There will be blood
Turtle Rock Studios breathes new life into the horror of Left 4 Dead
Laying our cards on the table with Back 4 Blood, Turtle Rock’s zombie shooter with a twist
The situation is a familiar one: hanging from a half-collapsed building shouting “Help! Help!” into a headset. Massed zombies claw at our feet, but we have three friends with machine guns coming to the rescue. We emerge crusted with gore, clamber across heaps of undead, reload and are ready to charge into the next building. The sound of distant screaming only adds to the sense that we might never escape the city of Evansburgh. The world has fallen to an infestation that’s turned almost everyone into a zombie – the fast, angry type, not the shambling specimens from George A Romero films. If you can’t work together, you and your comrades will end up as a pile of guts. If nothing else, Back 4 Blood works as an extremely stressful team-building exercise.
The game is the spiritual follow-up to the Left 4 Dead series. It’s been more than ten years since Left 4 Dead 2, and there’s a sense that the new game is a matter of unfinished business for Orange County-based Turtle Rock Studios. The original games’ structure remains intact: four teammates blast through gauntlets in firstperson, slaying hundreds of undead – both regular ones and mutant minibosses with the power to leap from walls, launch vomit at you, and smash you with huge, stretchy arms – as they move between the safe rooms that punctuate each level.
Back 4 Blood feels more refined than its predecessors. Movement is surprisingly quick, and the addition of a sprint command and small touches such as mantling make your survivor feel more elegant to control. You can aim down iron sights now, which instantly affords the armoury more nuance. Going to your scope gives you accuracy at the expense of peripheral vision – an important tradeoff in a game where dozens of zombies can swarm you from unexpected angles. In a tight situation you can spray and pray with hip fire, a tactic at its best with the pleasingly fierce submachine gun.
The weapons kick back hard, encouraging you to want to fire in bursts from longer ranges for more precision – or to take advantage of the M16’s three-round burst capability. You have two weapon slots, the first letting you equip a large primary weapon such as an assault rifle, submachine gun or shotgun, the second reserved for sidearms and melee weapons. Naturally, the latter option serves as a backup when you’ve run out of ammo or if you’d simply rather carve into zombies with a machete than waste valuable assault-rifle rounds.
But to succeed, Back 4 Blood needs to be more than a satisfying FPS in an increasingly crowded field of great co-op shooters. Tripwire’s Killing Floor adopted a Clive Barker-like tone and gave players hugely satisfying weapons. Fatshark’s Vermintide added a greater melee focus and an advanced loot system, embedded in Warhammer Fantasy’s established world. Even Destiny’s raids owe a debt to Left 4 Dead, but they also feature advanced puzzles and extensive progression systems in a glowing futuristic setting, the promise of new loot and tougher challenges ensuring players return for more.
Back 4 Blood features deckbuilding. The decision to add collectible card game elements to a gory action-movie shooter is an unusual one, but in practice it gives you extensive options to create builds that evolve over the course of a campaign as you draw new cards and use them to modify your character’s attributes and change the game world.
“There are endless strategies around deckbuilding, and it’s a game feature that we’ve leaned on more and more during development,” says Turtle Rock Studios co-founder and design director Chris Ashton. “For example, you can play an economy card to force more copper [the game’s currency] to spawn in the world, to better afford weapons and zombie-killing gear. You still have to go out there and kill zombies and find it, but it’s there because you chose to put that card in your deck.”
TO SUCCEED, BACK 4 BLOOD NEEDS TO BE MORE THAN A SATISFYING FPS IN AN INCREASINGLY CROWDED FIELD
The card system also gives players a new way to compete with the malevolent background AI that decides where and when zombies and their mutated counterparts spawn. Turtle Rock calls it the Game Director, and between rounds it can play its own ‘corruption’ cards against you. As troublesome as it sounds, it’s a feature than can actually give you valuable insight into what’s coming at you in the next map.
“It allows players some transparency into what the Game Director is doing, so they can develop a counter-strategy,” Ashton tells us. “For example, the Director is playing a bunch of Tallboys [enormous gangly monsters that charge from a distance] in the next section – you don’t know exactly where or when they are going to spawn, but armed with this knowledge and all those coppers you collected in the previous map, you and your teammates could stock up on HE grenades to take out the Tallboys more easily.”
This explains why our team is absolutely destroyed on our first attempt at the campaign, before we’ve started to get to know the card system. Ammo is scarce and the hordes are utterly relentless. The missions in Left 4 Dead were paced dynamically, the game’s AI Director allowing for periods of rest between sudden rushes. Back 4 Blood’s Director is not so lenient, bludgeoning you with crowds while throwing multiple mutated infected at you at the same time. Cards allow you to strategically tilt levels in your favour as you increase the chance of certain types of ammo spawning, or adapt your active cards to favour particular styles of play.
Take ‘Down in Front!’, a talent that gives you ten per cent damage resistance and immunity to friendly fire when you crouch. This accentuates a particular style of play familiar to Left 4 Dead players, where a couple of survivors in front crouch to allow friends to fire over their heads. The card enables you to become a frontline bulwark, and you might favour short-range shotguns and submachine guns as a result. Back 4 Blood’s audiovisual design supports this too: crouching tilts your gun sideways slightly, removing the need for UI elements to remind you of your stance. Friendly fire is highly visible, so you can easily see where your teammates are aiming.
The results can be spectacular, especially when all of your team members communicate effectively and back up together to funnel a horde of enemies through a doorway so the four of you can let loose your accumulated arsenal in one lethal torrent. Terrifying numbers of shambling enemies can appear simultaneously, spraying ludicrous
IT BLUDGEONS YOU WITH CROWDS WHILE THROWING MULTIPLE MUTATED INFECTED AT YOU AT THE SAME TIME
“WE’RE APPROACHING CO-OP IN A MORE FLEXIBLE MANNER NOW, NOT REQUIRING CHARACTER CLASSES”
amounts of blood around, especially when you land headshots.
Alternatively, you might play cards that improve your melee performance, which can sometimes make the secondary-slot weapons even more powerful than the primary option. Everyone enters a campaign with a deck – there are presets, but the strategic intrigue of the game relies on building your own. Between levels, each player receives three cards from their deck, of which they can play one before heading into the next section.
For even more customisation, the heroes have different passive abilities to support extra build tailoring. For example, Hoffman has a passive called ‘So Many Pockets’ that lets him start with an ammo pack and fight with a chance to find more whenever he kills an enemy. If you prefer weapons with high rates of fire, you might want to pick him and enhance his character passives with extra ammo cards. That’s just one of many ways in which you can take him, and Turtle Rock wants to encourage experimentation, especially at harder difficulties.
“It’s so powerful from a player’s perspective and so fun when you put a plan together with your friends, build custom decks and successfully conquer a level that was previously giving you fits,” Ashton says. “We’re approaching co-op in a more flexible manner now, not requiring character classes, specific gear or strategies. We’ve learned the value of letting players play their way.”
The heroes are notable for how ordinary they are. In addition to Hoffman there’s a machete-wielding fighter who hates it when his hoodie gets dirty. Holly brings a baseball bat to the campaign, and Walker a Glock 23 pistol. They look like average folk who’ve reached for the nearest weapon and decided to team up and take back their city.
Ashton says the team is aiming for a more positive tone than the one running through the Left 4 Dead games. The heroes will still exchange banter during fights and in saferooms, where you also find scrawled messages from former survivors, but there will be a few extra surprises, such as a saferoom where a chatty stranger is cowering behind some rubble. “We try to hit a broad spectrum of personalities and backgrounds, then put them together and imagine how they would get along,” Ashton explains.
In the game’s alpha build, four characters are available, but eight will appear in the final game. That means more passive abilities to choose from, but it also avoids forcing the last member of your gang to pick the only remaining character. And that means more room for variety and experimentation, and therefore greater replayability.
Back 4 Blood is meant to be played many times, with three difficulty levels that increase friendly fire and even change the mutated zombies. Some of the latter have glowing orange weak spots that you don’t have to worry about too much in standard difficulty, as you simply brute-force your way through with enough massed firepower. At higher difficulty levels, the mutated infected evolve the common sense to place armour on their weak points. Along with increased friendly-fire damage, it demands more precise teamwork – and a stronger deck.
“All players will earn cards and build decks as they go,” Ashton explains. “Combined with increased player skill, cards allow teams to get farther through the campaign and eventually they’ll be able to take on higher difficulties where they can earn even more cards. It’s a bit of a Roguelike meta progression.
“Aside from the progression loop, the Game Director is always mixing up the enemies, items, and even environmental effects like Fog or Darkness.”
The Director will also torment you with a two-storey-tall Ogre, which can rise from the ground to create an instant boss fight. You can damage the creature enough to force it to melt away again, but at some point it’ll return to hound you. It’s designed, as Ashton puts it, “to make players run.”
The massive size of the Ogre, and other miniboss zombies such as the Tallboy, comes directly from Turtle Rock’s experience creating Evolve, 2015’s PVP-focused FPS that pitted a team of four against one huge playercontrolled villain. Evolve was a big move for
the studio, which grew from a team of ten to 120 to make a break from Valve, where its co-founders had started out with Left 4 Dead. “With that came a lot of growing pains,” Ashton says. “We’re still learning valuable lessons as we develop B4B, but our biggest struggles have had more to do with the madness of 2020.” Though Evolve’s dedicated servers closed in 2018, the game’s mismatched player character sizes ended up working surprisingly well, and the experience allowed Turtle Rock work out how a creature ten times the size of anything else on the map should navigate complex terrain.
The Ogre is the very first creature we encounter in the game: as we emerge from the safe room, it makes its appearance and immediately starts throwing fleshy balls at our group. As we collectively blast it with everything we’ve got, it hits one player, launching them several metres straight back into the safe room – a hilarious moment in an otherwise overwhelming situation.
It’s easy to draw a link between Evolve’s criss-crossing array of co-op gadgets and the intense customisation at the heart of
Back 4 Blood. It’s a bold direction given the popularity of hero characters in other shooters such as Overwatch, where the design invites players to adopt a very specific skill and weapon set developed for a particular battlefield role. But the approach seems to come naturally to a studio happy to hand off control of moment-to-moment action to a dynamic and unpredictable AI.
The studio almost has to make the game backwards to support the Director. Level designers “build for opportunity”, Ashton says, creating terrain that the game’s enemies can exploit in different ways. One strain of mutated zombie leaps from wall to wall like Spider-Man, looking for unexpected angles of attack. Ashton: “We try really hard not to craft very specific scenarios. It’s almost the opposite of what most games do. How the game plays out depends on the interaction between players and the Game Director.”
There may not be set-pieces as controlled as the hospital rooftop defence at the end of
Left 4 Dead’s No Mercy campaign, in which survivors battle a set number of waves before a helicopter arrives, but Back 4 Blood’s levels are paced to an extent. We move from a cityscape into flaming tunnels, and onto a bridge section in which we have to run to safety on a moored boat. It turns out the boat isn’t safe at all. We shoot our way through cabins, fighting from deck to deck, getting split up and generally panicking. One team
WE HAVE TO RUN TO SAFETY ON A MOORED B OAT. I T TURNS O UT THE BOAT ISN’ T SAFE AT ALL
member dies on the bridge surrounded by a horde and being punched repeatedly by a Tallboy. It feels like a suitable punishment for wandering off from the group, and shows that even at basic difficulty levels you won’t survive as a lone wolf for long.
You get a grace period the first time you’re knocked down, which you can spend wildly firing or hacking at the creatures that downed you. If the entire team is down, you can use a continue to carry on, though the number of these available varies with the difficulty level. We have barely any health left when we manage to fight our way off the boat, only to discover that our next mission requires us to go back to the craft in order to plant charges and scupper it. Even at standard difficulty, Back 4 Blood presents a serious challenge.
Expect to spend a lot of time covered in gunk as well. Retches live up to their name by spewing bile all over the map, dealing damage and obscuring your vision with a dripping green filter. The agile four-armed Hockers spit goo that freezes you in place, exposing you to attack until a teammate punches it off. Including the Ogre, we’ve seen five enemy variants, but Ashton promises “a number of others that haven’t been revealed yet.”
That may have big implications for the planned eightplayer PVP mode. If it emulates Left 4 Dead’s version, it will pit four heroes against four mutated zombies. With so many characters and monsters to pick from, there’s masses of scope for experimentation in a competitive context, even more so if the card system has a role in multiplayer. It appears the system might support microtransactions, though Ashton says, “We know we want to have ongoing content after launch, but we’re still figuring out what that would be. If we do implement microtransactions, it would be for cosmetics only.”
It will be fascinating to see how Back 4 Blood fits into the current hierarchy of shooters that exist as evolving service games. The sheer number of interacting customisation options in the game threatens to overwhelm new players – and perhaps those who enjoyed Left 4 Dead as a kickabout way to spend time with friends – but Rainbow Six: Siege’s massive roster of operatives shows that you can hold on to an audience even with a complicated array of systems.
The heroes and special zombies are obvious hooks for future expansion, but it’s the card system that promises longevity. We find ourselves fawning over particularly powerful new cards, such as one that heals the rest of the team for 45 health when a hero is incapacitated. Combine this with Berserker, which grants you extra speed and melee damage, and you have a setup that encourages fighters to charge into the pack, knowing that going down will help the team a little bit. Some of the most entertaining parts of our experience with the game to date involve comparing cards and collaborating between stretches of intense, no-holds-barred shooting. Proper coordination and four players with strong custom decks is clearly going to be a signature of high-level play.
Back 4 Blood benefits from the simplicity of its premise, though its complexity might wrongfoot anyone expecting something like Call Of Duty’s co-op and Zombies modes. It promises gory action-movie spectacle – which it does well – and then pushes players into a disparate array of complicated upgrade systems. Even after you’ve encountered the card system and the hero aptitudes, there’s the matter of how you’re going to spend copper you’ve found in the saferoom vendors. There you face tradeoffs between the certain utility of an ammo pack and the potential usefulness of devices that open locked doors which seem to move around randomly with each playthrough. Then there are shifting hazards throughout the campaign that can bring a rush of foes down on your squad – try not to disturb flocks of ravens, or long-necked Snitch beasts that scream when they see you.
Back 4 Blood has fantastic monsters, though – hulking, disgusting, glistening things designed to mire you down and toss you bodily across the level. And the greatest monster of all is, of course, the Director. Give it enough time and you might form a longstanding love/hate relationship with an AI designed to kill you and your friends.
THE HEROES AND SPECIAL ZOMBIES ARE OBVIOUS HOOKS, BUT IT’S THE CARD SYSTEM THAT PROMISES LONGEVITY