I want to like this game. I really do. I want to sit down and write out a piece about a modern return of Left 4 Dead. I want to write a stirring impressions piece that inspires everyone to try out the open beta (which is running for the rest of the day today, 8/15/21, and maybe a little tomorrow) and support a gold standard return to these sorts of multiplayer PvE games. I know people who like this game and part of me wants to shut out everything that feels “off” about Back 4 Blood and just play it with them. But here we are just like we were with Evolve, where I played a beta that was reasonable enough but that I can’t shake the feeling will be dead on arrival.
All the context of this review is from the point of view of someone who thinks that Left 4 Dead is a great entry in the, to quote Wikipedia, “multiplayer survival horror first-person shooter” genre. This means that if you DON’T like Left 4 Dead then some of my comparisons will fall flat and maybe you’ll see some of the things Back 4 Blood does in a different light than I do. But here we are, that’s how comparative reviews work. Also throughout this review I will use the terms Left 4 Dead or L4D to mean the series as a whole rather than the individual games Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. If I do refer to those games I’ll mention it specifically.
Let’s start with what Back 4 Blood does differently from L4D before we go into how they stack up together. Back 4 Blood’s big gimmick is “cards” that act as a series of passive buffs which you can build into a deck and draw them randomly at the start of each round. The conceit of this is that you can use these to essentially make yourself specialize in whatever gameplay or weapon style you prefer, and cards are (at least at the moment) unlocked in the main hub area with points that you earn after completing rounds. At first these start as basic effects like higher health, faster reload speed, or more ammo, but higher end cards lead to more specifics like high bullet penetration with assault rifles, massive cleave on melee attacks, or healing from healing others. I wasn’t expecting to like the cards as much as I did, but I found myself looking forward to every new “draw” at the start of every round as a campaign played out, though the inherent problems with the randomization of a card deck still means that sometimes you don’t draw linchpins of your strategy until the later rounds, which sort of flies in the face of having a “build.”
The only other major difference in the game is a currency system based around coins laying around the map and completing bonus objectives. These coins are used to purchase items, weapons, and other things in safe houses at the start of rounds, and they unfortunately replace L4D‘s weapons, ammo, and health packs that you would find in that game’s safe rooms. I’d find this to be less of a problem than I do if it weren’t for some of the game’s other problems that we’ll get into in a second. If nothing else this encourages/forces exploration regardless of how much you know the levels, which can lead to its own frustrations where you have to go out of your way to comb every inch of the map just for the sake of making sure you have the coin to buy enough keys.
Left 4 Dead has a lot of simplicity in its design, and much of that can be see when you just look at the weapons. In the first L4D you really only had one base weapon and an upgraded version of that weapon, and in L4D2 they expanded on it a little with a handful of upgraded versions that might fire faster or carry more ammo. Rarely does the player have to worry about stats or numbers or anything like that when you’re playing L4D, you just grab whatever weapon you like and go from there. Not so in Back 4 Blood, where there are not only exponentially more weapons but they’re all CUSTOMIZABLE. So now you not only have multiple types of assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns, and pistols but they all have attachment slots for scopes, ammo types, extended magazines, barrels, etc. and of course they all affect your guns stats in various, arbitrary ways.
This means you don’t just go “oh there’s an AK over here” but “oh there’s an AK with a scope that makes it more accurate at range but increases it’s recoil and do I really want it because while my SCAR has less ammo capacity I really like the stock I have on it now and is the +2 damage worth trying to deal with the recoil?” Obviously people that like min-maxing and tricking out their guns will enjoy this, but it’s held back by a lack of readability (by which I mean that both the attachments you pick up and ones that you see on a weapon’s screen aren’t easily identifiable) and the fact that you can’t swap attachments between guns. Obviously since this is just a beta it’s possible that both of those issues could be resolved but I know a number of people that are turned off by this increased weapon depth because it distracts from the zombies knocking on the door while you’re deciding if an ACOG is better than a red dot sight on your SMG.
The part about the weapons that really bothers me is the ammo system. In L4D all ammo comes from the same pile and is in infinite supply from that pile, all for the sake of the simplicity I mentioned earlier. However in Back 4 Blood the ammo is weapon specific and comes in its own different boxes that you find scattered throughout the levels or in “supply crates”. On paper this sounds perfectly reasonable but in practice it inevitably forces your four player team to diversify. Suddenly you can’t have a team with four people on assault rifles because there isn’t enough ammo to go around of that type, which also clashes with the deck of cards mechanics. Take four players who like assault rifles and used their precious unlock points to make an assault rifle deck only to suddenly be stuck with 80% of their cards being worthless because they’ll never find enough assault rifle ammo for everyone. Granted that’s not a problem for people with a reliable group of four that’s ready to rock at a moment’s notice, but not everyone has that, especially if said group was fans of L4D and are split down the middle about this game versus just playing more L4D.
This ammo division doesn’t matter so much on the game’s “easy” difficulty where zombies are a little slow, specials show up irregularly, and more equipment spawns outside of safe houses, but once you get up to normal the game becomes a grind house. Once again it’s a beta and this will probably be adjusted before release, but at time of writing in the beta even getting through the first two rounds on normal without a coordinated team is an exercise in frustration. It’s hard to pin down exactly what goes wrong on normal, though enemy durability is definitely one of the problems and it ties directly back into the deck of cards system. In L4D many weapons are a one hit kill, particularly the melee weapons which sacrifice effectiveness against the special infected for the sake of clearing out regular enemies that come at you in swarms, but in Back 4 Blood the only melee weapon that one hit kills is the fire ax. At first I thought this was a balance thing, after all one could argue there’s really very little reason to NOT use melee weapons in L4D outside of the highest difficulties where you die in four hits, but then I remembered you have a dozen or more cards that you can put into a deck with stats like “raise melee damage by 75%” and why would you need that if melee weapons were a one hit kill?
The way Back 4 Blood manages healing and player health is probably a big part of the sudden difficulty spike as well. L4D starts every round of a campaign with a health pack in the safe house, giving a sort of continuity between rounds where, regardless of what happened in the last chapter, you’ll always start with either 80+ health (the healing cap on normal if you’re very low) or any given amount of health but also a health pack to use later. Back 4 Blood will only occasionally have a “healing station” in safe houses, and on normal up they don’t have enough charges for every player. On paper this is all fine because it encourages conservative play and you can buy healing items from the “store” inside every safe house, but it’s all made worse by how Back 4 Blood handles player health.
You see they decided to go in the direction of splitting your health bar into three chunks: health, healable damage, and permanent damage. Far as I can tell the first few hits you take will be healable damage but the more damage you take after that the more permanent damage you take, which can’t be healed by anything except those special healing stations, though it can be temporarily overwritten by the temporary health boosts you get from drugs, much like L4D‘s pills. This means that if you’re starting a new round after a bad round previously and there’s no healing station then you’re going to be starting a level on a severe back foot, as anything you can buy will just cap out your healable health and leave the permanent damage a big black scar on your chances to survive. This presents the whole thing as an exercise in a severe lack of consistency, which I personally believe is contrary to what a safe room is supposed to be.
Another factor on the game’s difficulty spike is the bots that are, quite frankly, horrible. This is a bit of a surprise for me compared to the relative competency of the bots in L4D, who are pin-point accurate and always do their best to come to the rescue, while the bots in Back 4 Blood will regularly shoot you in the back and almost never help you with anything. Their behavior towards team coordination is also strange, as in L4D a team with one bot will always see the bot trying to stick to the player that’s the furthest away from the group but in Back 4 Blood the bot always seems to stick with the majority of players, assuming it’s not stuck on the terrain or otherwise fell behind for an unknown reason. It’s almost like they knew their AI was garbage at interacting with the environment because the AI will also repeatedly teleport to make sure it’s staying with the group, which is probably why it sticks with the majority of players since the largest number of players moving away from it is what causes the teleporting. Frankly it’s shocking how bad the AI is, leading to cute videos of a player trapped by a zombie attack and three AI just standing around him watching it happen. Maybe that was something Valve helped them with in Left 4 Dead.
However even if we put all this aside the biggest issue with Back 4 Blood is how the game fails to capture the feel of L4D from a gameplay design perspective. The easiest way to notice this is with the hordes, the waves of zombies that in L4D can attack you from any direction at any time, all at the whim of the director AI that makes L4D so replayable, but in Back 4 Blood they’re entirely scripted. L4D has scripted hordes as well, normally triggered by causing a large environmental noise for the sake of traversing to a new area, but in Back 4 Blood that’s all they are. You will never run into a horde in an area that you aren’t expecting once you’ve played through a level once, nor will they attack you from behind unless you’re in a very open area or prolonged “finale” sequence. I would literally stand facing away from where the horde was appearing to see if any stragglers would loop around from behind and they never did, which I suppose adds to the game’s thematic atmosphere of “cleaning up the world” but doesn’t make the zombie hordes very exhilarating, nor does it make the game especially replayable when the most intense gameplay beats are always scripted to happen the same way.
Something that does seem to change is when the special infected show up. These super zombies are very similar to the ones you’d see in L4D, in that they’re generally larger, more durable, more mobile, and have some sort of special effect that mimics the Smoker, Boomer, Spitter, etc from L4D. I’d like to tell you all about them, but unfortunately the internet and your gameplay experience may lead to some conflicting information, which is a serious problem in a game like this. The conflict arises because Back 4 Blood has multiple variants of special infected that look very similar but all do different things. For example there’s the Exploder and the Retch, with the Exploder knocking back players in a high damage explosion when it dies, and the Retch vomiting acid and exploding acid when it dies, but they’re literally the same model except one is more spikey and one is more melted looking. The Bruiser and Crusher are two other special infected that share the same model, except one has a red arm and the other has a red throat, with the distinction being that one will punch you and one will grab you. Compare this to L4D where every special infected has their own easily identifiable model and it’s really questionable why Back 4 Blood couldn’t come up with different looking characters for these variants rather than identical models with different weak points. There also isn’t any special infected that’s as fun or scary to fight as a Tank or Witch from L4D, with the only comparative encounter being a scripted eighty-foot tall bullet sponge boss fight that happens during the second round of the beta’s campaign and the best strategy is just to run away from it. Oh and I forgot to mention that the special infected in Back 4 Blood can literally just appear directly in front of you, which along with the horrible AI really screams unfinished game design to me.
I wanted to briefly talk about the atmosphere and how the game doesn’t know if it wants to be “humanity strikes back against the zombies” or “zombies are overrunning humanity oh god,” or how it completely botches inter-character moments by having characters start spewing exposition in the middle of pitched firefights, but I think 2700 words about a beta is enough. At the end of the day the Back 4 Blood beta makes the game feel like it needs another two years in the oven while they design different special infected, fix their AI, balance the difficulty, address readability and other issues with weapon attachments, and make the randomization of their director AI do something other than increase the spawn rate of special infected while decreasing resource drops as the difficulty goes up. Regardless of whether or not you think anything else is a problem, I truly believe that the lack of unscripted hordes/boss enemies coupled with the game already having a planned $40+ season pass is a sure sign of the game struggling to survive after the first six months. These games live or die on their replayablity, and as Evolve taught us if you see everything the game has to offer initially while locking the rest behind overpriced DLC, your game isn’t long for this world. Considering Turtle Rock made Evolve you’d think they’d have learned that, but this beta makes me think they haven’t.
