A little bit of shock content just for you: Left 4 Dead 2, in which we still seemed to be shooting hordes of zombies with such pleasure yesterday, came out almost 12 years ago. Then Valve had not even released CS: GO and Dota 2, nobody thought about GTA V – Liberty City from the “four” still kept many secrets, and Sony had just started developing the PlayStation 4 and had no idea what it would share in the future. with PC boyars with a collection of exclusives. The creators of the original L4D – Turtle Rock studio – decided to return our 2009 to us with the game Back 4 Blood, which is actually the reincarnation of the same zombie franchise, just under a different name. We played the beta version of the shooter and now we will discuss in the material whether the company managed to preserve the dignity of the “original” and whether the world needs a Left 4 Dead successor in 2023.
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Traditional disclaimer: Cybersport.ru editors played the closed beta version of Back 4 Blood from 5 to 9 August. Eight chapters from two different acts (judging by the numbering, from the first and fourth), five heroes and five types of special infected (which are still divided into subtypes, but more on that later) were available in it. The impressions from the full version may differ, especially for Sergey Lampochko Sergienko, for whom B4B simply did not work.
Cybersport.ru editors on their first foray into the woods in Back 4 Blood
Welcome to the apocalypse, again
Let’s start with the main thing: how similar is Back 4 Blood to Left 4 Dead? I readily admit that if the game was created by some other studio, then such a blatant case of plagiarism would certainly be interested in a California court. Turtle Rock has so pedantically approached the transfer of all the key mechanics and features of its already classic hit into a new shooter that they can isolate something fundamentally new from the B4B formula – something that would give it a “face” and allow it to fully perceive the game as an independent one. franchise – it was pretty difficult in beta.
Just like 12 years ago (here you can argue that L4D had the first part, but let’s be honest: it was the “two” that became a real phenomenon), in B4B you have to take control of one of the four survivors and lead him from shelter A to shelter B, simultaneously destroying hundreds of brain-hungry zombies. You need to get pleasure directly from shooting monsters, since, of course, no sudden plot twists, scripted scenes and other attractions are expected – that’s what Left 4 Dead bequeathed.
It is almost impossible not to experience the feeling of déjà vu while playing. Here’s our editorial four filled up the starting area to collect weapons and first-aid kits. Here is the door behind which dozens of zombies were waiting for us. A little further – a car with an alarm, which, of course, I accidentally got into, having summoned monsters from all over the area for dinner. Fortunately, the situation was easily corrected with a pipe bomb – it squeaked so loudly that the zombies completely forgot about our heroes, surrounded the explosives and soon turned into a bloody haze. All this is an episode from our Back 4 Blood walkthrough, but before writing the review, I specially downloaded L4D2 and experienced exactly the same scene there – I added nostalgia to the déjà vu.
Instead of the main menu in B4B, players are greeted by a camp – here you can take quests and buy new cards for the deck
It’s funny that in 2015 Turtle Rock tried to revive the co-op shooter genre, but acted much more daringly. Then the company released Evolve – a game about a monster opposing a squad of four. It, at least, showed the studio’s desire to develop and change the genre. Only the release failed, and together with Evolve, the creative ambitions of the developers to do something truly new in the industry apparently died. Hence Back 4 Blood is a game in which Nick and Coach are absent, probably only because Valve retained the rights to them.
I never asked for this
With all the obvious self-repetitions of Turtle Rock, it should be noted: Back 4 Blood is a much more modern version of Left 4 Dead, with a new engine and a picture corresponding to industry standards. The sun’s rays are beautifully refracted here through the morning haze, the erased metal edges of rifles shine in the dark, reflecting light sources, and zombies … well, they have more polygons than those in 2009!
However, the quality of the picture is still a secondary thing when it comes to a co-op shooter. It is much more important that the game is able to keep your interest and that of your friends for many hours. The good news is, replaying Back 4 Blood is just as fun as L4D2. The bad news: Turtle Rock has not come up with anything fundamentally new in the gameplay after 12 years – B4B gives the impression of a predecessor, generously coated with mods. And this is not an exaggeration, most of the unique features of Back 4 Blood were really added to L4D long ago by the craftsmen.
It is difficult to see anything in the fog, but in the screenshot you see the sudden death of Daniel Smacked Khvalev at the hands of Ogre
When comparing the two games, the most striking is the modified shooting system. In a foppish way, placing headshots from the hip at a distance of more than a couple of meters in B4B will no longer work – the weapons have too large a spread of bullets, so you have to use a scope for accurate hits. However, even this, at first glance, a large-scale change is actually rather cosmetic, since it does not really directly affect the dynamics of the game – too quickly the heroes manage to raise the rifle to eye level. The same zombie hunt from L4D comes out, only with a “quick-scope”.
The weapon system itself has also changed, and I can’t say for the better. It has become more difficult, but whether this can be considered a compliment when it comes to a fun cooperative zombie shooter is a big question. Rifles and shotguns were replaced by rifles and shotguns of different quality (from boring gray to legendary gold), and even with the same multi-colored attachments – scopes, butts, magazines.
The introduction of modifications is a rather successful solution. Shooting from a “naked” AK-47 is not very pleasant: both the barrel goes up and the front sight is bulky. But once you attach a stock and a holographic sight to it, the rifle immediately turns into one of the best weapons in the game. At the same time, B4B has enough sloppy solutions from the developers – for example, you cannot remove the body kit from the gun, you can only replace it with another one. And if in a situation with an enlarged magazine or butt this does not sound like a problem, then an optics with a high magnification accidentally put on a shotgun terribly interferes and actually forces you to change your favorite barrel to any other that you meet along the way. However, I have no doubt that there will be fewer such flaws in the game by the time the game is released – the forums are already filled with complaints about sniper scopes ruining the passage.
Inventory in Back 4 Blood sometimes looks like the events are taking place in some kind of MMORPG
But it’s hard to believe that Turtle Rock will abandon the very system of “quality” of things. But I would like to, since all these legendary, rare and ordinary cannons with body kits give the impression of a completely optional add-on over an already working scheme. The problem here is that the difference between the common green flash suppressor and the rare gold will be noticeable only if you carefully compare their indicators in the inventory and see that the second has a decrease in recoil of, for example, not 25, but 30%.
Does it matter? Well, sort of. Is it felt in dynamics? Definitely not. Any stock solves all issues with recoil, turning rifles into real laser guns, and any enlarged magazine holds – you won’t believe – more bullets, and therefore it will be better than the standard one. But Back 4 Blood for some reason regularly pushes you to stand in the middle of a fierce firefight and try to compare the parameters of the two silencers.
“This is a trifle,” you say, and perhaps you will be right. But the fact of the matter is that there are too many such trifles in B4B (there are rare grenades, rare first-aid kits and even rare bandages!), And therefore, no matter how enthusiastic the player is a zombie hunter, sooner or later he will simply score on all calculations and among all these piles of multi-colored cannons will be looking for your favorite M4. And this depreciates the mechanics – which, let me remind you, is one of the few visible “upgrades” of B4B in comparison with L4D.
Are you charging them at the kiosks?
The main innovation in Back 4 Blood is the card system. Each player will have to collect their deck before going on a quest and … that’s where the parallels with Hearthstone end. The cards here are modifiers, buffs that the character will receive in each new shelter. Began the passage – here are several cards to choose from, completed the first chapter – take another cardboard.
PvP cards. There are much fewer interesting bonuses in PvE, which is strange
The bonuses in B4B are quite different: from not too ingenious “+ 10% to health” to cards that give you vampirism in hand-to-hand combat or replace a useless butt blow with a stab that is deadly for a simple zombie. Take the last two – and you can easily restore yourself 20 units. health in relatively calm moments. Needless to say, there are more bonuses of the first type in B4B than the second? And therefore, it was impossible to collect any unusual combos that completely change the gameplay in the beta version.
Zombies also have their own deck: it changes the conditions on the map and strengthens the monsters, and with her, things are more fun. So, during testing, we came across cards that significantly increased the number of cars with alarms or flocks of corpse-eating crows at the level (they work in the same way as cars: knock out such a crow, and it will call the horde for help), imposed an impenetrable fog on the terrain and added impenetrable skin growths to the special infected, which served them as armor.
The stock is still very meager – there was only one card for each monster in the AI deck. However, there is a lot of room for future content updates in this system. New abilities of the infected, traps, and even the “Day of the Lumberjack” map, which will replace all weapons on the map with axes – all this can greatly increase the replayability of PvE campaigns in B4B, which should be a key task for Turtle Rock, because in PvP- Unfortunately, the regime cannot hope.
Forget about PvP
The classic “Battle” from L4D, in which the survivors still got from point A to point B, and the infected, controlled by another team of players, still tried to prevent them, were replaced by the classic “Battle”, in B4B unexpectedly came the mode with fights in arenas. And this is a terrible, terrible decision.
Smacked wins, I am watching
The only task of the human team here is to stay on their feet for as long as possible. They will be prevented from doing this by waves of zombies, special ones infected from the enemy team and a swarm – that is, the blue zone from PUBG, the storm from Fortnite and other barriers that prevent you from sitting in the corner of the map in the “royal battles”. In B4B, the safe part of the map also decreases with each round, and after about five minutes it becomes completely impossible for people to survive.
As a result, the whole game feels artificial, orchestrated: the infected, no matter how hard they try, have practically no chances to win in the first minutes – the survivors by that time have too much regen and freedom of movement. And after four minutes, everything changes, and even the most disorganized team of zombies will be able to put all people on the ground with a primitive head-on attack. There is no room for self-improvement and building strategies at all.
And in the mode there are no random events, the maps are mostly uninteresting squares in the open air, the competitive component is also under a big question – neither you have a rating of the best monsters, nor a table with the most accurate survivors, what then generally strive for? The PvP mode is so uninspiring that I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. We went to play it as an editorial team, but even this did not brighten up our experience – already in the middle of the first round (after about 2.5 minutes) Daniil Smacked Khvalyov sighed heavily and suggested a shower. We finished the match (we won – 2: 0!), But only to boast about it in the article.
For the first time in our tent …
However, in this situation there is still one plus: in the context of a boring mode, we can talk about special zombies that have replaced everyone’s favorite Hunters and Fatties. In the beta version of such monsters – of those that the player can control – there were three: “Rough”, “Fat” and “Spitter” (the names were invented by the editors, but I assure you, they are much easier to use in battle than the options from the game) …
Zombies in B4B are unusually prickly
“Rukastiye” is a kind of variation on the Thug from L4D. This is a tall zombie with a huge hand, which he – depending on the mutation – can either grab the survivor and hold him until they come to the rescue, or hit the ground, scattering people to the sides.
“Fatty” are the same “Boomers” from L4D (by the way, remember the times when the word “boomer” meant only zombies? And the old farmer remembers). One variation of such zombies, excuse me, vomits at the survivors, reducing their viewing radius and inflicting damage (bile burns painfully), the second rushes into the crowd and explodes, causing quite tangible damage.
The “Spit” in B4B is more of a mix between the L4D Spit and the Hunter, as this monster can jump nimbly, grabbing onto any surface and aiming fire from there. The creature spits bile (you understood everything correctly – it burns) or some kind of cobweb that nails the survivor to the ground. In this case, the victim is deprived of the opportunity to move and shoot, and you can help her by hitting her forehead well with the butt – don’t ask.
There are three more types of enemies in the game that cannot be controlled in PvP: Signalka, Sleeper and Ogre. The first got its nickname from the editors, as its only function in the game is to summon a horde of zombies with a loud scream if it is not killed in time. Sleeper is the official name for a monster that usually sleeps peacefully in a cocoon on the wall until a survivor walks by, and then pounces on it, holding it in place. Fortunately, it can be neutralized with just a couple of shots. Ogre is a replacement for Tank from L4D. This is a huge monster that throws boulders and cars at survivors, and also – for the first time in the series – has a displayed HP bar. The latter is probably needed to scare newcomers who do not expect to meet a boss in such a classic sense in B4B. However, after a couple of meetings with the Ogre, you realize that killing him is not the most difficult task in the game. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have his own soundtrack, like Tank. I would like to believe that modders will quickly “present” him with a Shrek theme.
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