Review | Back 4 Blood - Long Live The Undead King

Right so, I need you to stay with me on this ok? Sun Tzu once wrote “If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy then for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” So dear reader I ponder this hypothetical question to you: Do Turtle Rock Studios know they are their own enemy?

In the past I have kissed the hand that is Back 4 Blood and I liked it. Now we will kiss the previous paragraph later, let’s review the game first, shall we?

The neighbour has really gone to hell since the O’Riddens moved in.

If my editor will let me get personal with y’all real quick… I didn’t buy this game. I actually made up my mind that I was not going to buy this game if I was not going to review it. But as luck would have it, Microsoft has big pockets and Back 4 Blood is free to play on Xbox Live Game Pass and I can play that on PC. So considering I didn’t buy this game it might seem harsh to criticise it too much, however, B4B has issues that must be brought forth.

Performance

To gauge the performance of this game is hard. Like the meme says: Sometimes maybe good sometimes maybe… Boomer Bile. There are sections where the game runs beautifully. Then there are sections where Then it just starts to chug… for no reason. The screen is totally void of ridden and you just chugga-chugga-woo-woo on like the little engine that tried.

There are times where this issue could be seen as warranted but it wasn't just isolated to hectic battles. It would happen to all of my party members. It caused some absolute raging deaths and temper tantrums all around.

AH! Dropped frames, right there! Did you guys see that?!

As for how the game looks… “sometimes maybe good…” - you get the picture. I bring this up here as the game is graphicly pretty nice but it is just drab and (if you pardon the pun) lifeless. The nearest comparison would be a 360-era shooter like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 where every area you go through looks like the suburbs from Red Dawn. It looks nice but it’s not blowing me away.

So with that in mind, I believe some of the poor performance must be tied to the servers. I say this as myself and my party live within 20 miles of each other and have the same ISP but different computer set-ups. I run a standard mid-tier system as did one other member. The final friend however has an RTX 3080 and an intel i9 11th gen CPU. His computer blows the game out of the water yet we all experience the same stuttering and jitter within moments of each other.

Story

John Carmack (a developer on the original Doom game) once said that ‘Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important". Turtle Rock seems to have taken this to heart. The overarching story of Back 4 Blood was shown in the trailers and the announcements - yet this story is not brought up in the game, with the game just sort of doing its own thing. However, this does not hinder the story of the game.

BATTER UP!

Instead, the game's story focuses on the Cleaners and your journey to clean towns’ infestations of Ridden. The game takes a very Doom 2016 approach to the story. There is some back and forth banter between party members in regards to their previous lives and what they are doing now but the game knows you don’t care and quickly moves past it.

The story is barebones and, yes, whilst that can work, the gameplay has to make up for it. Sadly, in B4B’s case, it can’t hold up its end of the bargain. My issue is that I am a huge Doom fan and… Doom did it better. Not to say that Back 4 Blood does not have its own merits, but this is like comparing the merits of chalk and cheese in a taste test, there is an obvious winner.

Standin’ at the top of a staircase firing from the hip?
That’s a paddlin’.

Gameplay

So far I have dunked the story and bashed the performance - so surely the gameplay has to be doing something good right? Yes and no. Allow me to elaborate.

In previous articles I wrote about this game’s Alpha and Beta I spoke about the difficulty plateau and how the step up from Easy to Medium was night and day - not much has changed there. We did a few runs to buy some perks to hit the story on Medium and got turned to paste before level four. Rage ensued.

We quickly realised much of our time with B4B would have to be spent farming better cards and the game is boring as a result. Even if you go in without the best possible loadout you are left at the mercy of the AI director.  Sadly, playing a game becomes a chore when you introduce this degree of RNG. My full team of pretty well-coordinated and experienced FPS players were routinely swept aside by the Special Infected and this was after a patch to reduce the amount of them on every difficulty!

We had all the cards to help the group and we were all very much overpowered - then we got overwhelmed by the luck of the dice.

We’ll survive the end of the world… THROUGH THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP!

Overcoming Adversity

So after this, we decided to make our own fun and made up a little run of our own. We set the game to the easiest difficulty but made it as hard as possible and called this “Gimped Mode”. Allow me to break down the premise:
Cards have buffs, some buffs come with debuffs. An extra 20% stamina for an equal loss in stamina efficiency. An extra 40% healing efficiency, but you have 50% less health to start with. Some cards are obviously beneficial, while others hinder rather than help. However, sometimes you find yourself having to fill out your deck and only have cards which are mainly downsides. The usual deckbuilding malarky.  

So in this game mode, we made the AI as dumb as a brick and weak as a twig and then decked ourselves out with fifteen cards that all had debuffs, just to see how far we could get. The game becomes a hell of a lot funnier when you can run 20 miles but take a year to get your breath back.

Turns out being plagued with all these debuffs we still beat the game - you tell me how that looks.

And Yet

And yet we still played the campaign to death. Almost like we were speedrunners. Optimising our weapon loadouts to assist each other, coordinating items and perks we bought, trading weapon upgrades. We were having fun with the game in spite of ourselves! The only major core gameplay grip we all held dearly was the pain of being unable to remove attachments from guns.

If you can put it on, surely you have the know-how to take it off, right? Apparently not. Still, even now, after release me and my team have been enjoying our time on the game and we will definitely play it more. We just need a competent fourth.

If we are being real it is kind unfair except B4B to be as good as L4D.
Left 4 Dead has literally the greatest bit of environmental storytelling in video games.

Summary

In conclusion, I feel it is safe to say that Back 4 Blood is good. The problem is the boots it is trying to fill. The biggest issue that plagues the game though is the  shadow it lingers in - Back 4 Blood stands firmly in the shadow of Left 4 Dead. We call The Ridden zombies, we call the specials their L4D names, It’s the same guy in a slightly different suit.

I think this was best summed up by (and I can’t believe I am saying this)... KFC. ‘Every masterpiece has its cheap copy’. Because that is kinda how this feels. It's a pretty good copy nonetheless, in fact I prefer this imitation, yet it struggles to leave the shadow of the originals. When people say ‘Stick to what you know’ - I don’t think they had this in mind.

Editor’s note: The folks at Turtle Rock seem legit (https://twitter.com/TurtleRock/status/1447986644834033672).

I am not saying Back 4 Blood is bad by any stretch, as I said I enjoyed it (issues and all), but it is what it is. Do I recommend you pick it up? Yes - on its own merits it does change the formula enough to be a different flavour, but it’s also co-op so even if the game bores you, the fun you can make with the company won't.