Test Back 4 Blood: Turtle Rock returns from the dead!

Amazing trajectory than that of Turtle Rock Studios. The Tony Montana of video game development rose very high, when he played the wise gun carrier for Valve until the consecration of Left 4 Dead. But the British studio also fell very low, its head in the powder when THQ fell before taking a full load in the buffet at the catastrophic release of Evolve, whose abstruse and aggressive economic model imagined by 2K Games would have even given the executives of Electronic Arts a cold sweat. We feared the talent of Turtle Rock would be lost forever, and the studio would be confined to a role of luxury service provider on wealthy sites that were not well on board: left for dead, against all odds it signs a resounding return with Back 4 Blood, its new cooperative shooter in zombie territory. They're coming to get you Barbara!

Test Back 4 Blood: Turtle Rock returns from the dead! View PriceRead ConclusionBack 4 Blood

Varied and challenging campaign
Decks and characters add depth
Constant tension
Teamplay and essential synergies from Veteran mode

The campaign is often “inspired” by L4D
Not very advanced damage localization
Hazardous collisions
Competitive in retreat

Test carried out from the PC version of the game, using a code provided by the publisher. Back 4 Blood officially releases October 12 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. It will be available immediately on the Game Pass.

Le Left 4 Dead de Wish ?

Back 4 Blood therefore takes up exactly the concept of Left 4 Dead: four players must go from point A to point B. Armed to the teeth, they are forced to coordinate their efforts to survive the hordes of dead- assailing them, but also achieve different mission objectives while avoiding the many traps that stand in their way. The principle is the same, but Turtle Rock spices up the formula a bit with a number of little ideas that prove themselves over hours of play.

Instead of the double class/character system of Evolve, Turtle Rock prefers this time to let the player shape his own style of play. The eight characters that can be played have many different characteristics - care, power, endurance... - which naturally bring them to a certain way of approaching the fight, but it is above all the possibility of improving your survivor with cards that adds depth to Back 4 Blood. We choose a new card to activate with each successful mission, and the small, frail victim at the start will quickly transform into a monster of power, endurance or resistance over the course of the Act in progress (our character is reset to zero by one act to another).

The system first involves earning cards, which are unlocked by spending resource points earned by completing levels or playing competitively. It is then necessary to create a deck and to define the precise order of arrival of the cards, since these will be accessible one after the other during our games. It's after a few hours that we clearly identify the potential of the system: the cards are numerous and varied, the order of selection is crucial and the biggest bonuses necessarily involve a painful counterpart in another category (+10% of speed, -5% resistance for example). But, and this is the most important, the decks are particularly interesting for teamplay.

The Horde Sauvage

Your survival depends primarily on your ability to chain headshots, control the mass of Zs that regularly land and avoid the traps that litter your path: door and car alarms or swarms of crows trigger the horde, for example, which promises long seconds of tension and action. But more than skill or caution, teamwork is essential in Back 4 Blood. Staying together - but not too close - communicating and sharing the few resources scattered here and there is also crucial, as is having a balanced team in terms of skills and decks.

Having four mercenaries cut out for melee can work in Novice, and even then. The first run ultimately serves as a warning for what comes next, since you can finish it without shaking your chin too much with two people, accompanied by two bots (or console players, thank you crossplay): the Veteran level is already unforgiving , and will immediately sanction the slightest misconduct by one of the team members. Special infected indeed regularly come to put their grain of salt. These Hockers, Bruisers and other Retchs are variations of the Jockeys, Boomers and Spitters of Left 4 Dead, and have more or less similar characteristics: attack from afar, vomit toxic bile, immobilization, violent rush, etc.

We see these "mutations" coming from afar in easy mode, but we sometimes have the impression that they are controlled by humans in Veteran, so impressive is their coordination and their propensity to systematically pick up the lost sheep at the worst of times. Their resistance is also greatly increased, so much so that it quickly becomes essential to think about your decks in a coherent and collective way: the fact of giving up a little resistance to gain stamina can for example be counterbalanced by a team buff of a teammate, and giving yourself an extra grenade slot by sacrificing your life bar can save the end of the mission. In the end, it seems more interesting to create diehard decks rather than trying to play on the versatility of your heroes, even if the game adds more or less random modifiers at each level to reshuffle the cards and test your choices. of team building.

A game more demanding than it seems

Explosive zombies that lose life when killed in melee, a given time to complete the mission, more traps: these corruptions are a good way for Turtle Rock to ensure a minimum of replayability to its missions, while allowing you to earn some extra currency. We will spend these precious funds at the start of the mission to improve our guns, complete our arsenal or buy a little ammunition and care. The system once again shows its effectiveness in Veteran, when the bloodless and penniless group finds itself faced with decisive choices as to the equipment and improvements it can afford for the next outing.

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Level corruptions can be a big game-changer

Only one continuous is granted, the available life bar drops with each knockdown and the doses of healing hidden in the levels are becoming increasingly rare: Back 4 Blood has easy game over. Particularly accessible with its arcade gameplay, which you can master in the blink of an eye if you've already played an FPS in your life, B4B never tightens its grip once the lock on the starting point has jumped. . Very mobile and resistant bosses, very angry special events, murderous bottlenecks: the campaign multiplies the strong sequences and if some seem largely inspired by the first two Left 4 Dead (the crossing of the fields, the camp of survivor become mass grave , the excellent jukebox sequence reminiscent of the L4D2 concert…), they are nonetheless remarkably effective and intense.

We often emerge washed out of these demanding playful apexes, satisfied to have played a bad trick on the grim reaper. One of the big interests of Back 4 Blood comes from its difficulty, and the way in which it forces us to transcend ourselves collectively to overcome it. It has little to do with the arsenal available; the traditional pump/smg/assault rifle/sniper, to pair with a gun or a melee weapon, are almost all useful if you pair them with the appropriate cards and improve them over the course of the session. It is the subtle balance found by Turtle Rock that makes all the salt of its FPS, which makes us forgive its few mechanical inaccuracies (the collisions are sometimes strange) or these less inspired sequences and environments.

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In less than six minutes I'll be dead

The wall between the first two difficulty levels will undoubtedly leave players on the sidelines: the soloists will be pulverized by the limitations of the bots, not completely stupid, but far less effective than human players, or crushed by the matchmaking which has no not intended to sort out players for their ability to communicate politely. Groups of two or three players will already limit the breakage much better, but it is really with four in voice that the experience takes on its full meaning, and that the game reveals its substantial marrow.

Accessible to almost everyone

It is undoubtedly with a view to opening up to as many people as possible that Turtle Rock has favored optimization over graphic quality. There are a few light rays and pyrotechnic effects that make their little effect, but the textures and animations don't offer anything very fantastic if you look at them more closely. Back 4 Blood relies more on its game conditions - darkness, fog - and on the accumulation - of corpses, blood, enemies, decorative elements - to create its effects. The largest spaces are rather bare, the closed places more loaded and detailed, but in any case, the fluidity is never faulted.

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Back 4 Blood isn't technically impressive, but it sure does look pretty

Our Ryzen 5600X, coupled with a 2080 Super and 32 GB of RAM, ensures 144 frames per second without ever shaking while the graphics settings are pushed to the maximum, with or without activating DLSS. We can easily imagine the game running correctly on more modest configurations, and the settings offered on PC are sufficient to allow everyone to find the right balance. We have also encountered no stability problems, neither on the client side nor on the server side, which is to be noted for a game that requires a permanent internet connection to play, even solo.

The good technical behavior of the whole is not a miracle either. The localization of the damage is unfortunately rather basic, the environments are not very vast and the invisible walls are legion: Back 4 Blood is not an exploration game, even if the meticulous inspection of the recesses of the map can occasionally reveal a fund of providential resources. The city, the swamp, the school, the survivors' camp: Turtle Rock plays with the codes of the genre without renewing them too much, which is felt a little in terms of visual and sound atmosphere.

Death suits you so well

Back 4 Blood recycles Left 4 Dead in different ways, but it also recycles itself by making us return to previous locations cleaned up for the purposes of a completely anecdotal "scenario" whose guideline is very difficult to follow. . Its punk atmosphere, its surly characters with ironic one-liners, its sound effects - corrected since the beta, thank God - or even its environments: Warner's game is not wildly original, and is aimed above all at players demanding people looking for a tougher challenge to take up with friends.

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Did you say Left 4 Dead?

Besides the campaign, whose 34 levels will take you between 5 and 6 hours in Novice mode, the game also has an asymmetrical competitive mode. Unlike Left 4 Dead which opposed survivors and special infected on the same levels as the campaign mode, Back 4 Blood chooses to offer limited arenas that a battle royale style toxic gas shrinks over time. The campaign map system is still in play, as the infected earn points to spend on upgrading the different types of zombies or even the horde. It's rather well balanced, quite tense in one camp as in the other, but the whole thing still lacks a bit of breadth, especially on the zombie side. The studio has failed to replicate the satisfaction of Left 4 Dead 2's successful combo attacks, which struggles to pass the pill of no versus in campaign mode.

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You will have to play long enough to unlock the 156 cards available

We end up always making the same combinations in the same places, the randoms leave at the slightest defeat and the groups already composed necessarily roll over adversity without firing a shot. The conditions to be met to have a good time - generous matchmaking, balanced teams - are a little too complicated to spend more than a few hours there, waiting for our teammates to connect to attempt a campaign run in Nightmare. At least we can scratch some supply points to unlock new cards, but also useless cosmetics for our weapons, characters and emblems. Dependent on our ability to tolerate adversity and spend some time configuring a coherent and complementary deck of our allies, the lifespan of Back 4 Blood could still amount to tens of hours as the challenge that arises ad is big. We are far from the thousands of hours spent by some on Valve games, of course, but we can well imagine Turtle Rock coming to feed its title with additional Acts in the coming months.

Back 4 Blood, l'avis de JVFR

Assumed heir to Left 4 Dead, which he happily quotes to the limit, Back 4 Blood manages to modernize the formula enough for us to return to smash zombies with pleasure, even once the campaign is complete. The sensations of combat are good, the card system is well thought out, the teamplay very engaging and provided you share this bloodbath in good company, it is not clear what could keep action enthusiasts from devoting long hours optimizing their decks to maximize team synergies. If you play alone or are looking for a good competitive game, go your way: Back 4 Blood is above all for the - immense - pleasure of slaughtering thousands of undead with friends. The stress relief we needed to approach the end of the year more calmly.

Back 4 Blood

Without being as hard-hitting and dense as Left 4 Dead 2, Back 4 Blood perfectly rekindles the flame of the co-op shooter with zombie sauce. Provided you play it with friends, and accept the challenge that comes your way!