It’s telling of Left 4 Dead’s quality that there still isn’t a co-op shooter that has quite outdone it. Unlike many popular multiplayer games of 2021, Left 4 Dead doesn’t ask you to theorycraft a build or study a meta. There’s nothing to understand beyond a few core principles: shoot and keep moving. That purity is why it was a foundational game for my friends and I over a decade ago and why we still squad up to mow down zombies 13 years later.
We’ve seen plenty of fantastic games riff on Turtle Rock Studios’ original template since the series was unceremoniously shelved in 2009, but only now are its original creators jumping back into fray. With Back 4 Blood, Turtle Rock is staking its flag in the ground and taking back the genre it created. Well, that’s the idea.
NEW BLOOD
Turtle Rock’s first official action’s playable characters are hunting the zombies, not the other way around. “Our setting is a year after the apocalypse and answers the question ‘What happens next?’. Now we’ve got stable communities of people in strongholds. We call our hero characters ‘Cleaners’ because they voluntarily go out into the wild and take on missions to try to put an end to the Ridden,” Ashton says. “In our world, there is hope for a future. This theme has a trickle-down effect into all elements of the game.”
