REVIEW: Back 4 Blood Beta confirms the game is a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead

Back 4 Blood is a game that will be officially released on October 12th, developed by Turtle Rock Studios and distributed by Warner Bros. Games. The developer is responsible for the creation, in partnership with Valve, of the Left 4 Dead franchise. In addition to the similarity between the names, we played the closed beta of Back 4 Blood and prepared an analysis of everything that the game has that is different and also what it keeps from its roots.

In general, the game still follows the same precept and format. The objective of Back 4 Blood is to kill zombies and survive an apocalypse caused by a worldwide infection. The format follows the same paths, with its differentials at the end. 

Back 4 Blood é Left 4 Dead 3?

For fans of the Left 4 Dead franchise and Valve, the idea of ​​there being a Left 4 Dead 3 was completely discarded many years ago with any hope that the company would make a trilogy of its main franchises. 

And within Valve, there was no real interest in making a sequel to the zombie game; on the other hand, its creators had this desire. So, with a revamped team and a few remnants of the Left 4 Dead project, Turtle Rock Studios began developing a new game. As the naming rights belong to Valve, they had to create a franchise, this time called Back 4 Blood, keeping the style of the original game.

For Valve, which still makes a lot of money from Left 4 Dead, it wouldn't be worth investing in a new entry in the franchise. So, Back 4 Blood It may be very similar to the 2008 and 2009 games, but they are unrelated and don't even belong in the same story.

Gameplay

The game has two main modes and we got a great taste of the potential of both during the closed beta. The best known is the campaign mode. In it, up to 4 players participate cooperatively in missions to survive and escape hordes of zombies, which in the game are called infected.

The main differential between Back 4 Blood and Left 4 Dead goes into the mechanics involved with characters and how they can be used. In Left 4 Dead, we could only play with the same characters and there was no difference between their abilities. Already in Back 4 Blood, there were 8 characters shown so far, each with a different story and special skills that will be important when building your team.

During the beta we were able to play in 8 campaign missions, in graphically very beautiful and varied scenarios. The game still follows the premise of a linear advance, where you only progress in the mission by going forward. Some levels have some tasks that break the stigma that the game is just for shooting zombies. Almost every final moment of a mission has a task like: blowing up a ship, loading a missile artillery, unloading a sand truck to clear the way. These moments, in addition to increasing the tension and difficulty of progression, break the frenetic pace of running in a straight line all the time, giving an interesting breath to the gameplay. 

In addition to the variety of map layout and different challenges to progress, another hit of Back 4 Blood is the variety of contaminated. In addition to the common zombies, there are also zombies with mutations that must be treated more carefully — and bullets. Each zombie mutation has different abilities and needs to be eliminated using different strategies.

meet the sentries

As mentioned before, one of the differences in Back 4 Blood is the variety of sentries, the game's playable characters. This variety allows each playthrough to differ depending on your strategy and combination of characters on your team. So, let's meet the characters in the game.

• Hoffman: He lost his mother in the middle of the infection and found a new family in the other characters. His special abilities are: generate ammo for every zombie kill, extra space to store offensive utilities, and more ammo capacity for the team.
• Walkers: He is an ex-military man of few words and respected by his comrades. He has the ability to increase the damage and health of the team, as with each critical low, the accuracy increases.
• Doctor: It is the most rational and pragmatic of the team, which has the ability to heal low health allies even without healing items; generate more health than others when using healing items and increase the team's trauma resistance. 
• Mom: She is the 'big mother' of the team: challenger and leader. It has the ability to instantly revive teammates, start campaigns with extra health, and has an extra support utility slot. 
• Holly: The light of the team, which always brings good humor and optimism. She has special abilities to recover health with melee casualties, more damage resistance, and increase team stamina. 
• Evangelo: He is the youngest and most inexperienced of the group, but also one of the most dedicated. His special abilities are: increasing the team's movement speed, increasing stamina regeneration and he is also able to break out of grabs more easily. 
• Karlee: She is the team's lone wolf. It has the ability to detect enemies, an extra inventory slot and increase the use speed of team items. 
• Jim: He knows better than anyone the surroundings where the campaign takes place. It has the ability to increase aim speed, increase team crit damage and also with each crit kill, the damage is increased.

card system

To increase the replayability of the game, the team of developers created the card system. For each match you must build a deck of cards that has buffs and corruption cards. The first ones give bonuses to your team, while the corruption cards try to affect the game to make it more difficult.

From your deck, the game will give you some options and each player will choose their cards, making each game have completely different combinations and strategies, due to the combinations of the cards.

So far, the card system has proved to be very interesting in modifying the dynamics of each match, despite being confusing right away. During the beta, the game does not have a tutorial on how to use the system and this can be confusing for most people. 

Bonus cards range from better, specific weapons to special abilities like increasing your stamina. It's worth mentioning here that in this game you can't run forever, your player has vigor, which appears as a bar on the screen, which, when exhausted, prevents the character from running, just like the breath itself. Also, you will take damage and will likely fall during the match. When a companion uses medical items on you, you will always have permanent damage, called trauma.

In addition to all these details, Back 4 Blood there's still the game director, the game's artificial intelligence. She manipulates the campaign maps according to her gameplay. So, when you play a level for the second time, it won't be the same anymore: doors will change places, zombie spawn and items will be different. All this to increase replayability, the main proposal of the Turtle Rock Studios team.

Competitive PvP mode

The PvP mode (player versus player or player versus player, in literal translation) is also very similar to the PvP of Left 4 Dead 2, formed by matches of 8 players divided into 2 teams. Each team will take a side, either as sentries or tainted.

The sentry team has 3 minutes to arm themselves and fortify their position with items from the ground and the zombies will have to coordinate an attack on the other team to kill them as quickly as possible.

Once the sentry team dies, the time will be set and the teams will switch sides; now the sentries play zombie and vice versa. The team that survives the longest at the end of the exchanges wins the round. The games in the beta were decided on a best of 3, that is, the team that wins 2 rounds, wins the game. 

Just like in the campaign, you have customizable items through the card system for both sentries and zombies, the modifications being mutations that alter the gameplay of each zombie category.

NVIDIA DLSS shows its potential

For PC gamers with Nvidia's RTX line of graphics cards, the Back 4 Blood experience has all the potential to be maximized. This is due to Nvidia's DLSS technology, which increases game performance.

DLSS is an upscaling tool, which is nothing more than rendering the game scene at a lower quality and using artificial intelligence to increase the final resolution. For example, if your graphics card doesn't run Back 4 Blood 4k 30 fps natively, when you enable DLSS, it will render the game at 1080p and use AI to get to 4K.

NVIDIA technology is constantly being updated and there are more than 60 games that support DLSS, including Back 4 Blood, which has already received the function in this open beta.

Back 4 Blood vai substituir Left 4 Dead?

During the beta, in addition to finally being able to test the PvP mode and new maps of the campaign, the game finally showed what it came for, with good gameplay and very few bugs and interface problems, which is a great sign for a beta.

However, it's hard to say that the game will fulfill its potential to replace Left 4 Dead. Despite being a lot of fun and having many improvements compared to the 2009 game, Back 4 Blood sins in one detail: monetization.

Left 4 Dead 2 it is played daily by a massive fan base and easily beats 20 concurrent players on the PC version. Knowing that the game is infinitely cheaper and more active, will this fan base move to a game that will be released at R$279,90? In addition to the full price of a triple A game, Back 4 Blood will have content divided into seasons, DLCs with maps and new mechanics that can immediately separate the game's player base.

With all this in mind, it should also be noted that the game has plenty of positive points to attract Left 4 Dead fans and new players alike. In addition to the ease of finding matches online, the game is crossplay, allowing you to play with people from any platform.

What remains for us now is to wait for the game's launch and understand what the programming of additional paid content for the game will be like. Back 4 Blood has everything to be the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, but could be overshadowed by aggressive financial planning from WB Games.

If you want to take a look at a PC that can handle this game with ease, check out the review of Techlifers envelope or computer SHIP Orbita IA20.