Back 4 Blood review in progress: “An absolute gun blast of joy”

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Back 4 Blood’s zombie co-op mayhem puts so few barriers between you and its brand of bloody fun that you feel deep inside Ridden’s guts before you really know what you’re doing. There’s a brief tutorial or the option to play the campaign solo with friendly bots, but there’s nothing stopping you from entering a fight without a clue how any of the systems really work.

quick Facts

(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

Release date: October 12, 2021 Platform(s): PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One and PC Developer: Turtle Rock Studios Publisher: Warner Bros.

This is both a strong point and a weak point, it’s great not to have any hurdles to jump into the mess with your mates, but it also means it’s easy to miss the basics of Back 4 Blood systems. Use the card deck mechanic used to increase your stats and add special perks to your team. When a section starts, the game will assign corruption cards to the level, which affects the type of threat you will face. It could be the weather, like fog that can hide enemies or a mutated type of Ridden who has uncomfortable armor on their weak points.

card sharks

(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

You can then draw from a random set of your deck – the cards in your starting deck, that you’ve either found or bought with points for completing levels – and maximize your chances of survival. Some are as simple as the Combat Knife card, which turns a melee strike into a stabbing attack, and some are applicable to the entire team, like a 10% increase in team health. My favorite – Living on a Prayer Card – gave me health points for killing Ridden when I was in critical condition, and saved my ass more than once. You can build custom decks and people smarter than me will probably already have come up with intricate Hearthstone-style combos for different teams and situations, but by the end of the night, I was still just a basic bitch.

I also wanted to have more customization options up front for my favorite cleanser, holly, and hazelnut. You can unlock skins for both using points from gameplay to unlock supply lines – which also give you new cards – but on the first day I barely made an impact, and my Holly was left entirely of vanilla.

Friends and (many) enemies

(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

But did any of these points stop my first night in Back 4 Blood from being an absolute blast of joy? Not a little. Playing with a couple of friends and a sober stranger — attempts to make our team private in the game will only result in us dropping an AI bot that seemed to fail — brought back everything we loved about Left 4 Dead, and then some. Apologies for scaring flocks of birds or setting off car alarms – both of which attract a slew of foes known as the horde – being merciful by highlighting good weapons and supplies for my friends to find, and running hero-style to save them when they were shot down. The levels gave us enough trouble that we needed some basic strategies – “Save the grenades…use that gas…once this path opens just book it” – but it’s not so hard to beat that we couldn’t all just run around Shoot and scream and you still have a chance of success.

I love the cleaners too, especially my mom (voiced by Barbara Crampton) who is a total badass, and the evil Carly who also replaced Holly when she opened her lock. Every cleaner has a special talent that is useful to the team, but honestly you would choose the one you like the most in terms of looks and sound because we are all shallow people and you’ll hear a lot of their jokes as you fight. I would need an option to turn off complaints from cleaners about friendly fire, although you’ll run in front of my little rifle, and you’ll get some stray bullets.

Despite the fact that I still feel like a Back 4 Blood kid after a full day of playing, and there are times that will definitely cause me to stumble until I find out, I’m happy to keep playing until then. All clicks are in place. It’s been a long time since there’s been a co-op game that’s good enough to pull me away from the happy introverted world of RPGs and solo sims, but Back 4 Blood is looking forward to becoming a major part of my social life.

Back 4 Blood is open to players who have the Ultimate or Deluxe version of the game now. For everyone else, it will be released on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and PC on October 12th.

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