Back 4 Blood is a new Zombie first-person shooter from the team that brought us Left 4 Dead. After many years away the dev team has largely come back together, and Back 4 Blood picks up right where they left off, which also includes a nice card-based system for different boons and effects in-game. It’s frantic, it’s bloody, but it’s also a lot of fun too.

The most fun I’ve had with Back 4 Blood is with a group of friends, getting them on Discord and running through levels, all slaying zombies as we go. The game offers up campaign mode which can be played solo, but I found it pretty mundane when compared to the hectic nature of hordes of zombies running at you with 3 other friends. It’s tough too. You may think adding in other players makes it easy, but it doesn’t and you have to pay careful attention to your weapons, ammo, health, and modifiers, plus coordinate with your team to be a success. You literally run the zombie gauntlet in one level early in the game, and if you don’t coordinate then you will be toast.

The gameplay is fairly self-explanatory, you are stuck in various locations full of zombies, and it’s your job to get to a saferoom across the other side of the map, hopefully taking out as many zombies as possible along the way. There’s a variety of Zombies trying to eat you from your standard walking zombies, large exploding ones, tallboys, plus ones that spit poison. The story is present, but not very memorable, and I don’t think that matters too much. This is a standard zombie action game, and it’s all about killing as many Ridden as possible. The game leans on the gameplay, and bets on the satisfaction of the gameplay loop. If you are looking for a deep and meaningful zombie story, then this game probably isn’t for you.

Back 4 Blood can feel a little relentless. There’s not a lot of quiet moments as you try to navigate the landscape. More often than not you’ll be contending with hordes of Ridden. On one hand, it can be very satisfying to carve through hundreds of Zombies, on the other hand, the game can be very action-focused. It would have been nice to have a few more moments where you creep through environments and have more horror elements to the game or the story, but the developers chose action. I can see why they did this, but often I came away from a Back 4 Blood session feeling tired and worn, rather than looking forward to the next session.

I mentioned before the fun I had with friends, and I split my playtime roughly 50/50 between multiplayer and single player. When I did play solo, it’s not as fun as you would want it to be and you’re constantly reminded about multiplayer. The game doesn’t do a great job of filling your lobby with other human players and you end up with a team of bots, who aren’t very clever. For example, I was running through a level only to find one of my bot buddies just standing in a kitchen shooting at a wall, when they could have been out helping out fighting off the waves of Ridden trying to kill their teammates.

Up until this point, the game is all very familiar, with Turtle Rock Studios sticking to the Left 4 Dead script. However, they have introduced a card system that adds lots of interesting modifiers to your game. This system really makes Back 4 Blood stand apart from Left 4 Dead, and over time I have come to really like it. There’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to the cards and how you sync up with other teammates, plus the hierarchy of the cards themselves. The cards allow to you spec into build types in meaningful ways, for example, if you carry a gun by default you may want to have cards relating to ammo, or if you want to go in with melee weapons then you can do something similar. Paired up with creating great builds, the cards allow you to generally boost Cleaner stats like health, damage, and stamina. Everyone begins with a Starter Pack to get you going, but as you play the game you’ll collect different cards which allow you to customize your deck, in turn affecting your playstyle.

As well as cards affecting your character, weapons, and stats they can also have an effect on the environment. For example, don’t disturb the crows or you’ll alert the horde, plus there are other environmental effects like decreasing the visibility or increasing the power or changing the type of Ridden that attacks you. It keeps the game fresh and offers up plenty of variety, which is a nice modern spin on the formula this team pretty much came up with within the first place. Turtle Rock Studios could have played it ultra-safe and simply emulated Left 4 Dead, but this shows they want to innovate and push the genre forward, and I think it’s one of the game’s biggest success stories.

Complimenting the PVE campaign and multiplayer co-op is a PVP mode where humans face off against the Horde. Some players play as humans and others play as Zombies. This was probably the least satisfying mode in the game for me. It didn’t flow very well, it wasn’t exciting and I stopped playing after a short amount of time with it. I would love to see PVP where humans face off against other humans while having to deal with a PVE component like the Ridden. This sounds very similar to something they do in Destiny called Gambit, and I think it would work. However, for now, this is what we’ve got, and I’m not a big fan. Give it a try, see if you like it, but the majority of my playtime was in the PVE mode, ideally with friends.

Back 4 Blood is a solid shooter. The guns feel great, it’s satisfying to cut through the waves of Ridden, but only to a certain extent. The gameplay does feel a little samey, and I found myself playing in short stints, rather than long gameplay sessions. The game is definitely more fun when played with friends, and I think the fact this game has cross-play enabled day 1, as well as being on Xbox Gamepass means the population should be healthy for a while. I’d like to see some quality of life improvements and a better PVP mode, but if you’re into killing hordes of Zombies while hanging out with your friends, then I can recommend you give Back 4 Blood a try.

Developer: Turtle Rock Studios
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Platforms: Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PC
Release Date: 12th October 2021