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Open Beta is cross-gen and cross-play supported.īuy Back 4 Blood: Ultimate Edition and get: Both sides come with unique weapons, abilities, and specialties. Switch between playing as a Cleaner with special perks and up to six different Ridden. Choose from five different Cleaners, one of the immune survivors, and a range of lethal weapons and items. Play with up to three of your friends online or go solo and lead your team in battle. Play the Open Beta and experience intense four-player co-op, competitive multiplayer as human or Ridden, and frenetic gameplay that keeps you in the action. Open Beta Period: August 12 at noon PT - August 16 at noon PTīack 4 Blood is a thrilling cooperative first-person shooter from the creators of the critically acclaimed Left 4 Dead franchise. Pre-order and get Early Access to be one of the first to slay starting August 5Įarly Access Period: August 5 at noon PT - August 9 at noon PT
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Campaign Versus fans are an extremely vocal minority, so Turtle Rock is wise not to specifically cater to them, but Back 4 Blood can never truly earn the title of "spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead" without it.īack 4 Blood arrives in full on October 12 for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox Gamepass, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC on Steam and Epic Games Store.Jump into the Back 4 Blood Open Beta. The Cleaner side has to be wiped eventually for the round to end, too, so it's impossible to feel like you've actually "won" as a Cleaner by surviving all the way to the end of a chapter like the old format. It's essentially "Survival Versus" from L4D, but with the card system layered on top, and the amount of time it takes for the Cleaner side to pick their cards, leaving the Ridden team to wait impatiently, is uncomfortably long just for a round that lasts an average of three minutes. Maybe its absence wouldn't sting nearly as much if the Swarm mode we got to play in the beta wasn't so unsatisfying. In B4B, you've got completely straight-laced soldiers like Walker completely devoid of an interesting personality, or you've got the complete other extreme in the form of Holly, a girl way too snarky and cheesy to allow any sort of enjoyable dynamic with the others. We're not looking for constant one-liners, here L4D wonderfully juxtaposed a bleak horror setting with regular doses of joy from characters coping with that hopelessness through goofy exchanges. Articulating exactly why B4B writing misses the mark takes some nuance, but the simplest explanation is an utter lack of humor. Valve's writers carried the dialogue and personalities of the L4D characters, so whoever at Turtle Rock was in charge of meeting those standards had extremely big shoes to fill. To be fair, Left 4 Dead 2's cast rubbed most people the wrong way at first and needed time to grow on everyone, so we should all reserve our full judgment until the October release (which will also bring three additional characters), but what we've seen and heard of the characters in the beta has left a pretty bad first impression. Image via Turtle Rock Studios, Warner Bros.
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We're not going to sit here and pretend the L4D games were totally flawless and jank-free experiences, but they definitely had a much smoother onboarding process.
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Once you feel like you know and understand everything about the game, though, you'll still occasionally feel cheated by taking unnecessary damage due to network latency, or triggering a horde because one of your shotgun pellets grazed a pack of birds 50 meters away. Med cabinets on walls can restore some Trauma for a price, but the game definitely needs to point this out in an extremely clear manner. "Trauma" is extremely important to manage-it's essentially "permanent damage" that accumulates separately from normal damage, it carries between chapters, and will cap your max health at 35% at worst-but almost no one understood these details at first.
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B4B is not forthcoming whatsoever about how most of its mechanics work, so you're either going to have to pick up tips from word of mouth, or learn the hard way through trial and error. That said, a significant source of the difficulty is just poor design choices.
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