Back 4 Blood

It's go a name like a B-grade action movie starring Steven Segal

Christmas has finally arrived for me. No, not because of Cyberpunk, but because of Game Awards season, which essentially allows me to piggyback off of the industry for content. (Yay) The night itself was pretty boring and anticlimactic for me, with the obvious suspect collecting all of the rewards that they were looking for, but there were still a steady selection of trailers that tickled my interest in various ways. Now I didn't feel that everything I saw there was worthy of conversation, and that might be because we saw neither Silent Hills nor Elden Ring despite several assertions from 'in-the-know' sources. (Never trust anyone ever) But I thought it wouldn't be right if I just ignored the game awards entirely on this blog about gaming so I'll say this much; congrats to Last of Us, Hades should have won more and Christopher Nolan should spend more time talking about games and less time twisting producer's arms in order to get his movies into theatres in the middle of a pandemic. (I'm never going to let that go.) So let me start off this award day coverage by talking about Back 4 Blood.

Behold probably the biggest 180 I've ever done regarding my opinion of a game, because I went from completely disinterested to signing up for the Alpha in the space of a couple minutes. To my credit I will say thus; their trailer sucked. I mean the cinematic trailer specifically; and it was the most terrible cinematic that I've seen in a good long time. (Actually only topped by a few other trailers during this very event.) First it started off with zombies, never a good sign when you're looking for imaginative premises, then it showcased a group of survivors so forgettable I literally cannot remember a single one of their faces; and it was all garnished with comically generic dialogue and witty banter which bordered on parody in it's flat lifeless content. I mean this looked bad. That was, until, I saw the title and noticed it was 'Back 4 Blood', with a stylised '4' instead of 'for'. "Huh", I thought, "that's similar to Left 4 Dead." (The cogs began to turn.)

Apparently this particular game had been floating about for a while without me hearing about it, and it is quite literally the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead that Valve would never allow the original devs to make, so they left and made it anyway. I still think it's kinda crappy of Valve not to hand over the IP, provided the story really is as cut and dry as they say, but I cannot understate to you how excited that connection to L4D made me, because I am all about Left 4 Dead. Back in the day, that game was the co-op title of the day, a game that was so unendingly entertaining that it spawned a whole community dedicated to creating custom maps for it years down the line. I mark L4D as one of the few games that's just as fun to watch as it is to play, thus even hearing suggestion of a continuation was enough to soundly turn this here frown upside down.

It only made a cherry on the cake for the developers to then come out and treat us with an actual gameplay trailer that was luckily devoid of all the 'great dialogue' that the team decided to write. And I have to say, it looks just like my memory of the old games do when I close my eyes. The animations look smooth, the graphics have stepped up and this just feels like a natural successor to the Left 4 Dead franchise. Back 4 Blood doesn't try to push the envelope in terms of fidelity and it doesn't need to; merely capturing a glimmer of that excitement wrapped in ingenuity is what everyone really wants to see. The years have shown us countless pretenders to the throne of Left 4 Dead, and a few have even been decent, but I remain adamant that there's a special little touch of jank that really sets this sort of game apart. I hope that Back 4 Blood might touch upon that.

The basic story of the zombie infection has been slightly updated in the most perfunctory way too, by blaming this infection on some breed of alien worms, but aside from that everything seems to be like your typical apocalypse. The various types of zombies has changed somewhat, however nothing seems to be incredibly distinct from their Valve counterparts. You have the Four-armed zombies that seem to hop around the place and lay traps for players, large zombies that take a lot of damage to take down and quite a lot of bile spitters. Where the creativity takes a step up is with the scale of these beasts that can be several feet higher than any normal human. The gameplay even showed one juggernaut interacting with the environment and chucking things out of the way, creating a very dynamic looking gameplay moment which I hope will be indicative of the design philosophy for the rest of the game.

All the gunplay looks to be serviceable too, with the cartoonish vibe to the gore really offsetting the many limbs that are being shot off. It really reminds me of the arcade-like feel to L4D's action which made it so accessible to jump into. Although, I do wonder for what the public might think of this game now we're no longer in a world without competition for this style of game. I've mentioned that there's been many pretenders, but some similar style games have actually made the idea their own and innovated in truly spectacular ways, such as Vermintide. There is a game that worked in decent melee combat into the formula as well as loot systems and progression, all in a way which felt like an evolution upon the formula whilst Back 4 Blood might be seen as a little 'same old, same old' to some people. But each to their own, I say.

Honestly, at the end of the day the things that I'm most excited for regarding this project is the stuff that they didn't talk about; namely, how accessible it'll be for the community. L4D 2 proved to be a playground for people to mess around in, and it resulted in a game that ballooned it's lifecycle to a legendary length. (Albeit, much of that prestige is lost today due to plain zombie fatigue.) Nowadays we're really missing that sort of community interaction with our games, and I'd love for Back 4 Blood to be the catalyst for those sorts of games to return. Mods, model swaps, custom maps, these are the tools of a virtual playground I long to mess around in. Anything which stirs the creativity of it's players is always worth a look, even if it's not the sort of game you'd typically play. (Take that from someone who literally has no one to play a co-op focused game with)

But of course, I tend to be someone who's easy to inflame but harder to satiate, and it's quite possible that Turtle Rock Studios have no interest in nurturing a community of custom content in a title they'll clearly be looking to monetise. (Modern development sensibilities have diverged quite a bit from the old days) Yet even then, there's still enough interest and blind fun in a fun little zombie massacre game for me to sign up to the Alpha, so I guess that alone proves I'm willing to give this team at least a modicum of my faith. We may exist in a gaming world saturated to the gills with undead romps to the point where zombies have lost any and all remote intimidation they once held, but despite it all we keep going back for one more run like the mindless instinct-driven automatons we take pleasure in annihilating. There's a lesson there somewhere.