According to Steam, I've clocked nearly 350 hours playing Left 4 Dead 2. That's less than the two,300 hours I've put into Team Fortress 2 and the nearly 900 I spent in Apex Legends before moving on, but I'm quite certain it's good enough for third put on my all-time list. The figure is staggering: That's 14 and half days of my entire life, playing a game about 10 hours of content. That does not even include the ample time I spent playing its predecessor, either.
All of this would be to say that, even if Turtle Rock Studios hadn't drawn its very own parallels between its new co-op zombie shooter and the franchise it launched in 2008, I do not think I possibly could possibly stop myself. Nearly every aspect of Back 4 Blood, as a result of its title, invites direct comparison with Left 4 Dead.
The great news for Turtle Rock is that Back 4 Blood doesn't immediately collapse underneath the weight from the comparison, despite the additional heft on my nostalgia. From a gameplay standpoint, the studio's latest undertake the concept keeps everything that worked about the older games fully intact, after which layers on some fairly solid ideas.
You're still picking from the number of playable survivors (now called Cleaners) and heading from safe room to safe room across maps full of common infected (the worm-infested Ridden) and special variants that are harder to kill and much more powerful. You are always looking through rooms along the way for new weapons, ammo, throwables like molotovs and pipe bombs, and healing supplies. And there's still an AI Director manipulating the adapt of enemies throughout each campaign map, keeping pressure as much as make sure you never feel too comfortable.
Everything here plays just as well as with Left 4 Dead, albeit with plenty of modern conveniences. You are able to aim on the sights of any weapon, not just scoped ones. The objectives you have to accomplish in every level are more varied, though still largely within the mold of Left 4 Dead 2's options: hold out until help arrives, find items randomly scattered around a place and cargo them up, or operate a gauntlet to get at the safe room as the Director throws everything it's to you. The biggest addition is devoted boss fights against a number of rarer Ridden variants, such as the towering Ogre, that may dish out damage and take a lot of bullets to bring down if the Cleaners don't coordinate. Aside from one memorable (and quite challenging) section near the end, it's not as dramatic a change as you may expect, though.
The bigger shake-up comes from the wider number of options among the lower-tier special Ridden. Here, each archetype has three mutations. The Tallboy, for instance, can smash you with his overgrown arm, however the similar-looking Crusher can in fact squeeze you with it, immobilizing you and also doing damage over time. Likewise, the Stalker can pounce you to drag you away from the group, like a combination of Left 4 Dead's Hunter and Jockey, however the Stinger can launch harpoons to pin you down. The power sets are very thoughtful in a manner that makes it clear Turtle Rock place a large amount of thought into what worked and what didn't in Left 4 Dead. And because each mutation chain shares a similar silhouette, it requires slightly longer to determine exactly what type of threat you're up against, which will help ratchet the strain.
But the most integral accessory for the formula comes through Back 4 Blood's card system. Essentially, the game lets you collect and build cards that improve your abilities in combat or survivability. Playing any content gives you supply points you can spend to earn new cards (in addition to cosmetics for the guns and Cleaners). After that you can assemble these into a deck, that will always surface the same 15 cards in the same order while you play. Before each match starts, you are able to select from your hand, made up of the next few cards within the deck, to enhance your chances. Each Cleaner receives a default card with set perks along with a starting weapon loadout, too.
What's more, during each mission you will find and earn a currency called copper, which you'll spend at shops in safe rooms to unlock weapons, attachments, along with other supplies. Taken with the card system, this makes for a much more proactive, strategic game than anything in Left 4 Dead, where you were largely subject to whatever you found in a given playthrough. Cards mean you actually have freedom to construct out a personality aimed at a particular playstyle. I am not sure just how much depth there is in the long run, but my gut feeling is a reasonably lot. I'm not generally keen on injecting cards into games, but Turtle Rock's approach works here to include a light RPG layer onto familiar gameplay.
One of the less successful decisions in Back 4 Blood, however, may be the way it structures its campaign. Instead of treating clusters of maps as standalone experiences, there is a linear progression from beginning to end. (You can connect the dots right into a single story in Left 4 Dead and especially Left 4 Dead 2, but each campaign was still treated as its own thing from the gameplay perspective.) Although this does allow the game to inform a tale of sorts, culminating in a big boss-fight showdown, the particular narrative is fairly slight.
The bigger impact of this approach is within the best way to actually play the game. If you want to provide the big Act 4 finale a try, you'll need to complete all of Acts 1 through 3 first, one at a time. While the lowest difficulty will let you start from any level within an act you've already progressed to, on higher difficulties you have to sort out chunks of countless maps to unlock a new starting place, making it impossible to inch the right path forward. You are able to have a shortcut if you hop in directly with a friend who's already unlocked more of the game, but you won't get credit for that maps you didn't personally complete, so you can't begin those who work in the future. You can't even quickplay for acts you have not already unlocked your self on confirmed difficulty.
The approach is admittedly a little restrictive, as well as in my experience it resulted in longer than expected matchmaking times. If I started right from the start of the act, I possibly could get in inside a minute or so. But starting in the center of an act meant I often had to sit on the matchmaking screen for any good 10 minutes before it paired me up with anyone. To date, I've only finished the campaign around the lowest difficulty-still lots of challenging when you are counting on matchmaking and very little one uses their mic-and the fact that I can not skip straight to the acts I enjoyed most on the higher difficulty seems like a pointless barrier inside a game so centered on co-op and replayability.
Another major vary from Left 4 Dead may be the way Back 4 Blood approaches its competitive mode. Rather than allowing players to trade off on runs of the same campaigns, playing as either the Ridden or the Cleaners after which swapping sides, Turtle Rock has chosen a smaller, more self-contained mode called Swarm. You're still taking turns to determine who can survive a long, but now the action is stationary, limited to individual parts of the campaign maps. As the Ridden team spawns in repeatedly as different mutated specials to try and defeat the Cleaners, a harmful cloud of insects gradually closes in, making the playable area smaller and smaller. When you've survived for around 6 minutes, the area is really small that death is but guaranteed. In essence, Swarm plays like a hybrid of Horde mode, battle royale, and Left 4 Dead's Versus mode.
Anyone who stayed in Versus knows it had balance issues, with the best teams of Survivors essentially sprinting through maps as quickly as possible and all but the most organized teams of Infected powerless to prevent them. Even if Left 4 Dead 2 introduced new specials to the mix to counter the most effective tactics, things still felt a bit off. And everything relied on which player randomly spawned in as the all-powerful Tank-pretty much your one shot at carrying out a ton of effective damage.
Much of Swarm seems made to confront these problems head-on. There is no Tank analogue, and the greater variety of different Ridden types mean you'll always have a chance to contribute meaningfully to an attack push when you are on that team, with multiple viable strategies and synergies to counter a strong team of Cleaners. Have the Stinger pin someone down with a Harpoon while the Retch spews acid in it, and you are likely to do a large amount of damage.
Still, the biggest issue from Left 4 Dead remains: Matches in many cases are horrendously lopsided, because strong teamwork trumps all. If anything, the card system carries right here makes coordination much more vital. It is simply hard to find a game of Swarm where one team doesn't stomp the other so difficult that people leave by the end of the first round. Sure, the game makes some adjustments to try to make in the difference for the shorthanded team, but it's never enough. If you have a core group of friends you can have fun with and strategize on mic, you're going to stay competitive enjoy yourself. If you're matching track of randos, you're going to possess a large amount of frustrating losses.
But that's not really where Back 4 Blood comes up short to me. The main reason I've spent a lot more than fourteen days of my life with the Left 4 Dead games is certainly not they're perfectly balanced or designed, either as co-op or competitive experiences. It's because these were great places to hold out. I made friends there. I maintained with friends there. After i found myself with spare time, I killed it killing zombies in that fun, familiar space. The characters had sharp, entertaining, and often genuinely funny banter that kept the mood lively, even when my team had been stomped on higher difficulties. The maps and types of conditions, especially in the sequel, were imaginative and memorable. I haven't booted up Left 4 Dead 2 in a decade, however i can vividly recall rushing around a shopping mall atrium, trying to fill an automobile with gas cans while Hunters ping-ponged from the heights above. I could probably still draw servings of the Dark Carnival amusement park map from memory.
If there's anywhere Back 4 Blood stumbles, it's here. The world of Fort Hope and Evansburgh, combined with the survivors that occupy it, are too bland that i can see myself ever forming any real attachment to the of them. Environments look fine and play great, but they almost all fall under exactly the same gritty, post-apocalyptic mold. Already, they're beginning to congeal together i believe into a single drab mass. One notable exception-a finale where you have to hold on in a bar while Mot”orhead's “Ace of Spades” blares on the jukebox-feels like little more than a hint at the personality the sport might have had.
Now, I won't go so far as to say the game's eight playable Cleaners show up quite that short. Each character comes with a few defining traits that separate them from the rest, to be sure, but the moment-to-moment writing can't really hold up its end of the bargain. Dialogue never crackles, and the characters never bounce off one another in almost any truly memorable way. The majority of what everyone says during gameplay feels like exactly the same largely generic callouts, and also the cutscenes bookending acts are extremely short and action-focused to round anyone out.
More conspicuous is the lack of any real levity during gameplay. Yes, there are attempts at comedy, but I wouldn't say they're great. One bit from Holly concerning the phrase “shooting fish inside a barrel” continued for thus long with no solid punchline it felt like I'd somehow loaded into Fort Hope's very disappointing open mic night. Turtle Rock appears to comprehend the necessary relief humor and lightheartedness can offer inside a game that may be almost oppressive in its difficulty, however the execution with that front is lacking.
And it's certainly no help the survivor whose perks attract me the most, Hoffman, is a conspiracy-theory-obsessed prepper. Left 4 Dead's Nick and Francis weren't necessarily likeable, but they were prickly in an endearing way. And more importantly, you didn't gain or miss out on any gameplay benefits by picking them. In Back 4 Blood, to maximise my chances I must go ahead and take perks of the characters, and not simply their personalities, into consideration. Hoffman's bonus ammo and extra grenade slot appeal the most to my playstyle, so I'm instructed to endure him referring to himself within the third person and saying dumb shit. Each time he opens his smug mouth, all I can think about is that absent a zombie apocalypse he'd one-thousand percent be posting rants concerning the Maricopa County Board of Elections on Facebook.
This is ultimately my biggest-and perhaps only-substantial gripe with Back 4 Blood: It is a game I've fun playing, having a design that smartly and fairly unobtrusively encourages me to help keep replaying its content, but I am not feeling any spark which makes me want to replay it, absent the dangling carrots of modern game design. I enjoyed playing with the game, and I might join in some more times with friends, but even with all the skins and cards to unlock and difficulty levels of master, I don't feel attracted to keep coming back 4 more.
Maybe things have changed. Maybe the tastes from the gaming public have changed. Most likely the issue is narrower than that, and it's exactly that I've changed. But whatever the underlying cause, within my eyes Back 4 Blood never crests the hill from as being a good co-op zombie shooter to some great one. Turtle Rock has crafted a spiritual successor full of plenty of smart innovations and modernizations but didn't recapture the special moment that made Left 4 Dead iconic. Back 4 Blood, then, nails the successor part, but comes up a bit short on the spirit.
