Back 4 Blood (for PC) Review (2024)

The Turtle Rock Studios-developed Back 4 Blood is billed as the spiritual successor to the legendary Left 4 Dead series, which makes sense as several team members worked on Valve's classic, multiplayer zombie shooter. When its visuals, gunplay, maps, music, and enemies fall into place, the $59.99 Back 4 Blood nails that frantic, cooperative action that made Left 4 Dead such a joy to play. Unfortunately, these elements don’t come together as often as they should, leaving you with a fun, but somewhat flat, PC game.

Return of the Living Dead

For the uninitiated, Back 4 Blood is a four-player, cooperative, first-person shooter. You and up to three friends (called Cleaners) traverse environments full of zombies (known as Ridden) to reach a safe house, while completing the occasional sub-objective. Back 4 Blood has a solid matchmaking system, and even lets you join games mid-progress, so you can easily fill spots if teammates drop or disconnect. AI-controlled NPCs fill vacant slots if you don’t have a four-player squad.

Most Ridden are cannon fodder that you can easily mow down with your arsenal of handguns, shotguns, assault rifles, and throwable explosives. Common Ridden are only a threat when they swarm you, but Special Ridden have unique abilities that threaten your team. Hockers spit paralyzing goo that locks you in place. Tallboys squeeze you with their giant right hands. Snitches call hordes to your location. Retches alert hordes with their corrosive bile. The 20-foot tall Ogres are effectively bosses who can wipe out your entire squad with just a few devastating attacks. In a nice touch, the Ridden appear in randomized waves, meaning no two encounters are the same.

This all sounds great on paper, but there are notable flaws with how Special Ridden engage you that sours the overall experience. It’s hard not to compare Back 4 Blood to Left 4 Dead, but the Special Zombies in the latter game felt unique not only in their play, but also with how they interacted with the world. For example, Chargers shoved you off maps, and the ape-like Jockey dragged you into alcoves, away from your teammates.

Back 4 Blood's Special Ridden don’t have nearly enough terrain interactions to make them interesting, so more often than not they just feel like dangerous bullet sponges that spawn far too frequently to feel fair or fun. The challenge comes from the game spawning Special Ridden into rooms you’ve cleared, ad infinitum, until you’ve met your objective. There are no audio cues to signal a monster's location, and they don't hide in wait to ambush you later; they just spawn and lunge. It's unsatisfying, especially compared to how Left 4 Dead handled similar enemies.

Mission Humdrum

Visually, Back 4 Blood straddles the fence between realism and cartoonish violence, with run-of-the-mill farmstead, factory, and cityscape environments accentuated by highly saturated colors that pop in the dark. The lighting deserves mention, as it's fantastic. The bluish fog that obscures some maps, dusk light splintering through tree lines, and deep, red emergency lights showcase how brilliantly Turtle Rock incorporated lighting into the game's atmosphere. It simply looks great.

Unfortunately, as good as the lighting makes these zones look, there isn’t much in the way of setting diversity. The entire game is set in a single town, with missions that take you to specific areas within the town or in its outskirts. There are 30-odd missions, and many reuse locations, since the story essentially has you run back and forth to reach new objectives. This has the adverse effect of making the setting feel all too repetitive. This would have been fine if the destinations were more distinctive, impressive set pieces, but that generally isn't the case. You get a handful of cool showdowns, such as blowing up a ship or racing through a quarantine facility, but all too often you get swarmed by Ridden hordes on a familiar street.

Deck Yourself

Back 4 Blood goes beyond its spiritual predecessor by introducing a deck-building card system. Before a match starts, you select cards that alter your stats. Every time you reach a safe house or your entire team dies, you’ll add a new card to your loadout from the deck you selected at the beginning of a level. Aliens: Fireteam Elite incorporated card systems into its loadouts, too, but Back 4 Blood makes earning, collecting, and utilizing these bonus cards a core replay incentive.

Individual cards can boost health, stamina, and ammo-carrying capacity. Others let you revive after being killed or let you carry extra health items (bandages, medicine) to give to teammates. Deck building's customizable nature means your teammates can take on specific roles. You can have a tank-type character absorb damage, a runner who bypasses hordes, or a dedicated healer for keeping everyone alive. The game is balanced around using these cards; rather than giving you an overpowered advantage, they make the subsequent challenge more survivable. As a result, it's vital to make use of the system, especially on any difficulty above Novice.

Corruption cards add an extra layer of challenge. For example, some Corruption cards boost zombies’ abilities, while others task you with finishing a level under time constraints. Completing Corruption card challenges nets you special rewards, including enhanced weapons and healing items.

Survival Tactics

Weapons feel great to use and provide excellent feedback when fired. Assault rifles are good for dealing with monsters at long range, while the shotgun takes care of anything that gets too close. Even the handgun does a decent job of clearing out standard Ridden. The sniper rifle feels somewhat out of place, since you’re almost always swimming in enemies. Still, it kicks like a mule. It’s cathartic to blast Ridden fodder from a block away, and watch its body somersault onto the pavement.

Running and gunning your way through mobs works in some instances, but if you want to reach the safe house at the end of a stage, your squad need to coordinate their efforts. This way, you’re able to revive downed teammates, provide cover fire, concentrate damage on a single powerful target or weak point, or have two teammates deal with Ridden, while the other two complete objectives (such as raising barricades or pulling switches). For these reasons, it is highly recommended that you play with friends, though the bots are somewhat decent. I’ve observed them shoot and help when I need assistance. Granted, there are limits to this. You have no way to commanding bots to focus on specific targets, and you cannot rely on them to hit weak spots, so you'll do the brunt of that work.

If you want to play solo, Turtle Rock gives you that option, but with a few annoying restrictions. Firstly, Back 4 Blood is always online, even when you're playing alone. In addition, playing solo prevents you from earning achievements or Supply Points (the currency used to unlock cards, player skins, and weapon skins). Player cards are unlocked in Solo mode, which is convenient, but that strips away one of the biggest incentives to replay the game (earning currency to buy cards to build a solid deck for your character). These are baffling and frustrating decisions. It feels like Turtle Rock deliberately designed the solo campaign to discourage people from playing it.

Back 4 Blood's Multiplayer Action

Player vs. Environment (PvE) gameplay forms Back 4 Blood’s core, but there’s also a Player vs Player (PvP) mode if you want to battle other people. These quick matches feature one team playing as Cleaners and the other team playing as Ridden. The Cleaners’ goal is to survive the hordes of AI-controlled common zombies, and player-controlled Special Ridden. Before matches start, Cleaners have a limited time to scavenge for weapons and health items. Then they must fortify their location by barricading entrances and setting traps. On the flip side, if you're controlling the Ridden must get past the Cleaners’ defenses and kill them as fast as possible. When a round ends, you switch roles. Against such overwhelming odds, it’s impossible for Cleaners to win. Victory goes to whichever Cleaner team ends up surviving the longest.

Though PvP isn’t as engaging as PvE due to the mode’s relative brevity, it provides an entertaining distraction. It doesn’t quite captivate once the novelty wears off, though. Back 4 Blood lacks Left 4 Dead's Versus PvP campaign mode, which is a glaring omission. In said mode, two teams alternated between human and zombie characters, and competed for points as they played through a preselected story campaign. It was a core Left 4 Dead game mode, and its Back 4 Blood absence is sorely noted.

Can Your PC Run Back 4 Blood?

To play Back 4 Blood, your gaming PC must contain at least an AMD Ryzen 2600 or Intel Core i5-6600 CPU, AMD Radeon RX 570 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU, 12GB of RAM, 25GB of system storage, DirectX 11, and the Windows 10 operating system. To play optimally, your rig needs an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X or Intel i5-8400 GPU, and an AMD Radeon RX 590 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 GPU.

We tested Back 4 Blood on two PC desktop computers. One housed an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 208 GPU, while the other contained an Intel i7-4790 CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. The game topped 60 frames per second on both PCs (at High, 1080p graphical settings). Overall, Back 4 Blood ran without a hitch.

Back 4 More

At its best, Back 4 Blood feels like a rock-solid Left 4 Dead follow up; at its worst, it feels like a thoughtless and overpriced knock-off. The wild fluctuation between both extremes as you progress through the campaign leaves a lot to be desired. Hopefully free patches or DLC are on the way, because more interesting missions, dynamic enemies, and additional multiplayer modes would radically elevate Back 4 Blood's status. Right now, it's a middling shooter that has a few interesting highs.

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