After 9 hours, Back 4 Blood is very exciting
Back 4 Blood is the spiritual successor of Left 4 Dead from Turtle Rock Studios. It is now released and we are playing it. Well, it was not officially “out” until October 12, but considering that anyone who pre-ordered the game can start playing it from yesterday, it is basically in the middle of a soft release. Those who don’t have a pre-order (because pre-ordering the game is stupid) or planning to play it on Game Pass can only wait until Tuesday.
We will conduct a full review of the game at that time, but at the same time, I have recorded my impressions based on the first nine hours of slaughtering zombies with my friends. Point? So far, Back 4 Blood is very interesting, not as complicated or bloated as I feared. As I play more levels, try more cleaners and unlock more modifier cards, please check back for updates.
Return to the impression of the first day of 4 Blood
To be honest, I was not excited about launching Back 4 Blood yesterday. In the past year, I played two early versions of the game, once to run for alpha, and tried PvP again earlier this year. Both times, I didn’t have much fun. I doubt Turtle Rock’s new emphasis on attribute rewards obtained through cards, and don’t like how slow it feels than Left 4 Dead. This is also a bit confusing for me, it really hinders the shootout. I am happy to report that after playing the full game for nine hours, I have completed it 180 times.
Back 4 Blood is pretty good, not surprisingly, it will be much better to play with friends. The first thing I noticed in the full version is how good the shooting feels-this is a very important thing for cooperative FPS! Although the tracer flying out of the barrel is obviously slow, everything is a hit scan, which means that if you have a quick headshot, even a single-shot gun will feel powerful compared to a fully automatic rifle.
After replaying Left 4 Dead 2 with friends for many years, the transition from running and shooting to stopping and ejecting is a bit awkward-Back 4 Blood is more like Call of Duty-but we found that many guns are beautiful and very accurate starting from the hips , If you buy or plunder some accessories, it may become more accurate.
Wait, buy and loot in my Left 4 Dead sequel? That’s right, in Back 4 Blood, you don’t always give you a better gun at the midpoint of the level. At the beginning of each level, you can spend the copper found in the world to buy healing items, grenades, guns, accessories, and upgrades that apply to the entire team. At first I was not attracted by the idea of fiddling with my weapons, but the upgrades were so varied and transformative that they won me. Do I spend the last coins on a suppressor that can provide sneak attack rewards for zombies who cannot see you, or equip my shotgun with armor-piercing bullets that can penetrate a bunch of zombies at a time?
Turtle Rock has made some smart design choices through its customization and plundering to prevent it from getting into trouble. On the one hand, the beginning of the level (while you are still in the safe room) is the only time when you can actually buy things and micro-manage your toolkit. And since everyone is doing it at the same time, you will organically get a few minutes of buying stage before everyone leaves the room comfortably. After leaving the world, you can exchange attachments with those found on the ground, but you cannot dive into the Apex Legends-style inventory screen and decide to install this scope on another gun.
Back 4 Blood is more about making quick decisions and moving on, both because of its simple loot makes it easy, and because if you hone for too long, the AI director will send new waves of infection in your way.
The special infections of Back 4 Blood (called Mutations here) are an important reason why shooting is so interesting. There are many of them-Turtle Rock basically obtained the infected prototype from Left 4 Dead and expanded it in all directions.
For example, there is basically a baby boomer who will spit out tribal acid and explode on your face, but there are also two or three other variants with different weaknesses, they may explode into fire, or as shown in the gif above , Throw you 40 feet backward into an early grave. In these variants, the director may provide corruption cards (random world modifiers) at the beginning of the level to make them more aggressive or give them thick armor around weak points.My favorite new monster is Sleeper. A zombie will ask, “If the Hunter of Left 4 Dead hides in a fleshy wall sac until you approach them and Then Pounce on you? ”
Those nasty sleepers caused a lot of trouble to our team when we met them for the first time, but in the subsequent game, my friend was playing Carly, these are the eight “cleaners” of Back 4 Blood one. Cleaning tools have unique personal abilities and a team bonus that is beneficial to everyone. Carly’s sign is that she can see special infected people through the walls. This technique comes in handy when we navigate a dark house full of sleepers.
Cleaners are another aspect of Back 4 Blood, I didn’t expect I would like it so much. Just like the L4D survivors before them, many personalities are reflected in situational jokes. Every cleaner has several different ways to express “why did you shoot me”, and the people who talked to them said “chill, it was an accident”. But unlike L4D, I not only choose the character based on the hands I want to see in the next 30 minutes. So far, I’ve been playing Doc, a support role, who can heal every teammate for free in one mission and start with my favorite pistol, but I’m seriously considering switching to Holly, a bat lover, every She can get stamina kills in every close combat, basically making her a never-ending zombie-head weed.
Since the last time I played, Turtle Rock seems to have adjusted the difficulty skillfully. The game defaults to the lowest difficulty level 3, Recruit. We noticed that the fairly stable supply of ammunition and copper made most of the first act easy and interesting (usually a gathering of two people and AI partners), but we started to play a few levels in the second act. We are sticking to Recruit for the time being, because each difficulty level will be unlocked separately. I would love to know how difficult Back 4 Blood will be once we are ready for the second pass. According to the description, the game has been preventing some particularly mean and corrupt cards.
The core of my Back 4 Blood fun is its amazing performance on my rapidly aging PC. In last year’s Alpha test, my RTX 2060 and Ryzen 2600 CPU encountered serious frame rate issues, but now in the full version, I can get relatively smooth 80-90 fps on high presets without lifting my finger. . I suspect that Back 4 Blood will be of great help to the realization of Nvidia DLSS function here. I set it to quality, and so far, I haven’t noticed any cloudy motion blur that supersampling sometimes causes.
Back 4 Blood is a big game. After finishing the first act of the four, it is obvious that I am only now starting to get into its core. I think I have played Left 4 Deads a half during that time, so this time the map diversity may not be a problem. In other words, it’s a shame that (as far as I know) Turtle Rock has no official plan to modify the tool. This advantage allows Left 4 Dead 2 and other Source games to remain alive with new free content years after release. .Maybe someone will find a way, but I doubt if I can click a button to turn Back 4 Blood’s Tallboy into Shrek.
In the final comment, I will have more information about Back 4 Blood’s map, card system and PvP mode (PvP looks terrible so far, but with such a good cooperation, I may not care).