Back 4 Blood review: more than Left 4 Dead


If you’ve never fought a horde of zombies while Dick Dale (and Pulp fiction‘s) “Misirlou” sounds on a shitty beat jukebox, of course, give it a try. This is how one of the missions towards the middle of Back 4 BloodFinish the first act. As a group of survivors try to escape by bus, you and your team, the cleaners, can play bait. And nothing captures the attention of zombies like surf rock.

The jukebox defense is a rare time in Back 4 Blood where you can just “be cool, Honey Bunny” instead of stressed out. As fans of Left 4 Dead, the spiritual predecessor of Back 4 Blood, you know, the zombie horde is something to take seriously. And that’s what Back 4 Blood does: takes Left 4 Dead seriously. Someone, or many people, at Turtle Rock Studios spent a lot of time thinking about what Left 4 Dead would look like in 2021. And all of that thinking paid off, as the differences between Left 4 Dead and Back 4 Blood it is as interesting as its many similarities.

Back 4 Blood It looks like someone dropped Left 4 Dead into radioactive liquid and let it sit for 12 years, which isn’t surprising since Turtle Rock Studios is made up of many of the same developers who originally built Left 4 Dead. It emerged with the same bone structure and shape, but with some evolved characteristics more suited to the modern era. The weapons have color and accessory rarities, there is a useful ping system, it looks beautiful, and yes it does have some deck construction.

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Gone are the days when people only played a few Left 4 Dead acts for fun. Now it’s for fun and progress, either in the form of usable loot or cosmetics. Back 4 Bloodprogression takes the form of a game mechanic that has become familiar in recent years: cards and decks. By completing races, you will earn points to spend in a shop in the city, permanently unlocking new cards. You can then put those cards in a deck and play them in your next race.

These cards add another layer to Left 4 Dead’s roguelike formula, transforming it into a rogue.lite instead of. Each race, even those on the same map, is slightly different from the one before it. The Director, Turtle Rock’s HAL 9000-style name for his zombie AI, plays a card at the start of each race. On lower difficulties, this could give you an incentive, such as reaching the exit with all the players alive. At higher levels, it will give enemies different perks to make them more deadly, or it will make it easier to alert the horde. To combat the Director, you can play your own cards, which can affect your stats or even increase your basic playing skills. One card transforms your standard kick into a more deadly knife, while another can simply increase your health or cause you to deal more damage with shotguns.

As you race through the levels, play cards and dodge the Director’s antics, you are collecting and upgrading your weapons. You are also collecting coins, which you spend in safe houses to upgrade your weapons or pills to stay alive. These coins are only useful for the race you are in, so you must spend them all before the end, as you cannot take them with you. And while you reboot with basic weapons and cash every time a new race starts, you can always buy a few more cards and build a permanent deck once you get back to camp.

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Back 4 BloodThe cards and coins are pretty and make you feel like you are leaving every gaming session with something new in your pocket. But what surprised me the most about Turtle Rock Studios’ new zombie adventure was the great diversity of its levels.

Sure, the first few missions took me through factory-like areas, had me interact with objects to “alert the horde” and all the other Left 4 Dead hallmarks. But then I played missions where I found the safe room in minutes but needed to rescue the nearby survivors before I could get inside. A mission asked me to destroy three zombie nests in search of a dead man’s arm, and when I finally found it, I had to use it as a melee weapon so I could defend myself before scanning it to open the safe room. Another asked me to load and fire howitzers into a tunnel to shut out the horde. And then, of course, there was the jukebox.

A group of cleaners takes out a nest of zombies.

Image: Turtle Rock Studios / Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Every time I started to get bored with the classic Left 4 Dead formula, Back 4 Blood He would do something like hit me with a stealth level or ask me to build my own safe room. 4 left 2 dead it had a level where you needed to fill a race car in a mall with gasoline in order to escape, and it remains the one I remember most vividly. The Left 4 Dead series had other similar sequences, but they were mostly reserved for the big endings of the chapters. Back 4 Blood Hit me with that variety on a regular basis, and it kept me engaged even when playing with random players or bots.

Left 4 Dead is a beautiful heirloom, something that I and many others spent hundreds of hours playing in high school and college. But with games like Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and even Aliens: Fireteam Elite diversifying and taking a more class-based approach, he was sure Back 4 BloodThe more classical bone structure would collapse under pressure. But Back 4 Blood it’s more like that makeshift hummer in armor you see in every zombie show and movie – the bones of what it once was are easy to see, but it’s been beefed up to survive in a new environment.

Back 4 Blood will be released outside of its early access period on October 12 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Xbox Series X using a pre-launch download code provided by Turtle Rock Studios. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.


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