


With a coordinated squad, we were pooling our excess Copper to get one more team upgrade, heal up a teammate in need, or buy someone the scope they’ve been struggling without. Copper, a currency found across the levels and earned at the end of each section, can be spent on weapon attachments, the weapons themselves, grenades, ammo, and team-wide upgrades that boost the effectiveness of your various bits of kit, or up the number of them you can carry.īack 4 Blood doesn’t have a lot of quiet moments, but this is one of its more pronounced. You also come across ammo, grenades and one-time use items like propane tanks and such.īefore you leave the saferoom, there’s essentially a buying phase where you mull over what to spend your Copper on. Usually, you’re on the hunt for different attachments for your weapons, which have the potential to change how they play, particularly if they’re higher up on the rarity ladder. The more difficult a room is to access, the more likely it’s going to have valuable loot. Some require special tools to open, others will trigger an alarm if you open them, and a few are easy to access but don’t always hide something interesting. The locations of the various rooms and stashes, too, are randomised. You’re never not looking for something in Back 4 Blood’s levels, and weapons are only one part of that. Or maybe, this purple M1 rifle is so good you decide to be your team’s point man and embrace the long-distance lifestyle. Maybe the shotgun’s reload speed is slower than you’d want it. Maybe you find the SMG you like but it inexplicably has a long-range scope. You’re constantly on the hunt for a more powerful version of your chosen firearm, or something radical enough that’ll get you to drop what you have for it. Weapons come in different rarities, and their attachments are randomised. This is a game with a fairly long list of weapons, split across the usual categories. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Scattered around those levels, another critical component of Back 4 Blood comes to the fore. There’s a compelling variety of environments, all seemingly modelled after cliche Americana – the diner, the loud greasy bar, the brick homes near downtown, the suburbs, the small town church, the foggy woods – it’s all there. Almost all of the game’s areas open up to reveal a big, wide-open section where you’re encouraged to explore the different paths, look for hidden loot, and survey as much of the objective as you can before you trigger the big horde. The level design, enemy variations, and encounters all embrace that. It’s a zombie shooter balanced around stop-and-pop action, one that encourages identifying and dealing with threats at range. It’s the most modern interpretation of those tenets, but it’s also a game coming out in 2021 - mindful of as many of our modern expectations as it can without ruining the flow.īack 4 Blood’s gameplay flow is fundamentally different from its predecessors.
#BACK 4 BLOOD PC PS2#
Left 4 Dead is still fun, but in sort of the same way a PS2 game can be: pretty engaging for an hour or two before you realise how hard it is to give up years of design, visual and production value progress for a nostalgia kick.īack 4 Blood is and isn’t the Left 4 Dead successor you were hoping for. In the lead-up to the launch of Back 4 Blood, the new game from the people who co-created the subgenre, I went back to re-experience Left 4 Dead.

The influence and legacy of Left 4 Dead were never in question, but there exists this idea that Turtle Rock and Valve’s classic co-op zombie shooter had a nebulous quality that cannot be articulated a formula that no one has been able to replicate.
