Turtle Rock Studios has delivered a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, the dormant but deeply influential game series it created in the late 2000s. Driven by experience and innovation, Back 4 Blood’s co-op zombie smashing is plenty of fun with friends, but it still can’t surpass its own inspirations due to the influence of modern shooter trends.
I empathize with the task at hand. Coming back to reinvent the wheel with the weight of Left 4 Dead’s popularity on your shoulders can’t be easy, and you can see where Turtle Rock Studios has been forced to compromise. Players familiar with modern shooters like Call of Duty Warzone or Apex Legends will find familiarity in the gunplay and mechanics, down to the way you can drop resources and weapons for your friends to use in battle.
It’s all very tight and Back 4 Blood feels great to play, but it’s not nearly as kinetic as Left 4 Dead as a result, and this is why veterans of the series may not get along well with it. Zombie hordes clump up against the player but you still deal with them individually. The bash – an important part of crowd control in Left 4 Dead – feels ineffectual here due to a stamina meter, with the addition of aim-down-sights shifting focus onto careful shooting from afar, and praying that nothing big gets close to your quartet.
While you can be thrown into the thick of it due to some innovative chokeholds and objective design, Back 4 Blood just doesn’t provide that same physicality or grit that Left 4 Dead would revel in. Instead of lurking chargers and smart smokers, there’s a cavalcade of special infected with spotty AI. One of the three families, the Reekers, will either explode, spit acid at you, or summon a horde with their guts if they get close. Due to how similar they look, I would challenge anyone to pick out which is which when they’re running at the party. I admire the variety of enemy mechanics in Back 4 Blood, but there are simply too many to make reliable calls about what to do with them on higher difficulties, especially when you want to avoid certain death.
Luckily, this doesn’t mean that Back 4 Blood is a bad game, it just feels insincere to bill it as the third coming of Left 4 Dead. It’s a very different game, but crucially, it doesn’t lose the necessary communication that a good cooperative shooter demands, which is why it’s so easy to recommend. I yelled and giggled my way through the game’s four acts, barking orders through fits of laughter as we curated our builds, completed run-saving cheeky revives, and invented better names for ‘The Ridden’. One of the more innovative enemy types are the ‘Sleepers’ that hide on walls and can pin a lone player if they’re caught out exploring. It’s a great addition that punishes lone wolf looters, but ‘Wall Guy’ is just easier and more descriptive, I’m afraid.
To get it out of the way, the story that frames the game isn’t much to write home about. Pre-rendered cutscenes bookend major events in the narrative, but despite how gorgeous they look, it’s all very stereotypical talk about “fighting to survive” and “the real monsters are among us” that you’ve likely heard before. There’s your big military man saying “get out of my house” as he blasts a zombie in the chops, so don’t come in expecting anything subversive. However, I will say that Tony Todd (Gary the Vortigaunt in Half-Life Alyx) puts in a brilliant shift as Dr Rogers, who is easily the most memorable character in the game. Back 4 Blood involves plenty of human survivors outside of your troupe so that the apocalypse doesn’t feel so hopeless or lifeless.
While playing, you may catch a stray, giggle-worthy joke about social distancing or getting socks for Christmas, but having so much pithy dialogue in a chaotic shooter where players are constantly talking means that it is often wasted. If I ever did listen to the chatter it was because I caught it in a subtitle while I was pinned, or in one of the fleeting moments of downtime between hordes. I’m sure over months of runs players will come to appreciate each Cleaner’s motives and backstory, but the back and forths between characters are some of the last things on my mind when my brain is in survival mode.
I do love the variety of Cleaners that players can choose from though. Each character comes with their own team effect and a special ability that can be activated within a level to fight the tide. I like to play as a medic, so I picked Mom first, who gets one free revive per round and can be incredibly useful. Once I unlocked her I later moved on to Doc, who can apply a healing field dressing to each player once per level, which fit even better with my ‘helping hand’ playstyle.
As you complete missions you’ll gain supply points which you can use in the game’s hub to progress through a free battle pass that provides unlockables like costumes, skins, and most importantly, cards. This feeds into Back 4 Blood’s most interesting feature, a deckbuilding mechanic that you can customize to specialize your character. There’s a nice little feedback loop where you earn cards with supply points, and then you use said cards to build a deck at the base which you can draw from at the start of each mission in a run. There’s an interesting metagame to which cards the player picks first, as you try and prioritize certain elements of your build. I don’t think the balance is quite there yet though. The card that turns your bash into a knife is so essential that it was the first card for our entire team all the way through the game, even though we all played as different cleaners.
Even so, there’s a lovely feeling when you get to the later cards and start unlocking drastic modifiers that you can build a deck around. For example, one gave me +225% revive speed, but locked me out of using offensive accessories like grenades and Molotovs! It’ll make your imagination race with possibilities, imparting similar feelings to The Binding of Isaac as you trudge through levels and slowly turn your Cleaner into a zombie-killing god. Guns also feel good to build across a playthrough as you bolt on attachments and weigh up swaps. Sometimes a gun will have a better base stat but feature red attachments that debuff its mobility or handling. Making these considerations with the zombies breathing down your neck is a lot of fun, even if I would have loved to be able to swap and drop attachments to help my friends build a better weapon. In one level we encountered shotguns and SMGs with great stats but unusable ACOG scopes, which felt like a cruel joke. The fact that accessories of different rarities don’t stack in your inventory also seems like an oversight.
After playing the alpha and beta, I was slightly worried about the amount of variety between levels and objectives in Back 4 Blood, but thankfully, Turtle Rock Studios was saving its best for the full release. The opening levels are solid if not trivial on the lowest difficulty. But as you get deeper into the game, more complex situations rear their head, and when debuffing corruption cards and mutations start to stack, a big Recruit run can feel like you’re playing on Nightmare difficulty. One level has you distracting zombies with a failing jukebox so survivors can be carted into a school bus. The highest praise I can give it is that it felt like maintaining a vault-opening drill in the excellent Payday 2. Others ask you to stealthily clear rooms full of Wall Guys, rush off an exploding ferry or enter multiple buildings to solve a wider puzzle in an open-world map. In some cases, you’ll be asked to completely forget your programming and push through tight corridors to fight an endless wave of zombies that leave acid in their wake. The soundtrack builds well in these encounters, with the tapping of drumsticks increasing in tempo as you face imminent doom.
There are a few clangers in the mix, especially when maps from the game’s pointless PvP Swarm mode are being reused, but it’s fair to say that Back 4 Blood constantly throws new ideas at the player between missions. Even objectives that recur, like the ‘nest nodes’ with popping pustules, are challenging enough that they don’t cloy over the course of the campaign. The level design deserves a lot of credit too, with blue tarps that hang on fences to entice exploration, or the use of light to frame an area full of loot. You will only get lost when the game wants you to, and when you do, it’s always very nice to look at.
Tiny details like the sheen of a pool cue, or the neon clover of an Irish hamburger shop stick out, and special zombies like the Hags and Breakers are wonderfully grotesque. The color palette, grading, and environmental variety in Back 4 Blood also reminded me of another zombie shooter, The Last of Us Part 2. Across the campaign we pushed through suburban blocks, hedge mazes, and incinerators, each with their own superb objective quirks.
It’s not the point of the game, but I couldn’t recommend Back 4 Blood to solo players. You use a completely different card deck to the campaign in solo mode, and while it does sound challenging, having AI survivors on your team is concrete boots for any run, especially on higher difficulties. Unpins are slow, reactions are poor, and they barely play the objective. You really want to play Back 4 Blood with a full squad or you won’t be engaging with its camaraderie-coaxing brilliance.
Conclusion
Back 4 Blood is not the ‘Left 4 Dead 3’ series veterans may have been hoping for, but it adapts a lot of what made the original games great and reinterprets the co-op zombie shooter for a new generation. With great progression systems and consistently exciting, action-packed missions, Back 4 Blood is an innovative and deeply moreish survival game that nurtures one of the best feelings in online multiplayer: chaotic co-operative communication.
Written by Jordan Oloman on behalf of GLHF.
