Back 4 Blood
Developer Turtle Rock
Publisher Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment
Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series (version tested)
Release Out now
Back 4 Blood is a Faustian pact, the gift of a devil risen from the earth like one of the game’s own bullet-sponge bosses. Of course you can have Left 4 Dead back, the devil begins. Here it is with the classic trimmings: four players fighting from saferoom to saferoom against regular zombies and superpowered Special infected; beeping pipebombs to lure the crowds away; desperate mid-scrum revivals; enemy spawning that functions like a personality test, with dawdlers pinioned by creatures they can’t fight off alone. Back 4 Blood’s desiccated United States burns brighter than Left 4 Dead’s twilit post-apocalypse, with colour choices that recall the developer’s ill-fated Evolve, but it strikes a familiar balance between archetypal spaces and twisty, Half-Life-2-era corridor design: malls and sewers, worrying hedge mazes, giddy paths of scaffolding over packed streets, and tumbledown arenas where you keep the undead company till a door finishes opening.
It sounds like’s outposts, with NPCs who talk to the air while you decide whether you need an Epic laser sight more than an Uncommon Molotov cocktail. A suite of power-up cards such as +2 health recovery per machete kill, sorted into decks of 15 and slowly unlocked over the course of each run.
