Back 4 Blood

I perceive B4B as a relatively soulless gesture and I remember it being incredibly boring to play, even with friends.

Back 4 Blood is in many ways fun and satisying:

- The graphic is very good and normal infected death animations are very satisfiying when they head blows

- There are a lot of different guns and accessories

- Every character has special abilities which makes them like an RPG class

- The card system that allows you to progress and customize your build

- The three points above makes for a very customizable and fun playstyle

- The corruption cards makes everything more unpredictable, varied and fun
(okay thery introduce a random factor but for me it's fun. Maybe they could also introduce a mode without corruption cards or no cards at all to make the experience more predictable for those who wanted to go pro.)

- Some maps are really fun and amazing bot for the objectives and the aesthetic/mood

- Among specials, Sleepers and Snitchers are awesome ideas imho and add a good addition to the Left 4 Dead specials (not wanting to do comparisons, but it comes natural here to me)

These are all awesome things to me and makes the game very fun to play especially with friends.

BUT there are also lot of little to big things that makes you say "Meh" inside yourself while you play, and you cannot avoid but think that these things makes what could have been a "perfect" game something far less enjoyable, making you swing between "this is awesome!" and "what the hell why in the world they did this".

So in my opinion, the bads are:

- Special infected have something that makes them anonymous to me. I don' want to do comparisons, but in Left 4 Dead there was something that made the specials REALLY specials and standing out compared to normal infected. Here, I don't know, I cannot really love them.

- Special infected sometimes spawn like crazy, which makes them not so special. I mean, sometimes they are so spammed in the crowd that seems like they didn't know how to make a level hard enough and they just compensated threwing in everything they could, instead of making an intelligent level and game design.

- Specials have different variants, which to me seems like a recycle of the same 3D models with different uses. You cannot easily tell if the special that is coming to you is a variant of the other, if you are not very aware of them. I would have preferred different special designs for different abilities to make them more caracteristic.

- The specials that hugs you and pull you away from the team have terrible animations and design, imho

- Thinking logically: what the hell are the big specials like the ogre or the breakers? A human could not ever transform in something like that

- Breakers are almost impossible to escape by foot and have a terrible unnatural jump animation

- Weapons accessories cannot be swapped between weapons. What the hell? Why??

- The torch cannot be turned on and off whenever you want but is automatically turned on and off on some areas. This makes no sense to me, in a game where for most of the part is night and in some places having no torchlight on is not scary, but just annoying.

- Some levels are long and fun, others are just about 5 minutes long and without anything special in them, what the fuck?

- Some levels are just repeated maps

- Some levels are just a hell of a lot of specials thrown at you making the level looking like a fan-made level with the game editor just to seem crazy

- Sometimes objectives are not so well specified on the map, imho

So I don't know, it seems like a game with AWESOME gameplay and ideas BUT with a lot of things that ruins the fun, sometimes. It's like they thought very well some things and other were just thrown here and there because they didn't know how to fill the gaps.

I'm curious to see the upcoming DLCs and if they will change some of the things mentioned in the meantime, I would love it.

Overall a fun game that could have been a masterpiece, but imho should not be bought at full price.

Back 4 Blood doesn't have the level of character and tightness of presentation of its predecessor Left 4 Dead, but what it does have in spades is amazing gunplay, fantastic variety in playstyles, and a much higher necessity for tight team coordination, which is great when playing in a group of friends/acquaintances. A worthy follow-up no matter how much Valve fanboys will insist that it's bad.

Its blatantly clear that what made L4D1/2 so timeless was valves insistence on the minutia that goes into every aspect of the game, but at the end of the day the core gameplay of B4B is preferable to me. Way cleaner gunplay, the card system adds playstyle optionality, and common infected dont have gravity wells in their fists. Shame they have absolutely no clue how to balance the game they clearly don't actually play.