I hate to admit it, but I was excited for this game. It had been a decade since we last saw this studio make a Left4Dead game, and I remember loving both of them... and I mean before the first one launched. Not many demos/alpha runs get my time, much less repeated plays, putting the first game pretty high up there with me. So to see these guys doing it again, I was absolutely hyped. But as I walk away, I can't help but feel my interest was misplaced... this just doesn't stand as more then a cheap imitation
Story: The zompocalypse has happened, but despite what the modern world would have you believe, no virus caused this. Rather it was a brand new worm found in Canada. This worm infects it's hosts, multiplying in the body and in the process mutates it into a zombie-like creature dubbed the ridden. Due to how this works and how easily it infects a human body, it has been colloquially dubbed the Devil Worm. When it got loose it spread quickly across the globe infecting the majority of the population. Those who managed to escape or were somehow immune banded together for survival, but could not prevent the world as we know it from ending.
It's been a while since the initial outbreak and while the world is over and the ridden now dominate the world, a new normal of sort has settled with small outposts of survivors protecting themselves and risking trade runs between each other. And this is where you come in. You are one of a specific unit of combatants who go into riskier places as the people of Fort Hope need: a cleaner... and at the moment you are out on one of these trade runs. This should have actually been a relatively easy mission as the area of Fort Hope has been fairly quiet as of late, but this would not last as the swarms pick up while you are out, leaving you with one brand new objective: fight your way back and stop the hoard before they get home with you.
This basic setup will start you on a 3-act story line of survival and even a chance to fight back and begin turning the tide against the parasite that now dominates the world and it is written well to both fill in why you are here as well as keep out of the way when the action gets hot and all you can really care about is killing enough ridden that you can clear a path and get the hell out of the situation you find yourself in... It isn't anything particularly special, but it fits the game very well. Unfortunately it does so with a catch. You see AAA greed has hit this game and effected the plot, leaving the game ending in a cliffhanger. If you don't want spoilers please skip the italicized text below.
During the 3rd act you find yourself looking for basically a mad scientist who has stumbled on a "cure" for the ridden. He has made it into a liquid you help test out by loading it into grenades you can throw during the act 3 final boss: a set of nests with a high level of special ridden including giant multi-story tall ones called ogres you need to destroy. The grenades do not actually do damage but make anything you hit with them exceptionally susceptible to it.
When you finish this battle, you load up the cure on a helicopter and fly back to Fort Hope only to find not only are you too late to prevent an attack on your home, but a whole new abomination created by the worms is attacking: a monstrous creature the size of a school has just ripped it's way through the ground in the middle of the base. All attempts to kill it with the cure from your helicopter fail as it retaliates by ripping it in half and sending you crashing to the ground... and this is where the story both ends in act 3 and begins in act 4.
For those who didn't wish to read the spoiler, the core $60 (even as I write this review) ends on a cliffhanger with no real ending. If you want to play that ending, you are going to have to shell out an additional $15 for a single mission act 4. No joke, they literally hid the real ending of the game behind a pay-wall and unlike when Capcom did this with Asura's Wrath, no one gave a shit. Even worse UNLIKE Capcom, WB didn't even try to mask their greed. Between each mission in whatever act you are on, you can see a "map" of levels sorted by act and act 4 is sitting right there at the end. Highlighting it when starting a run will let you know you have to buy the as of writing this only expansion for the game... this $15 DLC to play it. Guess people are just used to being nickel and dimed to death now.
And before anyone argues that they are planning to expand the game further, that doesn't cut it against the blatant greed displayed here. Go look up the end of act 4 on youtube if you do not believe me, but this DLC ends on a note that leaves plenty of room for future content, but a suitable stopping point if the story were to end there. This is unlike act 3 which is the actual end of the core game but actually has no ending at all: just the opening scene to act 4. This was planned to effectively make the game a $75 dollar title instead of a (still overpriced) $60 one.
4/10
Graphics: I can not complain very much about the way this game looks. Like the series it is the spiritual successor for, you will go on your zombie hunt from a first person view through various locations from an abandoned school to corn fields and even some less human locations, and it all looks fantastic. The developers put serious work into making these environments look great, and that becomes even more impressive when you realize the way the game itself works can change the environment you will be trapesing across. Sometimes, it will be day, sometimes night, sometimes fog... and it will change depending on your current run. I have to admit I was impressed here.
Nor are the characters any slouch either. While still not looking quite real, the characters are very well and very highly detailed. In the game itself it's tougher to appreciate as everyone will be moving around far too fast to see it well (enemies and allies alike) but you will ger a really good chance to see how things look between wandering Fort Hope (which acts as a hub to choose what you wish to do), In essence they could pass for a high end CGI movie made today. It all looks fantastic... well for the most part.
I do have to complain about a little bit of the technical end here for one simple word... clipping. Thankfully the game is fast and furious so you are likely not to notice all that often, but it isn't uncommon for enemies to make themselves known when they are behind a wall by their animation pressing through it in a way I haven't seen in many games for several years. It is kind of baffling how much work went into the work of the game to not avoid this while they were at it.
7/10
Sound: When trying to amp up a moment, audio is a huge component and this game does not dissappoint. You will find the game using metal rifts with an eerie tone to set the mood of levels, letting the tension build while the ridden's numbers remain relatively low and letting the creepier side of the world slip and sliding effortlessly between pace and tone as the situation demands. You getting bombarded expect the beat to turn up as the enemies press in. The music just keeps perfect time with what is going on.
The voicework is also incredibly solid with everyone playing up exactly who they should be. During the cut-scenes this is obvious and should now be the standard, but it is kinda amazing how well this all gets mixed together. You expect to have characters yell out when they find something useful since this would make sense to do in the situation as well as makes for a useful mechanic for the actual players to upgrade their equipment while they play. You may even expect some light banter from characters, but rarely have I played a game where I found myself doing more then filtering out that banter as background noise. Rarely have I seen the banter actually reacting to the world, like when a team scatters and gets in trouble, but this game did it. I have to admit I am impressed.
8/10
Gameplay: If you have played Left4Dead 1 or 2, you have a good idea of the core gameplay you are about to get into. Each level will see you basically getting yourself ready in a safe location before unlocking the door to the main event and traversing it to the next safe location (usually but not always a safehouse you can lock behind you). While out among the ridden hoards, you may be required to do several things like blow something up or deliver other things to specific locations several of which are predetermined to the level you are in with a combination of 3 friends, random strangers who drop into your game, or bots. Obviously the best way to play will be with your friends who you can banter with, but bots will fill in the gaps well enough when they are not available (or if they decided not to buy the game too). And if you are averse to playing with strangers, you can choose to either play offline completely using only bots or in a private server so it's just you and those you invite to join you. This may prove a very good option because this is also the kind of game where the other players will greatly effect how much you enjoy playing... and it can be a mixed bag.
Generally I tend to like to leave these games open and have had really good luck with randos who show up and in fact only can probably count the number of times Ive had it go bad from others joining me on one hand. In this game my luck was not so good. Don't get me wrong, not everything was terrible. Hell the first night I played 3 of the most laid back and awesome gamers I have seen in the wild ever dropped in and we were all having a great time till I had to log out for sleep (work schedule and all that). And the next would be a single player who while friendly, is very new.. a pleasant but run ending night.
But the next few encounters are straight up awful, starting with a single player who joined up and refused to communicate at all and ran straight ahead into everything. The game ceased to be about tacticfully working together to get the job done, but running headlong into danger to protect a wild-card player because you need the numbers in the party. Thankfully this was more unexpected then bad but when two other players showed up someone's connection was absolutely terrible resulting in the worst case of rubber-banding I have seen since this side of the days of dial up. The game became an unplayable mess I only stayed till the end of the mission so that I wouldn't lose the progress in my run.
And hey, while connection issues can ruin any online game, at least I can't blame the other players, right? Well the last game session was also ruined, but this time by other players. In a game where you are supposed to work as a team, there was once again zero communication between the players...and everyone basically scattered in their quest to collect loot before other players could snatch it up: not exactly functioning behavior for a team game. And on top of it, the idiots also decided they wanted to use melee weapons only. Since these were console players, I can't rule out achievement hunting, but it still involved all 4 of my revival actions up to this time... on the one who refused to use anything else but a hatchet. And then they all disappeared when it became time to play the final boss of the entire game. Long story short, this community might be the first one I can legit warn you about and suggest you bring your own friends with you.
And with that small rant out of the way, you can assume by the nature of zombie-hoard games that you will be assaulted by hoards of enemies while trying to complete your missions. Some will be waiting for you. I have to give the developers credit here as you will not just find everyone standing around waiting for you, Yes, there is plenty of that, but many will also appear still and like dead bodies, making the world itself that much more treacherous before it even begins to get interactive. Much like it's predecessors, you will also have the hoards drop in on you from time to time with the game working these roving mobs into how you well you are doing. When you mix in either group can have a selection of special ridden (some of which are are specific to the level) and no moment truly safe no matter how quiet it might be. The powder keg to frantic action is real.
It should also be noted that this game sells itself on replayability, but not in the same way it's predecessors did. Where Left4Dead 1 and 2 relied on the community to modify the game and extend it well beyond it's normal life time, Back4Blood tried something a little more immediate in the form of the card system. As you play, you will earn points you can spend on cards which you can then form into 15 card decks. Picking one when you start a playthrough, the cards will be drawn in order through your play, giving you extra benefits like more health or more ammo or make weapons be more accurate, or do more damage. Personally I tended to favor starting with a card that makes your melee attack a knife, rendering the ability to defend myself if I ran out of ammo for both guns I was carrying within some form of reach.
But the game will use the same feature against you too, as before each mission in a run, mutation cards will be drawn to change how the mission will play. Some of these are fixed to be part of the map, while others are random, and most of them will make things more complicated for you and your fellow cleaners. The randomness of this and the ability to boost your own advantages do make give the game some replay value, but not a lot since in the end you are still doing the same things over and over again... and you will, because this is not a long game.
6/10
Bugs: It's been a long time since I have played a game that shit itself this bad with buggy behavior. When the game works, it works great, but when it fucks up, oh god are you in for a rough night.
- Lag: This is the big one... and wow is it big. As noted in the gameplay, this literally made one of my few sessions it took to finish the story of this game completely unplayable by the end of it. In fact it was so bad I went looking for if others had seen this kind of problem in their own sessions and found people questioning if the game is Peer-to-peer and lying about being server based. Based on the behavior, I have to question that as well since the sheer volume of rubber-banding, anyone being stuck walking in place, enemies popping in out of nowhere, warping around, or taking full clips because the game wasn't registering the hits suggests to me whoever was serving the game had a terrible connection to me... and this is despite ping numbers looking great in the middle of the worst of it... and one player having 0 ping.
- Falling fails: This was a much lesser issue if a very strange one, but there is a mechanic in this game where if you fall off the edge of a platform, you can hang on there and hope another cleaner will lift you up... only it doesn't work very well. I found myself clinging for dear life from a piece of pavement hanging about 3 feet off the ground... and unable to do anything about it but just die cause no one got to me... I mean it wasn't as bad as the bug in SkyNET (a DOS game notorious for a half-a-foot fall potentially killing you back in the 90s), but I haven't seen an issue quite that bad with fall damage in a while either.
Score: I really wish this game was Left4Dead... and I think the game wishes it, too. It has the same core DNA and when you start playing you will immediately feel like you are playing those games, but between amount of content, potential server issues, and lack of mods, it is more of a shell then a successor. Add to this the mixed bag of the community and the fact that WB decided to get greedy and sell the ending as DLC, and it becomes a pretty empty husk of a shell. I seriously can not recommend the game as it stands and now understand why the game's popularity died as fast as it did. Do not make my mistake. Don't give WB your hard earned cash when the far superior games it's trying to be are available together for 1/4th of the price.
5/10
System Requirements:
- Intel Core i5-6600 (3.3 Ghz) or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (3.4 Ghz)
- 8 GB RAM
- NVidia Gforce GTX 1050 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 570
- 40 GB hard drive space
- Windows 10 (64-bit only)
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (2700) 3.2 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 1660 (6GB VRAM)
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
Source: Steam
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