect evolution; the game carries virtually none of the charm of the Left 4 Dead games, opting for a setting and an attempt at story that are both way too serious for their own good. But the game's card system, character perks, and weapon attachments offer an experience that often feels more dynamic than that of its forebears.

As to be expected, Back 4 Blood is a cooperative game in which four players battle through hordes of zombies--called "Ridden" here--to reach the next safe room, where they can use a buy box to restock on equipment. The volume of zombie swarms feels high, though it's difficult to say if the game packs more zombies on screen than Left 4 Dead in its more stressful encounters. There are also special zombies that fit the expected archetypes, like ranged spitters and bloated exploders, and even the occasional boss with a giant health bar. Ammo, throwables, and healing items are scattered throughout each level, and all of these elements are largely randomized on each run by the game's AI director.

The action in Back 4 Blood is really intense, offering far less downtime between swarms than I ever remember from the Left 4 Dead games. So it's good that the weapons here are as satisfying as they are to use. There's a decent variety of pistols, shotguns, and rifles, though melee-focused players will be disappointed by the tiny selection of melee weapons. Different optics, magazines, barrel attachments, and stocks can be found as loot or acquired in safe rooms. These attachments provide meaningful and noticeable stat bonuses to your weapons. Disappointingly, attachments cannot be removed from weapons once applied, and the game doesn't have a good enough way to compare attachments before swapping them. This makes it difficult to experiment and revert your decisions, since you must commit to whatever is being slapped onto a weapon. The game would benefit heavily from an Apex Legends-style system that allows for easy attachment swapping and removal.

Back 4 Blood's most meaningful mechanic is its card system, which allows players to build decks of cards that provide stat boosts and passive perks and abilities. Most of the cards offer straight bonuses, but some of the more advanced ones confer negative traits as a way to indicate their use for more specialized builds. Melee-focused cards, for instance, might give huge bonuses to melee attacks while reducing ammo capacity. Multiple decks can be saved with 25 cards each; you'll start with the first few cards in your deck at the beginning of a run, picking up more at the start of each level.

Crucially, the AI director also plays cards against the team at the start of each level. These cards can modify the health of special zombies, add new types of enemies, or affect the environment by blanketing the level in fog or shutting off all of the lights. There's a noticeable increase in how brutal this gets as your team performs well, often culminating in the game deploying a comically aggressive combination of these "Corruption Cards" as way to strike down your team. It can feel unfair at times, but the game does a decent job of pulling back once it has reminded you of who's in charge. It's worth mentioning too that at launch the game's difficulty was horrendously broken; anything above Recruit was next to impossible unless your team dedicated itself to cheesing the AI at every step. Turtle Rock has issued a handful of patches since then, and the game is more approachable now.

Back 4 Blood has a cast of eight survivors, each one having their own starting weapon, passive perk, and team perk. Much like the weapon attachments and card system, these characters feel meaningfully different, such that you could probably theorize about things like team composition if you really wanted to. On the easier Recruit difficulty, which I primarily played at launch, you don't need to sweat the differences too much.

Back 4 Blood plays very well, but outside of the moment-to-moment action is where the game really struggles for an identity. Its attempts to layer on a story are entirely unsuccessful. The handful of cutscenes in the game are produced well enough, but there's something about this style of frantic coop zombie-slaying that just does not warrant this much attention to narrative. Worse still is that the game has an overabundance of dialogue during some levels, such that I sometimes found it difficult to talk to my friends during safe rooms or even combat because the characters were chatting so much.

Perhaps the game's biggest weakness is that its environments leave a lot to be desired. Whereas the Left 4 Dead series had shopping malls, bayous, concert stages, hospital rooftops, carnivals, and more, Back 4 Blood trades almost exclusively in warehouses, small towns, and forests. There are a handful of good set piece moments, like a battle across a river that takes place entirely on floating debris and a standoff against hordes at a large mansion. But the areas you traipse through really blend together, enough that the game's three acts (Act 4 is just a boss fight) feel almost indistinguishable from each other. My hope is that Turtle Rock will add more varied environments over time, because this is probably the biggest killer of the game's replay value. Some of this visual plainness also carries over to the enemy design. There are technically multiple variants of each type of special zombie, but they all look so similar that you'd be hard pressed to try to identify them during combat.

Back 4 Blood is also quite strange structurally since the game's levels are unevenly distributed throughout its three primary Acts. Act 1 has thirteen levels, Act 2 has ten, and Act 3 has nine. This makes the game feel a bit lopsided. Further, there are a handful of levels throughout all three Acts that begin at a survivor base called Fort Hope, which also serves as the game's sort of hub area. In these instances your team heads out into the same part of town to get to different safe rooms, which lead you to new areas. It's very disjointed; I definitely preferred the more unique, self-contained acts in the Left 4 Dead games.

Despite the game's repetitive environments, Back 4 Blood still looks really nice. It certainly won't set any standards for graphical fidelity, but there are some moments where the use of lighting is particularly striking, and the game's abundance of blood effects makes it feel decidedly more brutal than Left 4 Dead. It'll be interesting to see if Turtle Rock add any more weapon skins to the game than what's already there, since my guns always seemed to be caked in red within 60 seconds of starting a level.

At launch, Back 4 Blood has three game modes. There's the standard 4-player cooperative experience, as well as a fairly disappointing solo experience that pairs you with pretty effective bots but that also doesn't reward any of the in-game currency used to unlock new cards (the solo campaign just gives you every card in the game to build custom solo decks). There's also a versus mode that sadly isn't very enticing. It's a 4v4 mode where a team of humans must survive against a team of special zombies, with the two sides switching after a round ends. Unlike in Left 4 Dead, these matches take place in single levels, rather than across an entire Act. It's a bit faster paced, but it just isn't very exciting.

Turtle Rock is promising content updates that will add new weapons, cards, enemies, modes, skins, and difficulties, so I imagine the game will look quite different a year from now. This is pretty exciting, because the foundation here is quite strong. It's only disappointing that the game's initial offering of levels is so underwhelming and that its story gets in the way as frequently as it does. With some more variety, Back 4 Blood could become quite excellent indeed.