Back 4 Blood (2021)

If you like coop games with friends, this could be a good option for you. It has fast paced action, and plenty of enemies and monsters to kill.

As for gameplay, the game can be very simple and complex at the same time. It is a shooter game, so you point and shoot as usual. You can choose between different characters who have their own perks to help you in the fight. I always like to play as Doc, since it is a good idea to have someone who can focus on healing the team. Besides that, you can go deeper and use the deck building system to make your characters even more powerful and useful, and select the gamestyle that best suits you. As for me, this system is way too complicated. I just googled a good deck combination for the character I was using and went with that. The game is very fun as a beginner, but it can start to get frustrating on harder difficulties. Especially since you only have two tries to finish the whole act. If your whole team dies twice in your run, you have to start all over again. That is way too much for me, so I just played on Recruit, which is the easy difficulty.

As for the story, I wish it was better told. There are a couple of cutscenes and some dialogue in between episodes... but it is not enough. Also, there is plenty of dialogue while you are fighting hordes of zombies, and for me it is impossible to pay attention. All the lore I know about the game is because I went and looked for it in the game's Wiki page. It is very hard to get anything while playing the game. In the expansions, the story is told way better! I actually enjoyed the expansions way more than the main game.

One complaint that I have is that the maps got very repetitive. You revisit the same areas over and over, and they look very similar. Things started to change a bit on the third act. Then the expansions did change everything and those maps were very fun to play. It is sad that they waited for the expansion to make something engaging to play...

In conclusion, B4B is a bit of a below averge game, but it can be worth it if you play with friends. Try to also play the expansions, which are way more interesting than the main game. They are on the short side, though.

I think after completing Act 1 that my overall consensus is that the game is solid enough, but it always feel like it's trying to play dress up. So much about the fun of the previous installments has been lost here. The zip is gone, the tension is gone, the dread is gone, and while, yeah, the ferry and bridge were cool moments, they ultimately just felt like worse versions of stuff already done well in the previous L4D games.

The characters are great, though. I like the characters, but the set pieces leave so much to be desired and there's nothing nearly as memorable, at least thusfar. Sure the game isn't as punchy playwise, and sure it's almost obnoxiously insistent on exploration, and sure the deck building seems to not only be completely unnecessary but also completely useless, but it does play well and the characters are neat. The special infected are also way less iconic, like, by a longshot.

Is the game bad? No. Not by any means. I'm having a lot of fun. But all I can think while playing it is "boy I wish this was L4D2" and that's not really a great sign.

If you can get around the unnecessary modernizations - like the cards and deck building, which is neat but totally unnecessary - and the character customization which is actually kinda welcome as it makes it a bit more personal, it's basically L4D3, but even then...

...guys, you didn't have to make these changes. We just wanted to shoot zombies. The game is nowhere near as fast paced, it seems a lot heavier on exploration and overall it just doesn't have the same zip as the previous versions. It isn't as bad as everyone lead me to believe, but it's certainly not the same, and as a result, it's worse off because of it.

But at least I can slay zombies by myself again, so that's nice. Screw playing with other people.

Back 4 Blood attempts to go beyond and improve upon the Left 4 Dead formula. It tries to introduce a few new game mechanics such as the card system, corruption cards, weapon modifications, etc. And while the new game mechanics do offer a fresh perspective on the zombie shooter formula… it just seems like it lost many things along the way that made the Left 4 Dead series great - i.e. tighter gameplay, map design, special infected, etc. This game isn’t completely terrible, but it definitely needs more polish. It tries to copy and one up the Left 4 Dead formula, but in doing so, it starts to lose its own identity.

Not a huge fan of zombie shooting games......left 4 dead 2 was the only zombie game I had some fun playing....so when I heard it was from the same developers I wanted to give it a try.

Its a solid game with super good gameplay.Killing zombies are soo satisfying in this game.I wasn't that attached to card system and all but it does seem like a good concept.For me the game is the best zombie shooter but that doesn't mean its perfect...the story was meh there were few bugs that were soo frustrating and the content for this price is too low....I tried this with gamepass so I didn't have the latter issue...anyways definitely give it a try if u have gamepass its super fun.

This is more of the Left 4 Dead experience, but with a much longer campaign and more customization. There's enough customization where I am creating a proper character build like an RPG. I can unlock cards that can be used during the game that will provide character buffs that are much needed when playing. Along with the cards, I can pick up or buy new weapons and weapon attachments and accessories of different types. There's enough here to create a team composition to create a strategy to face off against the zombies, and the game pushes back enough for that to feel necessary. My friends and I got our asses handed to us a few times, and we were playing on the lowest difficulty. It's an engaging, satisfying system.

The campaign has a decent variety of environments: city streets, buildings, sewers, etc., but some of these levels are repeated too often. That got disappointing after a while. I could not follow the story at all, so I can't give much input there. I always find this to be a problem when I'm playing a campaign with multiple people. I had a team of three, so our fourth spot was either taken by a bot or by a stranger throughout our playthrough. The bot AI is pretty bad. There was one point were all of us were down, and the bot just kept running around in circles and getting stuck on the environment instead of reviving us. The characters banter throughout the game. Most of them are fine, but some of them are really annoying. The comedic relief characters are painfully unfunny, and the same dialogue gets repeated a lot.

I appreciate the sound design in this. The weapons are satisfying to fire, and I can hear the sound of the weapon firing change as I get closer to the end of my clip. The special zombie types sound appropriately creepy. They kept me on edge in situations where I could hear them but couldn't see them.

Back 4 Blood definitely gives Left 4 Dead players more content but at the same time I felt there wasn't enough memorable content. There were a few levels that had features that stood out but the overall landscape felt forgettable. I couldn't even tell you what the plot was but it honestly isn't an important aspect to this game, so that's not really a negative here.

For starters, I highly recommend playing this game with friends as I don't believe I would've had much fun without them. The campaign is a decent length but after the first playthrough, I didn't feel the motivation to go back and replay through it again for the unlockables.

The gameplay itself is both fun and frustrating. It is very hard to overcome the urge to kill every zombie. You need to work as a team to complete objectives and maintain survival. If I got distracted with a standoff and focused on killing zombies instead of just running and gunning my way through them, I found myself frustrated by the never-ending hordes and got further separated from my teammates, making it near impossible to recover.

I recommend this game for a good time with friends, to anyone who wants a mindless yet somewhat strategic zombie murder fest, and to anyone who wants a non-scary spooky game to play.

I do not recommend this game for a solo experience.

If you play the game with friends it's fun because of the type of game it is and the budget with which it was created, but otherwise I think it's a game with a lot of design flaws:

• Most of the levels are the same, monotonous, its design does not propose interesting gameplay situations.

• The enemies are extremely generic zombies. They are not particularly fun to fight. The ones that are most different from the rest, instead of being fun, are just unfair.

• Speaking of unfair, the game's difficulty modes are wildly unbalanced. The lowest difficulty mode is too easy and the intermediate difficulty mode is too hard. But it's not difficult in a way that encourages you to get better at overcoming the challenges the game presents; it's a completely artificial difficulty that only emphasises the game's design problems.

• The last two levels attempt to achieve a great climactic experience, but they do it so poorly that the penultimate level is one of the most boring ones in the whole game, and the last one, while entertaining, is frustrating and extremely disappointing.

Still, if you like this kind of games and you have Game Pass, you have nothing to lose for trying it out.

So much like Left 4 Dead... with a few modern elements. Overall a great thing.

This is tried and true to the formula, character archetypes, level designs, and gameplay. The colored loot is a cool edition along with risk/reward for searching for more money to buy upgrades next time. But the new card system is obtuse. I get it in concept but the mechanics or the UI or something is confusing.

And of course being a heavy co-op game means the quality of the games can vary greatly based on your teammates. I have only found a few good team play sessions; too many other cases of teammates repeatedly alerting the horde in a single run. Hard to tell if this is just novice play, or deliberate jerky behavior.

Every once in a while I wonder "whatever happend to B games?"

It seems they're alive and well. And just as junky as ever. Sadly, in my mind, Back 4 Blood brings only these elements of B games and no unique quirk or fun mechanics to salvage it.

It seems obvious but honestly how do you clone Left 4 Dead in 2021 and have worse gunplay? Everything just feels too heavy and clunky, it really detracts from what should feel like a snappy arcade shoot em up, total mistranslation.

I have quite a few gripes but a lot of them are minor. The main point is that I had no real fun playing this game. I hear it's fun with friends, maybe that's true but none of mine were interested so I guess my review is the lone wolf playing with randos and bots perspective.

A joyless mess.

It's a pleasure to play as a squad even though a bit too hard in veteran I believe, the gap between this and recruit is waaay to steep.

If you don't have a full squad though, just don't bother: matchmaking is broken and there's almost no way to progress if you want to play with bots.

While I didn't expect the game to be really enjoyable playing solo (I mean who played L4D alone??) it's 2021 now and there is a lot of options to assemble a squad without having to look on reddit/discord.

MHW and Division 2 did it well for instance.