Fans of the Left 4 Dead franchise were waiting something like 10 years to hear what was next from the developer Turtle Rock Studio's, or if there would be a L4D3. Turtle Rock went on to have failures such as Evolve and other mostly irrelevant titles. But eventually they actually 'revived' the L4D series, except now its called Back 4 Blood. Why it's not just L4D3 I'm not sure, it must be some legal reason because maybe Valve still holds the rights or something like that, but either way Back 4 Blood released in 2021 and is basically a straight continuation of the L4D Formula.
Back 4 Blood has many of the concepts known from L4D, but with many twists and modern typical spins. You have the basic idea of gathering a team of 4 players, moving through levels and completing objectives as you go. You have the famous/classic Safe room idea where at certain points in the level you go into safe rooms which act like a checkpoint between progress spots. There's a "store" inside these where you can buy basic equipment like Health/ammo/armor and minor upgrades at times like Weapon attachments healthkits etc. Its got the typical ideas from left 4 dead like the various zombie types, like Hunters, stalkers, tanks ETC. They're basically all here in Back 4 Blood just with different names and spin offs.
The game has four acts, and four difficulties.
Right off the bat you'll notice things are different in this game, and take more of a modern turn for the worse, probably.
When reading the descriptions of the difficulties, it says things that talk about "Cards" and some difficulties only reccomend you play them "If you fully upgrade your cards and fully understand them"
So yeah, this game is basically one of these modern 'Hero shooters' like Overwatch, Rainbow six Siege, Apex Legends, and games of that nature. Unfortunately I fucking hate those kind of games and hero shooters in general, where you pick each individual character who has unique abilities like its some kind of MOBA or RPG or something. In Back 4 Blood it isn't quite as pronounced , you have a roster of a dozen or so characters all with minor differences like some characters find more ammo, others heal more, others can slightly reduce enemy damage. I didnt even notice that characters had differences until about quarter way through the game, its not a huge deal I don't think.
However what is pretty important is the Cards system.
You can build 'Decks' like its fucking Yugioh or pokemon or something.
So everytime you complete missions you get deck points or whatever, then at the end of each act you go back to the Hub world where you can purcahse random Cards from this Card store and then you have like 100 cards to choose from and you can make them into a Custom Deck .
Your deck can only hold 15 cards at once.
So you go through the store spending your points buying cards that give you buffs like Reload speed, More health, more damage, Sprint better, stuff like that. Most of the cards are just barely marginally noticable upgrades, but some of them are game changers. The actual game changing cards seem few and far between, stuff like Can carry Two primaries, No movement penalty for backwards/strafe, Crouching while shooting doesnt hurt teammates (IMPORTANT) , and so on.
Now the really strange part is you can only actually change/customize decks BEFORE or AFTER each act. This is really odd and bad because some acts can be HOURS long. So you can basically only customize your buffs like, FOUR times total in the entire game, because theres only four acts.
So everytime you start an act, it locks you into a 'Run' and you lock your deck in for the entire 'Run'. Apparently you can cancel a Run at anytime, and return to the latest safehouse you found, but I wasn't sure if there were any negatives to doing this, so I didnt want to do it just to be able to customize my deck mid act.
Yeah, the way its all structured and organized is a mess, unintuitive, its pretty bad. Why cant I just choose my cards at safehouses? Why is there even a 'Card' system? I Didn't need it, why is this a Hero shooter? All these modern trendy game design 'features' DO NOT really make it a more enjoyable game, its just layers upon layers of bullshit that just kind of get in the way and feel like tacky gimmicks to make the game seem more deep than it really is. I mean i guess it was kind of satisfying trying to choose which upgrades to get, and looking forward after each act to buy more cards, but at the same time it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth because the game would probably just have better pacing and be better without it.
The overall interface is clunky and doesn't explain much about the game. Trying to navigate the horde of menus sucks, and you cant even see an aggregate list of your total boosts from cards. The game does a poor job of even explaining any of this shit to you, it kinda just throws it all at you. We had to google some stuff to even figure out what it was, like the 'Trauma' system where you'll apparently loose all your Max health and suddenly be at 30 max health , turns out the only way to regain all your health proper is to use First aid stations on walls and equip 'Trauma resistance' cards. Its kinda a mess.
So once you get past all that shit, all the modern trends shoehorned into the L4D experience, you are acutally left with some pretty decent gameplay components. If you decide to play through the whole game in Co-op with your friend, it will randomly choose 2 bots that play with you. And for the most part the bots are fine, I didn't complain much about them until the very last act, which I'll talk about later.
But yeah the actual gunplay and combat is pretty satisfying. We beat the game on difficulty 2/4 'Veteran'. You have a kind of dynamic hitmarker whenever you shoot/kill zombies that feels kinda fun, theres a ton of different guns that you can aquire and get attachments for, all that randomly spawn around the world inside boxes and crates and such. You can buy 'Tool kits' from the safehouse store and find secret doors that require it and inside those rooms you usually find cool new guns to use. Theres a sort of like Diablo style loot system with the guns I never really understand, where the different weapons can have different 'tiers' and colors like White being worst, yellow being Rare and Purple being best or some shit. I never really noticed that it mattered much. But what I did notice mattering is the attachments. They do things like 50% more reload speed, more run speed aim down sights, Weakspot damage, and so on. It was pretty enjoyable gettin new attachments and constantly finding new guns and swapping around playing with them , shooting zombies and stuff.
I will say that the overall zombie designs and animations are kinda worse than Left 4 Dead actually. They're kinda glitchy and stiff , their blood and guts don't really look as good as it did in L4D, not sure if I'm just misremembering or what but I wasnt exactly blown away with the overal zombie animations and gore. Whenever you crouch you get this unique 'Gangsta' animation when you shoot your gun where you kind of turn it to the side and spray with it, its kinda enjoyable and feels cool.
So out of the Four acts , really you only have 3 real campaigns. The last act is just one level and is basically a big boss fight.
The first act is by far the longest, took like 5 hours. It has like 30 something levels it felt like. The actual locations and enviornmental variety was decent it never felt too boring or repeatative in that way. All sorts of apocalyptic places and interesting locations . Though one annoyance is some of the objectives and 'boss fights' repeat way too much. Like theres one objective where you have to go around and follow these multiple yellow tentacles to find the source and blow it up. This objective keeps popping up over the entire course of the game many times, it just gets old and stupid like couldnt they make each level more unique? Theres also this one 'boss fight' of this giant guy that you keep fighting over and over what feels like 20 times it kinda gets old. Other than that the actual level design and objectives are decent, its still intense and exciting seeing the safe house in the distance and a giant horde in the way spawning at you trying to get there in one piece.
I will say that the last 'act' is awful, its just one mission of like 3 boss fights. The final boss fight is just some gigantic guy running through a tunnel and you have to destroy all his weak spots in like 3 minutes. If anyone gets too close to his hitbox, he just one hits you instantly. This sucks because the bots are retarded and constantly walk into his hotbox and get one hit and ruin the whole thing. Also it constantly spawns hordes and you have to scramble around trying to find and shoot his weakspots before time runs out. The first 6 times we failed because we either kept walking into his one hit location ,or the bots fucked us over, or we couldnt find the weakspots. On the last attempt, for whatever reason, it actually highlighted all the weakspots in red glow, no clue why it did that, glitch or some shit? Either way that 'act' was terrible.
Speaking of hordes, theres this new horde mechanic where theres an icon on the top right tha ttells you when a horde is going to spawn, not sure how it works but it was atleast an interesting mechani to keep an eye on that kind of gives you some information what to expect and when the hordes will come.
The overall tone and 'soul' of the game is pretty lame as well. By that I mean the story/dialogue/characters, all that shit sucks. None of the characters are interesting, all the dialogue is stupid, theres hardly any story not that you can even hear any of the speaking between all the shit going on. Theres like 20 options of Subtitles in the main menu but apparently I couldnt figure out how to just enable basic NPC subtitles. Pretty stupid. By the characters and dialogue sucking I mean its just extremely generic archetypes without any real personality. The story is incredibly basic like "Uhhh save humanity and kill zombies to make safe spaces" Doesn't matter its just whatever.
Overall the game is atleast a welcome addition to any Co-op library. It would probably suck to play it alone, but with a friend its atleast more similar Left 4 dead kind of content, so that alone is worth picking it up on sale. Theres a ton of guns to play with, you and your buddy can just go in and slay zombies for a weekend and see end credits after a few sessions. Its like 15 hours long tops. The card/hero system is incredibly questionable and mostly lame , But if youre just looking to play some coop shooter with a buddy it's not too bad for a weekend or something.
7/10
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