Making “Back 4 Blood” must have been a surreal experience for Turtle Rock Studios. After all, the developers were making a game about how a zombifying parasitic infection that destroyed the world while a real pandemic was raging outside their windows. It’s a case of life spilling over into art and in a moment of happenstance inspiring it.
“We got a few toilet paper gags in,” said executive producer Matt Driscoll. He said the pandemic “did give us a little bit of lore” in the way America reacted to the situation. He said players will find stockpiles of that bathroom essential while the rifle through derelict homes.
The bigger triumph, though, is how the team managed to produce a spiritual successor to the legendary “Left 4 Dead” series while upheaval was all around them. “Video games are hard to make at the best of times,” Driscoll said, but doing it during a pandemic was tougher.
“Back 4 Blood” takes the zombie co-op experience and modernizes it in a way that makes it more replayable. Turtle Rock Studios didn’t want to redo their classic with better graphics. They moved it a step forward in storytelling and gameplay. Instead of survivors struggling to make do in the zombie apocalypse as it happens, the characters in “Back 4 Blood” are hardened Cleaners, specialists who have helped humanity carve out pockets of life amid an undead world.
MEET THE DISTINCT HEROES
In the four-act campaign, the eight Cleaners — Doc, Hoffman, Karlee, Mom, Evangelo, Walker, Jim and Holly — are battle-tested and used to fighting the zombies, which are called the Ridden. They’re also used to the more powerful mutations, which are harder to kill and have special abilities. Each protagonist has his or her own traits. Doc and Mom are healers. Evangelo and Holly specialize in melee combat. Walker and Jim are damage dealers while Karlee and Hoffman have support talents that are essential on harder difficulties.
Four-member squads can only have one of each character, so players must choose carefully. Each Cleaner also has a history that’s revealed over the course of the campaign. To learn the full story of each hero, players will have to go through the campaign with certain characters and groupings.
The Cleaner talents are only one part of Turtle Rock’s updated formula. The other part is the card system that tweaks a character with specific perks. These cards power up a Cleaner’s toughness, offensive capabilities and other traits. Smart players will build 15-card decks that augment a hero’s talents and equipment. They earn new upgrades by going through the campaign multiple times to earn Supply Points that they use on Supply Lines, which unlocks new cards, cosmetics and personalization options. It’s essentially “Back 4 Blood’s” progression system.
What’s notable is that the deck-building concept brings randomness, strategy and newfound depth into play. Before each campaign run, players will have to choose certain cards, with the top ones being the more likely options. Players have to make the right choices based on their equipment and situation. After each mission, players will get to select one additional card, so that by the end of a run, they’ll be more powerful and able to handle whatever the AI director throws at them.
To balance that out, Turtle Rock introduces Corruption Cards to the mix. Players choose which one to give to the AI director, which mixes up the monsters so that no two scenarios unfold the same way. It brings a dash of unpredictability and difficulty to each run, but it doesn’t drastically change a linear campaign.
BALANCING ACT BETWEEEN OLD AND NEW
With “Back 4 Blood,” Turtle Rock walks a precarious line between offering familiar gameplay that fans loved in “Left 4 Dead” while also pushing the genre forward. The team does that with its characters and card system, but the mission design hasn’t changed much. Players have to make it from Point A to Point B. What they do in between is different as the Cleaners will sometimes find themselves in situations where they’re under siege, looking for body parts in nests or loading research into the back of a vehicle.
The diversity in tasks is refreshing and it also presents players with difficulties. There will be plenty of trial and error as they figure out where to go on missions or where enemies will come from when they hit a button. Experience is the best teacher in “Back 4 Blood,” while teamwork is almost as important. Having a squad that works cohesively is essential, especially when playing on harder modes. Teammates will need to share ammo, heal each other and warn the group of dangers.
Although parts of “Back 4 Blood” feel modern, it doesn’t entirely let go of its past. It’s a game that feels more nostalgic instead of new. That can seem like a drawback for those looking for innovation, but fans can’t argue with the results. “Back 4 Blood” is a great co-op experience that overshadows everything else, including the player-vs-player Swarm mode. Turtle Rock solidifies its position as developer that knows how to make a co-op experience with a formula that works across platforms and hasn’t gotten old with time.
MORE SCARES
A great year for the horror genre got even better with October’s spooky season. The month featuring Halloween is when publishers release all their terrifying projects. Bandai Namco recently came out with “The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes” by Supermassive Games. It’s the third entry in a series of efforts that work as a playable movie.
This game focuses on the events of the Iraq War in 2003. Players take on the role of five characters — four American service members and one Iraqi soldier. While characters are looking for weapons of mass destruction during a skirmish, an earthquake sends them to an underground cave system where they discover an ancient Akkadian temple. The soldiers have to survive each other and an army of mysterious monsters if they want to get out alive.
The premise is intriguing and the campaign itself is compelling enough to keep players hooked. They’ll make hard choices and even see some characters die. The one issue with the game is that the visuals, though moderately impressive, sometimes bug out and those glitches torpedo the suspension of disbelief. If players can get beyond that, “House of Ashes” is a fun adventure that’s worth a weekend playthrough.
The other effort worth noting is “Diablo II: Resurrected,” which launched last month. It’s a remake of the classic hack-and-slash loot game that inspired countless others. For this remake, Blizzard North gives the game a fresh coat of paint so that it looks great on 4K screens.
Players can note the difference between the old sprites and the new polygons through a quick toggle. The switch shows how impressive the developers’ hard work was in updating the game, so that it looks just as beautiful now as it did on old CRT monitors. That’s fine and good, but what separates this classic from its peers is the gameplay, which offers players seven classes and five acts. It’s a lot of content that will remind veterans why they love the game and it will give newcomers a sense of why this chapter is so hallowed.
With the new graphics, “Diablo II: Resurrected” shows that the classic still stands the test of time.
‘Back 4 Blood’
3½ stars our of 4
Platform: Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5, PC
Rating: Mature
