Back 4 Blood Review (Babadewk)
Definitely not worth the £60 price tag.
This game feels like a confusing mash of mechanics that just do not work well together, mixed with many poor / questionable game design decisions.
Add to that the fact that the game's idea of difficulty is simply just to spawn an insane amount of "special" ridden right on top of you.
Special Ridden
The special ridden are, overall, extremely poorly designed. In terms of visuals, sound, and the way that they work, and the way you can counter them.
To give comparable examples, in Left 4 Dead, each special infected has a very clear silhouette. The Spitter, Charger, Boomer, Jockey, etc, all have very distinguishable visuals. Very easy to identify. On top of that, they play very easily recognizable sounds right before spawning, so that you and the team have time to react to the fact that they are there. And most importantly, they were all designed so that you are able to counter their attacks if you have the skill and reaction to it.
When the Smoker smokes you, it plays a sound right before attacking, and the tongue takes a while to reach you. During this time, the smoker is very weak so that you can quickly locate and shoot it if you are fast enough. Additionally, you can attack the tongue with a well-timed melee attack as well. For the hunter and jockey, you can either backtrack and forward-charge with a shove attack to make them stumble temporarily, or even do a well timed shove while they are in the air, right backing attacking you. I can keep on with these examples.
The point is, none of these nuances are to be found in Back 4 Blood. The special ridden seem generally designed to be tanky as hell (able to soak up a whole lot of damage), with attacks that does not in any sense seem designed to have clear counter-mechanics that you can employ. The Tallboy just walks towards you, until it does a last-minute sprint of godlike speed to grab you (if it's the crusher mutation). The spitter variants of the special ridden just have projectiles that fire at the speed of light, making you unable to dodge them, all you can do is try your best to find cover while their insanely low cooldowns means that they just keep on spamming attacks on you. The Retch can spew vomit from 500 km away, also at high velocity. And what they all have in common is that they are basically extremely tanky. In any case, the best "counter" you end up employing is either to run like hell, or simply shoot them as fast as possible, praying that they don't reach you before you do. Now you can try doing this with 5 Tallboys and 4 spitters / hockers, whilst you have a reeker running towards you. I guess because they were too incompetent to come up with better designs, the best way they can increase the difficulty is just to throw all of this at you at once.
I'm not saying the special ridden has to be exactly like what they are in L4D at all. I'm just saying there's no reason why they haven't applied the same wisdom to the design.It clearly works
Card System
The overall idea of the card system is nice, but in practice I think it works poorly with the rest of the game.
The idea of the card system seems to be that you can create decks which represents certain builds. Maybe you make a deck that makes you good with melee, with assault weapons, with shotguns, etc.
But I don't think that works well with the other RNG elements of the game, and I don't think it plays nicely with balance and corruption cards either. In general, it doesn't play well with the overall dynamic and "adjust as you go along" type of game that B4B tries to be with corruption cards.
First of all, you can make a build that makes you good with a certain type of weapon, sure. But you will not exactly be sure when you will be able to get a good quality weapon of that type because the weapon drops and the store weapons are random. This will matter a whole lot of harder difficulties. Getting what you need for your build to work best will be at the mercy of the RNG gods.
Second of all, decks are very static by nature. You create a deck. You choose one at the start of your run, and then you are locked to that deck for the entirety of that run. No matter what corruption cards are thrown at you, and no matter what else happens in the game. This means that even though the game tries to be dynamic and throw you surprises, you generally can't use your deck to adjust to any of it. Your deck is what it is, and at any one point (after each level), you will only be able to pick 5 cards from your deck, also taking into account that the sequence of cards matters as well. This leaves you very little wiggle room to do any meaningful choice regarding your cards once a run has started.
Honestly, I don't understand why they don't just do away with the concept of decks, and simply allowed people to choose from the entirety of the card pool at the beginning of each level. You will still be able to create builds the same way you do it with decks, the only difference will simply be that players are more free to pick and choose as the game progress. It seems very arbitrary to lock people at a pre-defined stack of 15 cards. What good does that do?
Besides this, balancing with the card system is also a bit... off. When you get to higher difficulties, the powers and abilities of cards matters a lot. But by the very nature of the design, you will always start out weak. At the start of the run, you will always have fewer cards than at the end. Meaning the game will at times be harder simply by the fact that you don't have access to as many cards as later... it's just odd compared to being equal in power throughout an entire Act / campaign. But maybe that's just me.
Annoying Design Decisions
Then there are the exceedingly annoying smaller design decisions that makes no sense whatsoever, and ruin the overall impression.
First of all, no manual toggle flashlight. Really? Apparently modern game design loves to take step backs on what seems like obvious, basic functionality. A decade old game like L4D (and many other games) did this. Why can't I toggle my flashlight? Seriously, why? There are many times where I've wanted to toggle the flashlight where the game did not do it for me. And if I have to hear another fanboy tell me to simply "adjust my brightness" I'll go crazy. Why should we have to make either game-wide or system-wide adjustments to make up for such an extremely simply feature that would be so easy to put in, in the first place? Again, it makes no sense.
Second of all, removing attachments cannot be done. Again, what is this insanity? And yes, I know, they are working on adding a card that does it. But seriously, a card!? WHY can't it just be something you can do? The only thing this atrocious design decision has done so far is basically punish me and my friends from picking up higher tier weapons because we have had lower tier weapons with better attachments. With all other things that go on in the game of RNG, why should it be a risk to pick up another weapon and just pray to the RNG gods that you then get the attachments you want later? I just don't understand it.
Third of all, car alarms and door alarms are designed extremely poorly in relation to projectiles. You can trigger cars and doors miles and miles ahead in the level that you have no chance of currently seeing, because there seemingly are no radius at which the player has to be within before shooting alarms triggers them. This doesn't provide any good. No amount of skill will be able to get you out of that situation, besides constantly shooting towards the ground. Maybe you think that's good design, I certainly don't. You're punishing the player for something he/she is not yet able to react to.
There are many other points I could make... but these were the ones that just seem to stick out the most...
All in all, not really recommended. Go play something like L4D instead :)