Played Back 4 Blood. Left 4 Dead at minimum salaries – review addiction

Will the novelty be able to surpass its immortal progenitor? To find out, we played the Back 4 Blood beta and talked to the game’s creators.

How the Back 4 Blood campaign works

PvE-mode Back 4 Blood really strongly resembles Left 4 Dead: it is built on exactly the same principles and mechanics, only with a couple of point changes. Four people move from one safe room to another, fighting off hordes of zombies and special infected. Each character has five slots for equipment: a large cannon, a pistol or melee weapon, a grenade, a healer, and some auxiliary tool like a stun gun, with which you can break out of the enemy’s grip. Enemies here are darkness, and at any second there may be even more of them: it is enough to inadvertently scare away a flock of noisy crows or, as is usually the case, to shoot at a car with an alarm. And health and patrons are not endless – to survive until the end of the campaign, you need to be on the lookout and constantly cover your partners.

Special Infected (they are called “possessed” by Back 4 Blood) are not represented by specific mutants, as in L4D, but rather by archetypes, within which there are different subspecies. The spit looks like a hybrid of a Hunter and a Smoker: it is fragile, briskly bounces on different surfaces and attacks from afar; depending on the mutation, she can either shoot acid pointwise, or swaddle the victim in a cocoon, from which her companions will have to pull her out. The stinker combines the qualities of the Fat Man and the Spitter, only, unlike them, he is quite strong in health: he makes his way to the survivors, splashes them with caustic bile and explodes after death. Finally, Verzila is a cross between Thugs and Tanks: he can run and is able to withstand the fire of the whole team, scattering the nearest victims with his huge hand (he can grab one of the people with it).

In addition to the three main types of opponents, we also met zombies hanging on the wall (they work more like traps) and Ogre – a gigantic enemy who crawled out only at one level in the same places according to scripts. The developers claim that it can appear randomly, but after four passes of the confirmation stage, we did not find it

To set the game apart from Left 4 Dead without losing its former replayability, the developers of Back 4 Blood implemented a system of modifier cards into it. Before the start of each map in the campaign, the AI ​​director throws additional conditions and tests for the players: for example, fog will periodically descend on the location, seriously reducing visibility, or the number of birds whose screams attract zombies will increase. Players, in turn, gradually collect a collection of cards with useful perks: from simple bonuses to stamina or ammunition to passive skills that significantly affect the character’s abilities. For example, a kind of “vampirism” was available to us: with it, killing zombies with critical hits (a shot to the head or other vulnerable point) replenished health.

Motivation to ransack all the nooks and crannies of locations and perform tests is given by the system of “multi-colored” equipment familiar from any looter-shooter: from ordinary gray to the legendary orange. And even if you have already found the unloading to your taste and are satisfied with your weapon, there is still a point in inspecting the stashes. There is always a chance that somewhere there will be exactly the same gun, but of epic rarity – with increased characteristics. Or an upgrade for it: a sight of a different magnification, an increased clip, armor-piercing cartridges. Or at least money that can be spent on pumping or buying supplies in the shelter. All this, coupled with the unique skills of the characters, makes it possible to customize your play style in each new playthrough.

Phil Robb, co-founder of Turtle Rock Studios:

There is something attractive about straying off the main route in search of useful things. This formula is used by many games: when you find something cool, it is rewarding. In addition, it forces the team to weigh risks and rewards: I can look into that dark room and find a useful thing, or I can wake up a crowd of zombies and turn the situation into chaos.

In the beta, we had two campaigns available, four levels each, and the earned perks and equipment were kept between them – we started the second campaign with everything that we accumulated during the first. Thematically, both are dedicated to the American hinterland: one-story suburbs, warehouses, mines, farms, freight stations – all roughly in the spirit of “Bloody Harvest” and “Deathknell” from the first L4D. Campaigns are structured in a similar way. Open segments with exploration of locations and an abundance of loot are regularly replaced by scripted events where you need to fight off a wave of opponents or complete a certain goal. For example, to destroy foci of infection, tracing their location on the nasty “umbilical cords” stretched along the ground.

The finals of both campaigns traditionally do not give any respite: hordes of zombies endlessly attack from all sides, while the surrounded people try to complete a certain task. In the first campaign, you need to break through from the end of the level to the middle, plant explosives in the sunken cruise ship and get out of there before the explosion. In the second – to shoot several times from the howitzer (and this is not as easy as it seems) in order to fill up the entrance to the mine, from where the mutants are springing.

In addition to the PvE campaign, there is also a PvP mode, and a completely separate one. If in Left 4 Dead “Battles” took place on levels from the campaign, where the opponents were people playing for the special infected, then Back 4 Blood offers two teams to take turns to survive in small arenas, changing sides. Whoever holds out for the people longer will win. Helps the team of survivors pumping, and much deeper and more interesting (at least in beta) than in the campaign. At the beginning of each round, people can choose four perks at once, but in addition to simple improvements to characteristics, there are much more amusing things. For example, automatic reloading of removed weapons or damage buff for every second of aimed fire. By combining these bonuses, over the course of several rounds, you can assemble a small build tailored for specific effects: for example, healing allies or attacks on the vulnerable points of the infected.

The team of monsters is also pumped, and, unlike the survivors, the improvements acquired by each player apply immediately to the entire team. But their upgrades are simpler: defense, health, attack damage and properties of special skills. Separately, you can pump simple non-playable zombies so that they bother the survivors harder.

Also, unlike Left 4 Dead, before the respawn, you can always choose which infected to attack, because each of the three Possessed has three more varieties. It is not so easy for a team of people to sit out in one secluded corner: not only the infected, but also a swarm of insects interfere with them, constantly narrowing the area of ​​the battle, as in the “royal battles”. At the end of the round, people are forced to crowd on a scanty piece of land, and even often without any cover: if the team holds out for five minutes, this is already a great success. The shortness of the rounds was the main reason why the developers preferred this particular PvP mode.

Phil Robb, co-founder of Turtle Rock Studios:

We didn’t want the PVP session to last for hours – in this mode, you win or lose very quickly. Not everyone can afford to sit down for a match that will last an hour and a half.

Beta impressions

How successful are the decisions of the Back 4 Blood developers? Will it make a worthy successor to Left 4 Dead? Now it is difficult to judge this, but we have some guesses. This time two players will share their thoughts at once: Denis prefers the first Left 4 Dead, and Sergey prefers the second.

Denis Pavlushkin, editor of Igromania

I will voice, perhaps, the first thought that comes to mind: live Back 4 Blood is played much better than you might think from the early trailers. At one time, the announcement of the game caused me (like many other Left 4 Dead fans) only skepticism, but the evening spent in the beta version left surprisingly pleasant emotions. While Turtle Rock Studios defiantly and shamelessly crushes nostalgia, the game itself doesn’t feel like a cheap attempt to cash in on the series’ disadvantaged fans. It looks quite dignified and sounds no less dignified – this is already a small, but still a success.

Try to ignore broken subtitles

Back 4 Blood quotes its ideological source almost literally, down to specific mechanics and situations – the studio could be accused of malicious copyright infringement if it did not look back at its own ideas thirteen years ago. This is alarming at first, but despite all the obvious similarities, there is one rather important difference between the old and new versions of the formula. If Left 4 Dead was primarily a competitive shooter, Back 4 Blood clearly focuses on the co-op mode, which, even on normal difficulty, is a good challenge. The shelters do not have a mountain of endless ammunition and a set of healers for the whole team – these vital things have to be bought for coins scattered across the locations, which still need to be found. The total shortage of first-aid kits, cartridges and other useful items forces us to seriously worry about resource management: a stupid approach to the economy can painfully backfire in the future.

For example, the lost health here gradually turns into a “trauma” that cannot be patched up with bandages or washed down with pills – old wounds can be healed only in a special first-aid post hidden somewhere on the map. If you are greedy and save your last first-aid kit until better times, then the best times may never come: when the maximum supply of health is reduced, there will be nothing to heal. You need to use resources wisely, so before each exit from the shelter you think hard about what to take with you, where to spend your finances and what to save on. Put all your savings on a cool cannon, or hope there is a better barrel along the way? Buy a toolbox to break into a locked supply cache, or leave that slot for a first aid kit? Cure and replenish ammo as far as it will go, or tighten your belts and save up coins for an upgrade that will help the whole team?

In Back 4 Blood, you constantly rush between selfishness and altruism, stinginess and waste – I personally did not expect the game to throw such dilemmas over the familiar zombie action. And with the action, as for me, everything is also fine. Weapons have weight and tangible recoil, crowds of monsters are beautifully scattered into bloody lumps, the pace of firefights accelerates from zero to absolute chaos in a couple of seconds. Even the system of card perks, which many in absentia called a mistake, is quite organically integrated into the gameplay and does not seem superfluous.

True, I’m not sure how long this fun will last: for all its merits, Back 4 Blood still looks like entertainment for several evenings. I will be very glad to be mistaken, but it seems to me that she simply does not have a conditional margin of safety. Payday 2 or Deep rock galactic… There is no chase for rare equipment typical of loot-shooters, there is no fine-tuning of difficulty that would allow you to arrange a particularly sophisticated test. There is no reason to go back to the game after seeing everything it has to offer. In theory, modifier cards should support replayability, changing the conditions of each playthrough, but … I remember that Turtle Rock Studios already promised something similar in Evolve – I think there is no need to tell how it all ended in the end. Back 4 Blood raises similar concerns: Sergey and I ran both campaigns several times, and the events always unfolded according to approximately the same scenario. For the first time, the thick fog suddenly covering the freeway really makes you nervous. In the second, third and fourth – hardly.

It wouldn’t be a problem if players could do something else, but there are only two game modes in Back 4 Blood – even in the original Left 4 Dead there are three! And if the co-op campaign can still claim compliments, then the competitive multiplayer turned out to be absolutely nothing. You can enjoy it, but it is completely devoid of the depth that the classic “Battle” was once famous for: it feels more like an online mode Dead space 2… That is, an amusing trinket that will soon turn out to be of no use to anyone. And for the heiress of Left 4 Dead, this is, to put it mildly, like death.

Sergey Tsilyurik, managing editor of Igromania

My impressions are a little more skeptical than Denis’s, and all because of the comparison of Back 4 Blood with her ideological inspirer. Left 4 Dead was one of the best co-op games out there; well-coordinated work of the team there was literally imposed by the mechanics. Almost all of the infected were extremely weak and relied on attacks that immobilized people – thanks to this, the monsters relied on synchronized attacks, and the survivors were forced to constantly cover each other, since those who had strayed from the team were immediately eaten. In Back 4 Blood, everything is different: the monsters are tenacious, they hit painfully and can never grab anyone for a whole campaign, relying on brute force. The developers comment on this fundamental difference as follows:

Phil Robb, co-founder of Turtle Rock Studios:

Yes, players can split up and complete everything successfully; I don’t think it’s bad. After all, this is a new game. We wanted to give people a new experience, not just make a clone of an old project.

Left 4 Dead was a tactical game: by competently covering each other, the team of survivors could minimize the damage from the attacks of the infected. In Back 4 Blood, Thrasher shoots people from an arbitrary distance, and Stinky’s and Verzila’s huge health reserves allow them to easily walk up to close range and inflict damage, which also lowers their maximum health.

The Big Man can run, and the exploding Stinky cannot be pushed away from himself, like the Fat Man in L4D

As a result, B4B is starving. At medium difficulty, the crowd was not very dangerous, but every appearance of a Special Infected almost guaranteed that the team would take damage. In the final, where you have to run towards an endless crowd, into which special infected people pour in every ten seconds, the two of us simply did not have time to kill them.

Why are we left alone? Not because of our tactical mistakes: just at the average level of difficulty, other members of the press decided not to play, and we had to resort to the help of bots. And these are the dumbest bots I’ve ever seen. Left 4 Dead also gave many reasons to complain about the behavior of AI partners, but at least they had some kind of self-preservation instinct. In Back 4 Blood, bots raise a fallen comrade while he is beaten by Verzila, and die from damage (instead of first killing the enemy, and then helping a friend). They don’t even try to move away from the exploding Stinker. Finally, they themselves – in the complete absence of enemies around – jump into the abyss and die.

I would joke about suicidal bots if their behavior did not make the game impassable

The troubles of an incomplete team are not limited to this: for the money collected, players can buy improvements for themselves or for a team; bots don’t do anything at all. They do not even get treatment for the money they have (the collected money falls into the pockets of everyone at once). Thus, by the end of the campaign, the incomplete team will be objectively weaker than the game requires. The pumping system itself turns against the players.

To play 4, we switched to low difficulty – and found that the zombies hardly try to attack on it. They are few in number, run slower – in a word, they behave unsportsmanlike. Зато особые заражённые стали умирать с пары обойм, а не с пяти-шести, как на средней. Back 4 Blood не помешала бы более тонкая настройка сложности: раз уж в ней так много вещей кастомизируются карточками, почему бы не дать игрокам возможность убавить здоровье Верзил и Вонючек, оставив количество и агрессивность зомби прежней?

Открыть дверь в церковь и призвать огромную толпу — где же я это видел?

В целом же ощущения от прохождения кампании оказались вполне схожими с теми, что в своё время дарила дилогия Left 4 Dead. Разве что сильно не хватало Танков: в L4D каждое их появление было событием, локальной кульминацией. Back 4 Blood же заваливает игроков «мясом», практически не давая точечных ярких впечатлений. Скромный бестиарий успевает приесться уже за одно прохождение, и в реиграбельность не особо верится.

Всё было бы иначе, будь кампания простым разогревом для основного PVP-режима, как в L4D. Увы, нет. Здешние уровни хороши, но, глядя на них, я не мог перестать думать о том, насколько не реализован их потенциал: вот тут можно было бы людей спихивать в пропасть, здесь было бы отличное место для засады, там было бы уместно какое-нибудь событие с тем же Огром… Однако разработчики от этого отказались.

В результате единственным PVP-режимом Back 4 Blood стал аналог «Сражения: выживания», который добавили в L4D2 через десять лет после релиза (что само по себе показывает, насколько он востребован). Да, динамики ему не занимать, зато глубины не хватает. И проистекает это из всё той же возможности закидать выживших мясом и из чрезмерной живучести Вонючек и Верзил. Да, прокачка тут глубже, чем в кампании, но нет сомнений, что игроки за неделю найдут оптимальную «мету». А за две — устанут от режима, в котором нужно просто сидеть и отстреливаться, а меняется лишь расположение центра шторма, куда игра сгонит выживших под конец матча.

Ведь тут нет тех вещей, которые делали мультиплеер L4D столь запоминающимся. Выжившим не надо никуда идти и ничего делать. Их окружение статично и не представляет никакого интереса. Тут нет машин с сигнализациями, нет пропастей, нет даже пробиваемых стен, через которые может хлынуть новая волна. Нет Танков, способных превратить части декораций в смертоносное оружие. Простора для эмерджентности тут гораздо меньше, чем хотелось бы видеть.