Back 4 Blood Review (Tav Yen)
I really...really...wanted this game to be good. But it isn't, in my opinion. The game really tries to be Left 4 Dead but fails miserably. It suffers such glaring problems that many just cannot overlook, hence the mixed reviews.
-Gun sounds are awful.
-Gameplay is repetitive.
-The amount of foliage in this game is insane. Retches and other specials can easily hit you from places you cannot see because of the foliage. What makes it worse is that oftentimes, the foliage will block your ability to ping the enemies. You'll end up pinging a leaf instead of the special behind it.
-Speaking of specials, they're all terrible. Terribly balanced, terrible design. Idk whose idea it was to make the tallboy drag his weakspot behind him while also giving his slam attack a HUGE AoE. The bigger issue is that the tallboy variants will often just attack instantly, which often makes your attempt to flank it be in vain. And they run...so fast... Stalker variants attack very quickly and have a stupidly high stagger threshold despite having the frame of a malnourished child. Retches can puke instantly as well as puke over obstacles (even though they supposedly need Line of Sight), and are capable of doing 90 degree turns while puking.
-The game has no soul. There's very little interaction with anything, all the characters are bland, the ambience is nowhere to be seen, even the dialogue of NPCs is just terrible.
-Gun selection is terribly uninspired. They're all real guns of course, but I really wish they would give some variation. We have the M16, AK-47, M4, AA-12, etc. It's all things you've seen a billion times. They also recently made Legendary weapon variants which just seem so out of place due to their cartoonish Fortnite properties and appearances.
-Level & objective design is awful and a lot of the maps are just reused assets. I'm not talking about like a truck or a stack of crates, I'm talking about large parts of a map. There's one map that you play through three different times, each one opening up to the same starting area gas station and then branching out to different paths. Aside from reused assets, the map design is just terrible.
-Updates for this game are so out of touch and often just end up breaking the game further, whether in terms of balance or actual ability to play. For example, in one of the recent updates they accidentally made Mom glitched to where she made teammates bleed out 2x as fast. I don't even know how you manage that.
-Servers are awful. There are party hosts, but no true dedicated or host servers. It's their own servers which are absolutely terrible. The desync is so abhorrent, you might see the red kill indicator on your screen, only for the zombie to die a full second later. One second may not sound like much to the inexperienced, but it actually makes a huge difference in a horde killer. You supposedly kill the enemy, move onto killing the next, and the first zombie comes up and slaps you and THEN dies. It does not make for fun gameplay.
-The card system is...polarizing. Personally, I like it, but many don't and I can see why.
-The devs obviously have no modicum of understanding for balance. Things have gotten a lot better, but they're still nowhere near good. For a very long portion of this game's post-launch life, the meta was literally building a speed deck and just running as fast as possible through the map, avoiding every conflict with ridden possible. I don't just mean avoiding cars and alarm doors, I mean avoiding all the randomly spawned ridden and running past every threat, even during hordes. Basically, the best way to play the game was to not play the game. Again, things have gotten better, but how much can you really expect from a dev team that allowed such a stupid thing to take place for such a long time?
-Denuvo DRM. Need I say more about that?
-Versus mode is terrible. It's more of a stationary death match, rather than what you saw in L4D where it progresses through the map. Also horrible balance, of course. It's also entirely dead for these reasons.
I could go on for days. This game is just generally of such low quality. I do not understand how they justified the $60 price tag knowing what the game is. I can't even justify a $20 price tag. This isn't even a game. It's an interactive experience which makes you think....think about how you could better spend your time and money.