The early-access beta for Back 4 Blood wrapped up on Monday, and after four straight days of non-stop zombie murder, we've got some easy-to-digest takes on how it's shaping up. In short: If the game releases in this state in October as planned, it would absolutely be fun and engaging enough to be a good excuse to grab three of your friends for a weekend or two... but to be a worthy successor to the Left 4 Dead games that keeps you coming back for years, it would benefit from another delay in order to iron out some glaring issues and launch in a more complete state.
Read on for the details.
Spoilers Ahead
1. It's Not Left 4 Dead 3
The sooner you accept that B4B is a completely different take on the formula than L4D, the better. "Four-player co-op zombie shooter" is pretty much where the similarities end. A lot of elements will be familiar at first glance: chapters bookended by saferooms, molotovs and pipe bombs, special zombies with abilities analogous to those of the Boomer, Smoker, Spitter, and so forth. But you can probably count the total direct similarities on one hand.
Right after the title screen, you'll find yourself in the first-person perspective and in control of a character right away at some sort of base camp; already completely different from L4D. You can sprint instead of just walk, and the moment you pick up a gun, you'll find that you can aim down sights just like every other modern shooter. There's this whole thing about "cards" and "decks," but you don't need to worry about that just yet. When you start a run, the characters you can pick from have unique abilities like instant revive or team ammo capacity. Some cynical player thinks to themselves, "Great, they turned L4D into a 'hero shooter' like every other game that comes out now." You have a currency and spend it on weapons, items and upgrades at a shop. What the hell is a tool kit? "This is a lot of new stuff I don't want to think about right now; let's just kill some zombies already."
The zombies sort of just slowly shamble at you unlike L4D's full-sprint enemies, but they also immediately damage you without warning the instant they close the gap. Your first encounter with a Bruiser will probably be a rough one; he just tanks every bit of damage directly in front of him, and his arm swing attack hits a deceptively wide area. "How am I already out of ammo? Wait, I have to manage different ammo types now? And why is my health never going back up no matter how many med kits I use?" While you're still getting your wits about you, a teammate sees some weird-looking zombie with a red, glowing neck, and thinks to themselves, "Ooh, glowy red weak point. Gotta shoot it!" But all they've accomplished is triggering a horde that wipes the whole squad. L4D fans are going to be spending a lot of time un-learning years of lessons and slowly coming to accept Turtle Rock's new vision.
2. It's Brutally Challenging (Sometimes for the Wrong Reasons)
The beta offers three difficulty levels, and they can be quickly summarized as follows: "Survivor" is extra-forgiving for people who just want to see the game, "Veteran" is a huge difficulty spike that requires basic knowledge of the mechanics and level layouts from every member, and "Nightmare" is relentlessly punishing even to highly coordinated and patient teams that communicate and plan out every single step. "Veteran" will probably end up being the happy medium that most players gravitate towards for an experience that's still reasonably challenging without being totally impenetrable. The outright absurd challenge of "Nightmare" is actually a good thing for the game's longevity. Given the recent industry trend of games designed to be more beginner-friendly, it's comforting to know that we still ocassionally get AAA games willing to offer a level of extreme challenge that hardcore players can sink their teeth into.
That said, a significant source of the difficulty is just poor design choices. B4B is not forthcoming whatsoever about how most of its mechanics work, so you're either going to have to pick up tips from word of mouth, or learn the hard way through trial and error. "Trauma" is extremely important to manage—it's essentially "permanent damage" that accumulates separately from normal damage, it carries between chapters, and will cap your max health at 35% at worst—but almost no one understood these details at first. Med cabinets on walls can restore some Trauma for a price, but the game definitely needs to point this out in an extremely clear manner. Once you feel like you know and understand everything about the game, though, you'll still occasionally feel cheated by taking unnecessary damage due to network latency, or triggering a horde because one of your shotgun pellets grazed a pack of birds 50 meters away. We're not going to sit here and pretend the L4D games were totally flawless and jank-free experiences, but they definitely had a much smoother onboarding process.
3. The Characters Lack Charm
To be fair, Left 4 Dead 2's cast rubbed most people the wrong way at first and needed time to grow on everyone, so we should all reserve our full judgment until the October release (which will also bring three additional characters), but what we've seen and heard of the characters in the beta has left a pretty bad first impression. Valve's writers carried the dialogue and personalities of the L4D characters, so whoever at Turtle Rock was in charge of meeting those standards had extremely big shoes to fill. Articulating exactly why B4B writing misses the mark takes some nuance, but the simplest explanation is an utter lack of humor. We're not looking for constant one-liners, here; L4D wonderfully juxtaposed a bleak horror setting with regular doses of joy from characters coping with that hopelessness through goofy exchanges. In B4B, you've got completely straight-laced soldiers like Walker completely devoid of an interesting personality, or you've got the complete other extreme in the form of Holly, a girl way too snarky and cheesy to allow any sort of enjoyable dynamic with the others. And Evangelo just... sucks? He kind of just sucks.
Hoffman is the clear stand-out for being a socially-awkward conspiracy theorist with just enough quirks to carry whatever little charm that B4B has. Conspiracy theories are super trendy to mock these days, especially in the political realm, so there's no doubt Hoffman's characterization was inspired by current events. One of the conspiracies he obsessed over, though, was the zombie apocalypse everyone currently finds themselves in, so now he feels more validated than ever about everything he's ever read about aliens and government secrets. There's a ton of potential here, but Hoffman alone can't save B4B; hopefully the three other Cleaners being saved for the full release—Doc, Karlee, and Jim—can turn things around.
4. Unlocking Cards and Building Decks Is Addicting
We probably sound pretty down on the game so far, but we still played nearly non-stop for the entire beta period, because the card system kept us coming back. The range of ideas that Turtle Rock came up with for perks, penalties, and balancing their values is pretty impressive. They allow for a level of free-form creativity with playstyles and team strategies that simply weren't possible in L4D and are a very welcome addition. For example, several cards come with the penalty of disabling your ability to aim down sights, so if you're willing to always hip-fire L4D style, you've got a super-powerful build that no other deck has access to. Coordinating decks with your teammates and specializing roles is going to be absolutely crucial to overcoming Nightmare difficulty.
The process of unlocking them is pretty ingenious, Yoo: you earn currency for completing chapters, the amount you earn scales with your performance, and you spend your currency on one of three progression tracks that rotate out with new tracks whenever an old one is complete. The loop is super engaging thanks to never knowing what cards will show up in a new track, and when a particularly intriguing card catches your eye, you'll be compelled to immediately test it out in a new run. You do have to play a ton to get them, though. Even after 40+ hours, we still didn't unlock them all, and the full game is sure to have even more than the beta. It's a bit of a shame that those only casually interested in trying the game out (like those subscribed to Xbox Game Pass) will never scratch the surface of this system, but for those who decide that B4B is a keeper, it's a great hook.
5. It Has PvP, but the "Campaign Versus" Format From L4D Is Gone
This is probably the biggest source of the disappointment and outcry from die-hard L4D fans. You can read more about the details behind this decision here. Technically, this shouldn't even be considered new information from the beta; they revealed and explained their new "Swarm" PVP mode in a video during E3, and at no point during this video titled "PvP Showcase" did they show or mention the traditional "Campaign Versus" format. Still, that mode from L4D is the entire reason a certain sect of fans play the game at all, so they assumed it's inclusion in B4B was a foregone conclusion and feel burned especially hard.
Maybe its absence wouldn't sting nearly as much if the Swarm mode we got to play in the beta wasn't so unsatisfying. It's essentially "Survival Versus" from L4D, but with the card system layered on top, and the amount of time it takes for the Cleaner side to pick their cards, leaving the Ridden team to wait impatiently, is uncomfortably long just for a round that lasts an average of three minutes. The Cleaner side has to be wiped eventually for the round to end, too, so it's impossible to feel like you've actually "won" as a Cleaner by surviving all the way to the end of a chapter like the old format. Campaign Versus fans are an extremely vocal minority, so Turtle Rock is wise not to specifically cater to them, but Back 4 Blood can never truly earn the title of "spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead" without it.
Back 4 Blood arrives in full on October 12 for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox Gamepass, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC on Steam and Epic Games Store.