Back 4 Blood - Beta - Video Game Review

Left 4 Dead 2 is one of my favorite video games ever. Despite being over 12 years old it is still incredibly fun, especially with the community creating so much original content such as gun skins, custom campaigns, custom player avatars, and more. The fact it is still being played so lovingly today with its dated graphics and simple story and gameplay is excellent! There is no other zombie game being played today with such dedication, most haven't lasted more than a few years. But it seems Left 4 Dead 2 might soon have a spiritual successor soon, brought to us by the creators of the original. This week and the previous week people are playtesting this upcoming game and it's called... Back 4 Blood.

Back 4 Blood is a first person zombie shooter made by Turtle Rock Games, the people behind the original Left 4 Dead. In this game a mysterious organism called the Devil Worm is discovered in the arctic and when brought back for research in the state it escapes and begins to infect other people. These infections turn everyone into zombies called Ridden and soon most of humanity is decimated by this parasite. One of the last safe places on the planet is Fort Hope and it guarded by a group called Cleaners. It's been a long while since the end of the world and since any massive Ridden attacks, but something is happening to cause them to appear more often. There are also mutations among the Ridden, creating monsters of terrible power. You, as the cleaners, are tasked with gathering supplies, destroying hives of the Ridden, and clearing out any massive hordes that endanger Fort Hope. Are you up to the task?

So when I heard that the original creators of the Left 4 Dead announced in March 2019 were making a new zombie shooter that would basically be a spiritual successor I grew a gigantic smile on my face. Finally in December of last year an alpha trial became available and as soon as I saw I could sign up for it I did and immediately got on the list of alpha testers. Sadly I didn't get much time to play since I had to review Breaking Bad and I also had to prepare for Christmas vacation with my family, but from the 3 hours I had of the game I had a decent time and was eager to try it more.

But after another delay a beta has been released and I got to be one of the first to try it out! Thanks Turtle Rock for giving us alpha testers an early trial before the main crowd comes in. Though I would have liked it if there were more tests other than two (with this newest one happening two months before the official release). Now the game feels more complete with a finalized first campaign, a hub world, access to all the weapons in the game, and a full on look at one of the main features of Back 4 Blood: The Card System. I enjoyed the beta more than the alpha, but I did have a few problems like not being able to have a good versus match and having every difficulty beyond easy being way too hard. I also have a few additional worries about the game while I will go into later on.

So let's begin with our playable characters. In this beta there are five out of eight playable cleaners. We have Evangelo, a young cleaner capable of breaking out of traps; Hoffman, a doomsday preper who can spawn ammo from ridden he's killed; Holly, a rambunctious young woman who can regenerate stamina upon kill; Mom, an old badass who can instantly revive somebody once a mission; and Walker, the leader of these cleaners and a former army ranger who gains accuracy upon critical hits. They all have an additional bonus for themselves and one bonus for their entire team. This makes selecting which one you want more important of a choice because they each offer something unique to the team. I liked playing as all the cleaners, they were all very fun and they had some good pieces of banter back and forth. My favorite character to play as was definitely Walker since I'm a guy who always aims for the head. Every one of them though I had a good time playing because their abilities were all unique and very useful (with the possible exception of Holly).

A small problem I do have with the characters is that they act too much like superheroes. Maybe it's because they've been cleaners for a long while and feel adjusted to this world, but some of them spout one liners like, "Now I'm mad!" that are just... Bleh! You shouldn't be this comfortable in a zombie apocalypse, especially when some of the zombies are mutated with giant arms, belching acid, or climbing walls like a spider. The dialogue should be more serious than this since their job is basically being the safety of one of the last strongholds of humanity. There is good banter about pasts, about where the characters are in a campaign, and apologizing for accidentally shooting teammates, but some of these felt off to me.

The survivors can't do it with just themselves though and that's where the card system comes in. The player buy cards through points they earn from completing missions and these cards can be used in a 15 card deck. These cards enhance the player with more health, stamina, ammo, and other unique traits. Every mission and defeat (up to two continues) adds a new card to the player's list of boosts. Some are small, but some can be big (with the possibly addition of a negative effect to balance out the positive). For instance there is a card that I almost got in the first round of the beta that says when any player goes down everyone else gets unlimited ammo, 30% more damage, and 20% more health for 10 seconds. That's nuts!

In order to use the cards at their best though you have to organize them about and be careful in picking what you need because of the limited size. My experience with the system so far is you have make a few sacrifices to make builds you want. I like that, since it makes us think carefully over what we find is best for ourselves and our team. When it comes to my builds I've always included cards that increase the amount of copper (this game's currency) so I can buy better stuff at each checkpoint and a card that turns my wimpy melee push into a killing knife thrust. Other than that I'm still trying to find more mods to build up my deck. There is going to be a lot of combinations and builds for this game when it's fully out.

Facing off against the cleaners are the ridden and I have found both positives and negatives in them. On the good side the "specials" are great in terms of threat. They're definite improvements of the Left 4 Dead special infected, dealing more damage and being more mobile in this game. All of them (or at least the main three in this beta) also have 3 variants to each of them. We have the Tallboys, which can smash or crush people in their singular giant arm; there are also Stingers, able jump and wall climb like a spider while also being able pin cleaners to the ground with their claws or spat webbing; and Reekers, which can barf acid, fight close quarters, or become a zombie suicide bomber. There is also the Ogre, a twenty foot tall behemoth that can smash cleaners up, as well as throw giant balls of explosive flesh at them.

However I did find their designs to be weak. They're just plain monsters. In Left 4 Dead each of the specials wore clothes and have a unique trait other than appearance that made them feel special. The Smoker had a distinctive cough, a long tongue, and left a trail of smoke behind them. The Tank was huge buff dude with supersized arms that was continually raging. The Hunter was a hoodie guy that growled and scream and always scared the hell out of me when it pinned me to the ground and ripped my guts out with its claws. But in Back 4 Blood the ridden go through so much of a mutation they're barely human anymore, which makes them kind of dull in appearance.

Another problem I have with the game is the hub world. I don't like it. When I was told we were going to play as the people who are basically keeping humanity safe I was expecting a place like Alexandria or The Kingdom from The Walking Dead. Instead it's a wooden fort. Not like Hilltop, which was originally a historical museum turned fortress, just a plain wooden fort with army stuff laying about. Upon first seeing the hub world I wanted to rage and make a very long tweet about how its a very poor base for a zombie apocalypse. The walls are too short (to the point that multiple special ridden can easily hop over or destroy them), There's too little open space around the base so that ridden can easily swarm out of cover, barely any food and the fields are too little/ small to grow crops, and there are barely any guards on the walls. Unless we are able to upgrade the base in the full game this is a very poor home in a zombie apocalypse.

But that's just personal, subjective opinions on design that might have nothing to do with gameplay in the end product. There are still other, more relatable problems with the hub world. First is that there is still a stamina bar in the hub. Since it's not upgraded at all you get a couple seconds of running before you tire out and need to walk again. There should be unlimited running, or at least a lot more stamina, while in Fort Hope. Next is that despite how apparently big the base is, a lot of Fort Hope is blocked off from the player. The invisible walls over small, metal fences greatly irritated me and I could only move about a third of the full base. Relating to that, everything from the shooting range to the deck customizing to mission select are very bunched up together. And lastly I couldn't interact with any of the citizens of Fort Hope for small talk. Why should I save these people if I can't get to know them? Even if they gave the citizens one line of dialogue just for the beta I'd be happy that I could talk to people. But they just speak dialogue to everyone else expect me.

Returning to positives I found there was a great emphasis on teamwork in the game. Not just by watching each other's backs and helping people when they were pinned down by the specials, but also through having to share money, upgrades, weapons, and even ammo with one another. The last of these is because all ammo is shared and each weapon type (rifle, pistol/ SMG, shotgun, and sniper) separate and can be found scattered across each map. You'll definitely have to switch weapons at least a couple of times to balance out ammo usage and give your good weapons to players who need one.

What's making me so worried about the future of this game though is the pricing of the main and of the upcoming DLCs. The full game is $60 USD, with a $90 pre-order deluxe version and a $100 ultimate edition. That's quite a lot of money a person could spend on this. As I've said though there will also be DLCs coming as well for more story, more characters, and more special ridden. The last big game Turtle Rock made was Evolve, which was a 4 vs 1 game where four mercenaries hunted down a single boss monster that evolved as the match kept going. That game failed because it was so pricey to obtain everything and that is something I greatly fear might happen to Back 4 Blood.

There have been confirmations that players won't have to buy everything, that they can unlock a lot of content on their own in game without paying any cash. Also, if one player owns DLC then everyone playing with that has access to that content as well. But the history of this studio has put a lot of people (including myself) on edge of buying this game. Left 4 Dead 2 still has an average of almost 20,000 people daily on the steam charts, despite being over 12 years old. The way Back 4 Blood is going I'm hesitant on going farther past the beta on this. At least the card system will having nothing to do with real world money.

Another element that I'm worried will greatly affect Back 4 Blood's future is the lack of mod support. There have been no announcements for mod support for the game and with it being made in the Unreal Engine that might make it more difficult. As I said at the start of this article, Left 4 Dead and its sequel are still being played because of the mountain of community content available. Five campaigns at the start, plus the original ones later on and a bonus campaign, is a lot, but there is plenty more that can be explored it took a lot of years to build all that up. But I don't know how much content I'll be getting in Back 4 Blood and right now $60 is definitely not worth using on this game.

To cap this review off I'm going to end on a positive: There is crossplay in the game. Immediately I was playing with people on PC, Xbox, and Playstation! While I had problems with matchmaking none of them felt like they were associated with the crossplay and I'm very pleased about that. Having not played a game with such crossplay before this was a really interesting experience. True, some of the console players were acting like they were playing a dumb Call of Duty game, but just having this option is a great plus for this game. Don't have to buy it individually for each system.

The Back 4 Blood beta has been a pretty fun experience, but it's a game that currently has a very uneasy, possibly disastrous future. There are problems already such as bad dialogue, unbalanced difficulty, and a poorly made hub world that probably cannot be fixed easily. But there are possible problems like pricing and lack of mod support that might have even greater consequences for the game's future. I do not want to see another Evolve, but Turtle Rock might not have fully learned their lesson from that failure.

Tentative Score: 7.25/10

The fact I could only play the game on easy mode really annoyed me. I wanted to experience higher difficulties, but there are too many negative bonuses for the higher levels.