Back 4 Blood Review (Hudson633)
Advertised as a Left 4 Dead clone, but lacks the quality, and largely abandons the theme of four.
Concept
L4D was a beautifully simple and polished release, with 4 memorable characters, 4 well-paced campaigns, 4 well designed special zombies, and a boss. B4B butchered literally all of that.
Gameplay
The game wants you to review perk cards before you play, but there's over 150 of them, and they're poorly implemented. Payday 2 did an infinitely better job of letting you play first, then introduce a few perks to pick from, and repeat that process to keep the game flowing. B4B just mindlessly dumps it all on you at the start. Ontop of all that, there's long introduction videos that really just explain the core mechanics of L4D, which are totally pointless because the gameplay in L4D was intuitive, and this game was advertised to people that had already played it.
I don't think the teammates I was matched with even wanted to watch it. They'd probably done it all before, and raced ahead taking all the ammunition (which is limited) and attachments, while I was trying to get to grips with the character perks and shop items. Boss fights aren't satisfying when you have to fight specials at the same time, they're just stressful. You even get multiple bosses at the same time where their health bars overlap, which feels broken.
Too many zombies
Even on the easiest difficulty, a campaign easily runs on for hours due to how many segments they have, and the high spawn rate for zombies - made worse by waves being spawned for obscure alerts like many doors being alarmed, flocks of birds accidentally being shot, and car alarms that are far less obvious than the ones in L4D. The special zombies are chaotic to deal with, as they're confusing, and attack and respawn far too quickly. Shove is disastrously replaced by ironsights, which are a chore to use as the campaigns drag on with the constant fighting.
Useless bots and getting stuck
The campaigns are so segmented and locked that I rarely got real teammates. Insanely they're planning to split this sparse playerbase with a "New Story" DLC. The bot teammates you're stuck with run away from you (and get killed), waste grenades, have limited range, don't heal you when you need it, and often just get in your face - blocking your shots and ignoring the zombies.
The few real teammates I saw were newbies that didn't understand the confusing mechanics and attracted more zombies than they killed. The difficulty feels artificial being constantly swamped with specials, and if you die then you're kicked back to the menu. Likewise if someone goes AFK there's no mechanism to resolve it so you have to go back to the menu - sometimes to an earlier safehouse.
Overcooked mechanics
The ammo is confusingly separated (only half the pistols take pistol ammo). You can drop ammo, but like many unexplained mechanics I only found that out many hours into the game. The attachments are unintuitive, like a scope increases bullet damage, or you can get extra bullets in a revolver magazine - so you stand there reading the attachment attributes while hoping a teammate won't grab it or a special won't attack you. I couldn't find a way to get them back off a gun, so it's just annoying to run out of ammo for a kitted out weapon.
Immersion is also wasted by the pointless addition of hitmarkers, and pointless timers for hordes and a "speed run" timer which counts down for some reason. Other gimmicks add to the complexity like tool kits and the permanent damage system that makes you not want to lead all the time, but bots won't take the lead. The flashlight is pointlessly automatic. Cosmetics are inexplicably locked and look ridiculous. There's a silly Battle Royale shrinking zone that was shoehorned into the game.
There's a .50 cal rifle, but it doesn't kill some zombies in one hit. The hitreg on weakspots is awful. Massive zombies vault through tiny windows. The stats never compare how many zombies you killed to teammates. The voicelines didn't feel natural. There's stupid hide and seek parts, like where you need to find a car battery but aren't allowed to open cars up, or find a keycard that's practically hidden outside the map. When I completed the game with a full party we all felt it was an anti-climax, and were confused about what happens when you click the ready button - it just disbanded the party.
Quality
I couldn't find a frame limit setting, so there's a needless waste of electricity when the menu is 3D, yet there's 2 other menus anyway (ESC, TAB). It stutters often and doesn't like to stay minimised. Zombies sometimes appear or disappear infront of you, and can lag teleport all over the place. The animations are terrible compared to L4D. They cheaped out on the music. The game breaks Shadowplay, and F11 (commonly used for recording) sometimes changes the game to windowed mode.
The guns didn't feel as good as in L4D. Bullet impact effects are often missing, and many objects aren't breakable. The saferoom graffiti is strikingly bad in comparison to L4D, and characters inexplicably leave dead bodies in them. It's sometimes confusing about what you're allowed to vault over or what doors open. I cut a lot of quality of life complaints out because it made the review too long.
Powergame
You're rewarded with coins for doing well, which can be spent on hitpoints in a safehouse, but that clashes with the immersive use of medkits in L4D which would give you a break if you were struggling. Things like the cards and speedrun timer also make the game feel too meta.
Damage control
Threads with criticism are being locked. The fact that even a Valve employee locked a thread is utterly bizarre. Threads have been locked for constructive feedback, fair criticism, the streisand effect, we can't talk about the low playercount, players talking about refunds, we can't talk about other games. And it became outright anti-consumer when we can't even talk about reviews.
Summary
Additions to a simple game should be intuitive. When I look at the cards, they just don't make sense. There's too many, their implementation is confusing, and they're not even tangible. How would an ammo belt increase bullet damage by 2.5%? Who even notices 2.5%? Part of the the problem is that L4D was an 18+ game released in 2008, so the players are about 30 and probably don't want to suddenly learn all these awkward gimmicks when they're expecting the flowing quality of L4D.
It's a cash-grab when graphics are the only polished aspect to draw pre-order sales, neglecting gameplay. By 2 months they still didn't have offline play, so I doubt they'll address the issues with it. To jump into it with friends you'd have to ignore the confusing gimmicks, if it wasn't too expensive (£49.99) and the file size too inconvenient to get on a whim. It's got content, but doesn't live up to the hype.