Back 4 Blood Review – IGN
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Amid a sea of seemingly endless looters-shooters, Back 4 Blood changes many trends in favor of something old-fashioned. After spending 25 hours with this four-player co-op first person shooter game, I loved its glorious white-knuckle tone, clever card-based progression, and varied punch-worthy campaign. An awkward difficulty curve and outdated versus mode keep Back 4 Blood from moving into a full-blown sprint, but still provide an exciting mix of new and old ideas as you take down legions of the undead.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world where blasting zombies (called here “Mounted”) in the head is as common as brushing your teeth, Back 4 Blood follows a community of survivors who try to get their jugulars not ripped off before breakfast. This isn’t a plot you’ll get deeply involved in, as it’s just a series of thinly veiled excuses to shoot zombies with friends, but that’s all the justification the four-act campaign needs. Despite dire circumstances, it’s actually quite a lighthearted game, with seven playable “Cleaner” characters frequently pulling pranks in the midst of impending doom. My favorite is Karlee, a punk-rocker who tends to blame her teammates for getting in the way of their bullets in case friendly fire breaks out. By the time my friends and I were held in a bar, killing hundreds of zombies while Spiderbait’s Black Betty blew up the jukebox, I was completely on board with Back 4 Blood’s goofy, upbeat humor.
That surprisingly nice attitude also permeates the combat in Back 4 Blood. Too often, I found myself smiling at absolutely absurd images, like Sleeper Ridden sitting comfortably in fleshy, wall-mounted cocoons that suddenly come to life and then pin a teammate to the ground. Or throw frag grenades at a crowd of the undead only to have the ensuing showers of sinew drench friends. Laughter aside, the shooting also has a pretty satisfying kick. The M249 light machine gun packs enough punch at high rates that I almost always carried one, especially if you found some damage-enhancing accessory out there. Whether you love high powered magnum bombs or fire up fast assault rifles, every weapon feels great in Back 4 Blood. Even a bat with a nail or two went through it!
So it’s a shame that losing sight of your target is incredibly easy during wild and close fights. Too often I accidentally tagged friends with stray bullets while trying to differentiate them from the sea of bodies rushing us like a pit of unholy mosh because combat readability is so poor. Your character can often come out of fights covered in blood and guts looking like a zombie, and that’s definitely not cool when the whole goal is to kill anything that remotely resembles one. What’s more egregious is that various types of Ridden appear nearly identical despite behaving differently from each other. Explosives and retching are swollen masses with broad shoulders, yet the former runs towards you and, well, explodes, while the latter spews acid from a distance. They have a few distinct characteristics that you can recognize to differentiate them, but they are things like little spikes on their arms that are easy to miss in the middle of a fight, and an incorrect assumption on your part can have significant consequences.
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Fortunately, Back 4 Blood’s surprisingly deep card system is the right kind of thing to get lost in. Deck-building might sound hilariously inappropriate for a game about throwing thousands of rounds at walking corpses, but it’s perhaps my favorite addition to this familiar formula. Before missions, you can equip various cards that modify a cleaner’s stats and abilities. There is a starting platform, and you will find more scattered around the environments or by connecting the points earned in missions on the light progression treadmill called supply lines. Since Karlee was my primary and her only Cleanser card boosts item usage speed, she wanted to keep a fast pace on her feet and on her sleeve as well. So I built a deck with Superior Cardio, which increases stamina regen like no one else, and Power Swap, adding a huge 20% damage advantage to weapons after switching between primary and secondary secondary weapons just before one runs out. charger. Stopping for anything became a fleeting memory with these cards, as I could run back and forth while often tapping once through the undead hordes.
Compared to what others have come up with, my deck was relatively simple. A friend cleverly combined the effects of various cards to bring him back a ton of health after attacking Ridden en masse. However, even ridiculous decks like that don’t feel overpowered, as Corruption cards pop up mid-mission to counter your blessings with challenging mods. For example, just when we thought our builds were too strong, a Corruption card spiced things up by adding an Ogre, a heavy 20-foot-tall mountain of flesh and blood, to the mission. Cards add bright RPG-like random elements without straying entirely into levels and skill trees.
It is also essential to examine each card you come across as you search through the levels, because attempting the most challenging difficulties in Back 4 Blood is a waste without them. There are three difficulties available from the start: Recruit, Veteran, and Nightmare. My group initially chose to recruit to find our balance, and we knew it was too easy in no time. So we called him a veteran and it all went to hell. We strayed maybe 20 feet from the starting point of a mission before being invaded by the strongest guys in Ridden. A huge, gangly Tall Boy crushed one friend while a sneaky Stalker carried off another, and finally a Retch projectile spewed everywhere, as if to humiliate us with its corrosive bile. However, I’m not sure that Back 4 Blood has earned the right to feast on our unworthiness, as that kind of ridiculous scenario is more of a by-product of my team being horribly ill-equipped for the veteran’s difficulty. At least, when we’d only completed a handful of missions, anyway.
I love good challenges, as long as everything is fair. Marching into Back 4 Blood’s veteran difficulties or nightmares right away is downright masochistic, though, especially since the debuffs pile up when Corruption cards enter the mix more intensely than Recruit. I have a suspicion that Turtle Rock Studios wants everyone to play through recruiting first, similar to how Diablo 2: Risen drive your progression curve. But if that’s the case, I have no idea why the others can be selected from scratch. Worse still, there is a strange roguelike element to every run, so finishing an act means your group will have to complete sessions within a limited number of continuous or else you will have to redo an entire chapter, which feels outside of the box. place in a game. like this. Once we finished the recruiting drive with a ton of letters to strengthen our cleaners, the veterans’ difficulty was much more manageable, but a difficulty that was placed somewhere between them would go a long way toward alleviating these problems.
At the very least, defeating a veteran or a nightmare gives you a decent excuse to replay the wonderful and diverse chapters of Back 4 Blood, each of which contains several unique missions. From desolate rural towns in the middle of nowhere to entire cityscapes engulfed in mounds of rotting fleshy undergrowth, no place is safe from this world’s collapse. The campaign is not just a ride from Saferoom to Saferoom, as your objectives will change a bit depending on the circumstances. A mission called T-5 requires you to search for key items in a creaky old mansion as swarms of the undead try to enter. The rate at which you have to find the random location of each trinket is dizzying, but the creepy taxidermy busts are practically begging you to do so. admire the fine layer of dust they have accumulated. I was regularly distracted by the haunting beauty of it all, much to my teammate’s anguish. That continual practice of spicing things up is the reason I keep coming back to Back 4 Blood.
However, not all of Back 4 Blood’s attempts to break the mold work, as is the case with its 4v4 mode which can outlive the other Swarm. Sure, having a team of survivors face off against another that is all Assembled while a battle royale circle shrinks the arena sounds great, but in truth, it’s pretty easy to gobble up if you’re the Mounted. Crowd control is vital to success in Swarm, and the four-armed Hocker excels at pinning survivors to the ground with sticky spears that it can launch from a distance. As long as my friends and I used two Hockers and a pair of Tall Boys, we would decimate the survivor squad. Even when they get access to better weapons as the match progresses, we just have to pin them down like Hocker and then have one of our Tall Boys move around and bomb whoever’s caught. Meanwhile, the same thing happens to us when we are on the survivor side of the equation. That kind of massive imbalance makes Swarm uninteresting at best and frustrating at worst.