Video Game / Back 4 Blood

They say Four Is Death, time to show them why.

Back 4 Blood is a Co-Op Multiplayer Horror First-Person Shooter developed by Turtle Rock Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the Spiritual Successor to Turtle Rock's earlier game, Left 4 Dead, as that IP is currently in possession of Valve.

In the aftermath of an outbreak of parasitic worms that turn their hosts into monsters and mutants known as the "Ridden", a group of survivors called "Cleaners" fights to continue existing against the hordes of Ridden.

It was released October 12, 2021 for PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Epic Games Store and Steam. In January 2023, after three additional DLC expansions, Turtle Rock announced no new additional content updates would come to Back 4 Blood.

The announcement trailer can be found here.

---

Tropes:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Act 2 has a level set in the sewers of Finlayville, which look big enough to drive tanks through.
• After the End: The game takes place a year after the zombie apocalypse began, but civilization holds on in fortified towns. The situation is stable enough that vehicles and electricity are common sights and Phillips talks of wiping out the undead for good.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • When carrying a plot critcal item that takes up your hands without the knife card in your deck you automatically get temporary access to it while holding the item so you're not totally defenseless.
  • If you have to use a continue the game will buff your stats some to help you try again.
  • Being downed will give the character infinite ammo and stamina so you can fight with everything you have while in the greatest danger.
  • With the Rivers Of Blood update they changed it so that duffel bags can spawn on any level instead of just act 5. They are the holder of the new cards that showed up in dlcs 2 and 3. Where you could get totems from quickplaying with somebody who has the first DLC and running the tunnels with the random group in order to do act 5 without the dlc you had to be in the party of somebody who had it and started the campaign with you already in their party. Now even base game players can have full access to all the cards to build their deck with even if characters and levels are locked.
  • Bots don't actually use ammo themselves, and will drop any spare ammo they pick up and carry if you run low so you can grab it. You have to tag a first aid station for them to use it but they don't use up a charge healing themselves, they simply will only use it once before refusing to do so again, so the players have more leeway.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: Each map has a secondary objective to meet, which can include finding a specimen container and carrying it to the safe house, or completing the map without setting off any alarms. Meeting them usually rewards extra copper and supply points.
• Artificial Stupidity: Once again, the AI of the bots has its moments:
  • Bots will often blunder straight into your line of fire, even crowding around the business-end of a gatling gun as you're trying to use it.
  • They will frequently heal someone even as someone else is healing them, wasting the items.
  • They will throw molotovs and grenades to take out a couple of common Ridden, or throw them in completely the wrong place to be useful. Likewise, they will throw pipe bombs at Mutations, who are not affected by these.
  • Sometimes they will fail to move at all even as they get torn apart by Ridden.
  • On the Ridden side, the AI will often fail to use the Mutation class effectively, such as running straight towards the Cleaners in the open when ambush tactics would be more effective.
• Artistic License – Medicine: First aid kits can be used in three seconds and bandages can be used in two. It would pretty much be impressive for someone to unwrap and ready such medical equipment in that time, let alone actually diagnose and applying them. Pain meds can also be applied almost instantly, which means the cleaners are somehow able empty around a bottle of pills into their mouth and swallow them in that duration. Even more impressively, they can do this to another cleaner.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Some Ridden have glowing red boils on their bodies, and if you hit them, it does as much damage as a well-placed headshot.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: The level "Bar Room Blitz" sees the Cleaners using a bar's jukebox to distract the Ridden while survivors are loaded onto buses and ferried away. Notably, the jukebox plays from a list of licensed music, including "Ace of Spades" and "Black Betty."
• BFG: LMGs are an option in later levels of an act. They have longer-than-normal reload times and you have to aim down sights to get any accuracy out of them (unless you run specific builds designed for hip-firing), but they pack a punch, and when it comes to room-clearing, they have almost no equal.
• Blackout Basement: Any level with the "Gloom" corruption card becomes this, putting the game in all-consuming darkness, with flashlights being the only source of light.
• Blinded by the Light: Flashbangs can be thrown at the Ridden to stun them and cause them to take more damage throughout the duration. They aren't quite Friendly Fireproof, but will only blind players hit by them for about a second compared to the minimum of six seconds that Ridden will be affected by them.
• Body Horror: Besides the general amounts of body horror expected in a zombie apocalypse, the various Ridden all have pronounced boils on certain parts of their anatomy. For the Mutations, the boils are weakpoints.
• Body of Bodies: The Retcher Mutation has at least three other visible heads alongside the main, mutated head, implying this.
• Boring, but Practical: The combat knife is this. It kills common ridden in one shot, is always available, can be used while the weapon reloads, and is available from the start. Its a great backup weapon for shooters and an easy way to clear out your immediate area while reloading.
• Boss Battle:
  • The game has 3 boss monsters that have a chance of appearing in certain maps; the Ogre, a massive building-sized Ridden, the Breaker, a smashing/slamming Hulk-like monster similar to the L4D Tank, and the Hag, a dangerous but blind and deaf roaming monster with an instant-kill grab that behaves similar to the L4D Witch.
  • There are also two huge Final Boss enemies fought in multiple phases; one at the end of the main campaign, and one at the end of River of Blood, the game's final campaign DLC. The former is the Abomination, a quadruped Kaiju-sized Ridden creature burrowing tunnels beneath the Cleaners' hometown, and the latter is the Harbinger, a somewhat smaller creature similar to the Abomination which the Children of the Worm have created to cleanse the world of uninfected humans, that's fought as a Stationary Boss.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Weapons, attachments, and accessories use colors around the frame to denote their quality. From worst to best, they are white, green, blue, purple, and orange.
• Cthulhumanoid: The Hag appears to be this from a distance, having a face made up of tentacles, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the "tentacles" are actually human arms.
• David vs. Goliath: The Ogre is a huge monster that serves the same purpose as Left 4 Dead's Tank, only instead of being bodybuilder-sized, it's building-sized. It's also considered as a Boss Battle whenever encountered due to having its own health bar.
• Death by Materialism: The "Cost of Avarice" corruption card is this along with the Midas Touch. Not only does it massively slow your character down if you have more than 100 coins, it also turns all the supplies in the level into coins instead of healing items or grenades. Plus, it essentially breaks the A.I. of any bots in your team since they can't dump their coins at the safe room merchant like human teammates can.
• Disposable Pilot: In "The Abomination", the pilot of the helicopter that goes down is the only one who dies - the four playable cleaners who were on it are all fine.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • In the mission "Pain Train," the cleaners can pick up a message on their radios from a woman describing how her hometown has been overrun by the Ridden, just before you hear a sharp intake of breath and a gunshot, implying this.
  • It's fairly common to find bodies in out-of-the-way locations, covered in blood and slumped in chairs, with a gun resting beside them, also implying they took their own lives.
• Dual Boss: The last two levels of Act 2 have you fighting an Ogre and a Breaker (the Ogre appears first, but the Breaker will show up in a minute or two even if you haven't managed to kill the Ogre yet), and two Breakers at once in the final battle of the Act.
• Early Game Hell: The beginning parts of every act are where the most resets tend to occur. The cleaners don't have access to their cards and the myriad of perks, are stuck with grey tier weapons and don't have the money to purchase supplies.
  • They recognized this as an issue and changed it so that all characters start out with their full decks unlocked. There might still be some difficulty, such as weapon reliant loadouts not finding their needed weapon type by sheer bad luck or the lack of higher grade accessories, but overall this trope got removed.
  • It doesn't last long but even with the complete decks the gane doesn't give new players the ability to build a focused deck until after 10-15 levels worth of money. And it can take longer to make a deck that focuses on their playstyle, such as sustaining health with melee or being able to spray and pray without wasting too much ammo. If a player isn't already good at the game it can take a bit to build an suitable crutch that lets them compensate for whatever they lack.
• Emergency Weapon: Players can throw punches at the Ridden ("bash") or use a knife if they have the Combat Knife card, which will cost some stamina to do. Indeed, these options are a bit more prevalent than strictly for emergencies since they do not interrupt reloading and cannot cause friendly-fire.
• Eyeless Face: Several mutations, including the Retch and the Hag, have mutated to the point that they've lost their eyes. Some common Ridden also have faces deformed to the point they're just a lump of flesh.
• Eye Scream: The opening cutscene shows how the Ridden infect others: by throwing up parasitic worms that enter through the victim's eyes.
• Fight Like a Card Player: Core to the game is a card system that works in two parts. On the player side, you can build a deck of cards that represent various perks that you can gain during your run, and find cards on the map as well. On the enemy side, cards are used to represent additional stipulations a map might have, e.g. fog or more aggressive Ridden, and an optional objective to meet for additional resources. This got Downplayed a bit in the wake of players' deck starting with all of its cards instead of starting with some and drawing another one with each level of the run completed, though players can still add burn cards before loading into the saferoom.
• Friendly Fireproof: Played straight in the Recruit difficulty. Averted for all other difficulties, though crouching while using the Down in Front! card makes a player completely immune to causing or receiving friendly-fire damage.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Characters can die during gameplay and then immediately show up in cutscenes perfectly alive, if a bit blood-splattered.
  • You can only bring a squad of four to fight against the final boss. The ending cutscene, however, shows all eight cleaners teaming up to fight it.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: The scanner to the police armory is linked to a man named Bob, who's in pieces, meaning you have to find his arm. Once you find it, you can use it as a bludgeon and get an achievement from killing ten Ridden with it.
• Guide Dang It!: The stats displayed on weapons is largely arbitrary - pretty much any weapon of a higher tier is going to be more effective in practice than a weapon of a lower tier no matter the attachments due to them causing more damage to help them kill or stagger Ridden better, despite what the "firepower" stat may claim.
• Gun Accessories: You can find the usual set of attachments for your gun, including barrel mods, laser sights, scopes, enhanced magazines, and stocks.
• Gun Porn: The game features a larger arsenal of weapons than "Left 4 Dead" with various customizations.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The Children of the Worm DLC campaign adds a new enemy faction, Cultists, hostile half-human half-Ridden who have retained their individuality and intelligence, but lost their sanity, and worship the Ridden hive mind.
• Hard Mode Perks: Completing levels on Veteran and Nightmare earns you more Supply Points.
• Hazmat Suit: Available as a cosmetic unlock for some of the Cleaners. Dr. Rogers also wears one, either due to not being immune or working with hazardous chemicals.
• Hellish Copter: Averted...at first. The chopper takes back the cleaners safely in "The Broken Bird". However, in "The Abomination", the helicopter they're on gets its rotor struck by an ogre's projectile and goes down. The pilot turns out to be the only fatality on its crash.
• Holiday Mode: Fort Hope may get a slight makeover during holidays, like having a tree and lights around during Christmas.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Depending on their own cards, their team's cards, and upgrades from vendors, players might be able to carry upwards of five first aid kits, bundles of razor wire, ammo boxes or defibrillators and grenades along with two large guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition later in a run. They probably won't have thousands of units of copper on their person if they can carry all of this other stuff already, but it's technically a possibility as well.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Recruit (Easy) , Veteran (Normal) , and Nightmare (Hard).
• Implacable Man: The Ogre is an enormous Mutation that can shrug off a massive volume of fire, smash through pillars and grates and even stick its arm through doorways to grab the Cleaners once its bulk prevents it from following them.
• Kryptonite Factor: The T-5 compound developed by Dr. Rogers proves to be this. Hitting any Ridden with this gas drastically weakens them, turning even the health bars of bosses into wet tissue paper. Unfortunately, you only get to use this in the second-to-last level.
• Lag Cancel: Very Downplayed - while reloading guns, players can still bash freely during the reloading animation or swap weapons after the magazine is filled but the reloading animation is not yet finished. However, bashing has its own animation that cannot be skipped and it cannot skip over reloading animations, only be used during them, and the time it takes to swap weapons means a player will have to stack together a lot of swap speed bonuses to hope to save time on reloading by swapping out of the still-animating-but-reloaded weapon and swapping back to it - without doing that, a player can only make due avoiding reload animations by swapping from of the reloading weapon to another weapon and using the other weapon instead.
• Life Drain: Some perk cards grant you health for killing enemies. Others instead grant temporary health which serves as a buffer over your actual health that continuously depletes on its own as time passes.
• Lighter and Softer: The game is this to Left 4 Dead, only in so much as the Cleaners refer to fighting off the Ridden as a job rather than a necessity, are being paid to fight the monsters and the survivors have a safe haven to return to in the form of the well-fortified Fort Hope. That said, the game is still pretty dark and gruesome as a whole, the areas outside Fort Hope are full of death and decay, and the situation becomes bleaker and more desperate as time passes. However, Act 4 and 6 both end on triumphant notes as the Abomination and Harbinger are defeated.
• Luck-Based Mission: On Veteran/Normal difficulty or higher, corruption cards can have a massive effect on how easy or hard a level is, especially early in an Act before you're able to put together a reasonably synergized grouping of perk cards. Which Boss you end up fighting on a level also can massively affect the difficulty; an Ogre on a level will many insta-kill fall off points like the Ship's Graveyard is way deadlier than a Hag or Breaker.
  • Just like another strangely familiar game the A.I. Director may end up screwing you over by sending the wrong specials at the wrong time. Retches on the other side of a narrow path, Tall Boys and the exploders in an area with falls, grabbers blocking your way or getting a lucky shot during infinte hoard events. Even on lower difficultys the dice roll might end up being far more dangerous due to chance or circumstances.
• Magical Defibrillator: You can pick up one of these to use to revive a dead teammate, or to pick up a downed teammate in a hurry...which means the defibrillator here is somehow capable of restarting a person's heart after flatlining or is used on a person who is too injured to move their legs but still otherwise able to swing, fire or reload a weapon normally (which is to say, someone who probably doesn't have a currently-irregular heartbeat and really shouldn't have a defibrillator applied to them).
• Major Injury Underreaction: The way Cleaners react to being shot by their teammates is usually similar to how one would react to getting lightly jabbed by their friends - even their most dramatic lines is usually just annoyedly swearing at the shooter instead of the expected pained agony of being shot. This applies even more so on higher difficulties, where friendly fire is enabled.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Trauma damage reduces your maximum health. It can only be recovered by using first aid cabinets found in safehouses or stashes, or from the use of some cards.
• Meaningful Name: The title itself is a reference to Turtle Rock Revisiting the Roots, as the game is a Spiritual Successor to Left 4 Dead.
• Meat Moss: The Ridden have created nests that are effectively gigantic piles of meat and viscera covering buildings and the like. Hive levels has the cleaners go down into these.
• Molotov Cocktail: An offensive accessory that leaves a pool of fire which will light Ridden on fire (and cause damage to players as well while standing in it, though fortunately it will not cause them to lit on fire after leaving the pool of fire). This makes it a Jack of All Trades out of the other damaging offensive accessories since the pool of fire is very useful against common Ridden but the fact that is is set off on impact makes it more usable against Mutations than Pipe Bomb's long duration before setting off making it difficult to actually damage Mutations with.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Like Left 4 Dead, survivors have frequently left one another notes by writing on safehouse walls. Some of those notes are outright call-backs, such as a post-it reading "This used to be a nice neighborhood!"
  • A well-hidden piece of graffiti, on an apartment wall in Act 2, mentions a rumored operation that ferries survivors to the Florida Keys once a week, which mimics the plan that Zoey, Francis, and Louis had at the end of Left 4 Dead The Sacrifice DLC campaign.
  • In Left 4 Dead, all of the guns are listed as made in the Finlayville Armory. You visit this particular location in Act 2.
  • One of the checkpoints in the first act involves going to a church that, when you try to open the door, initiates a horde due to the ringing bell. A similar event occurs in the Death Toll campaign in Left 4 Dead. The difference is that for this game, the bell was rigged to ring as an alarm, while in L4D, it was a crazed survivor.
  • One of the jukebox songs is "Electric Worry" by Clutch, which played in one of Left 4 Dead 2's commercials.
• Nintendo Hard: Even on the lowest difficulty, Back 4 Blood is not a walk in the park compared to Left 4 Dead or Left 4 Dead 2 (much of this is because any difficulty above "Recruit" expects you to have a synergized perk deck, which takes several hours of gameplay to build). Nightmare difficulty is particularly brutal unless you have a good team that communicates and strategizes well. Also, like the original Gears of War, the lowest difficulty is easy mode while the next highest difficulty is essentially hard mode, with no standard "normal" difficulty setting in between. This is particularly true if you're playing with bots or randoms.
• No Scope: Several perk cards give you very large bonuses to movement speed, reloading, accuracy, ammo capacity, damage resistance, etc., at the cost of taking away your ability to aim-down-sights, forcing you to fire from the hip at all times. With the right cards you can create a dedicated hipfire build that plays like more classic shooters that predate the widespread usage of aim-down-sights mechanics (including Left 4 Dead itself, which had no ADS except for sniper rifles).
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The zombies are referred to as Ridden in this game. The word "zombie" is occasionally used in-game and by the UI, however.
• One Bullet Clips: Reloading simply places missing rounds directly from your inventory into your firearms. However, it's correct that no firearms in the game can have chambered rounds in them as all reloading animations have the cleaner finish up their reload (with applicable weapons) by rechambering the weapon.
• OVerheating: Some cards allow players to make ammunition reserves be limitless with some specifics to them e.g. The Ammo Stash card makes your secondary weapon, but only your secondary weapon have unlimited ammunition reserves to draw from.
• Parasite Zombie: The zombies in this game are the result of infestation via parasitic worms. The opening cutscene shows that the worms burrow into the host's head via the tear-ducts. A voiceline from Holly implies that individuals who are immune to them can still get infected by the worms ("I hate the weird sucky noise they make when they pull them out of you."), but worms can't turn them into a Ridden.
• Player Headquarters: Fort Hope serves as the game's base of operations. Most acts start from this location.
• Practical Currency: The currency of the game is copper, which presumably has many practical uses for maintaining the remnants of civilization such as electronics and mechanical systems. It being found in the form of convenient Asian free-to-play game coins rather than scrap metal is likely a gameplay convention.
• Power at a Price: Cards that provide greater bonuses usually have larger caveats. This can involve reduced damage resistance and/or stamina efficiency, being unable to aim down sights, or losing access to certain accessories, among other effects.
  • Warped Chests are guaranteed to have a random card intel, a variety of offensive, support and quick items, some really good attachments and weapons or even legendary items inside them. However, they inflict a corruption card from their own unique pool which causes a significant penalty on the stats of the cleaners for the remainder of the level.
• Raising the Steaks: Might be the case since birds will alert the Ridden when you spook them, and after they leave their location, they'll always have been on a strange, grisly, tentacle-like pile that looks very much like it'd be related to the devil worms.
• Second Episode Introduction: Storywise, Doc, Karlee, Jim and Hoffman don't join the cleaners until the end of Act 1. Previously, the characters were locked until the player finished the first act, but this was changed so that they would all be available at the beginning.
• Sequel Hook: At the end of the final story campaign DLC, River of Blood, the Abomination and the Harbinger have been defeated, but the Mother of Worms is still alive and bent on turning the world into a Ridden-infested "paradise". The Cleaners celebrate their victory at their homebase before the game ends with an And the Adventure Continues ending.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The main goal that most of the game has been building up to is attempting to save Dr. Rogers, a scientist who has developed a compound that kills the infected. At the end of the game, Dr. Rogers ends up abruptly dying in a helicopter crash and all his research notes presumably end up destroyed in the fire from said crash, putting the survivors back at square one. The only thing that prevents it from being a "it would have made no difference if they had just stayed home" scenario is that they're able to use the last of Rogers' compound to kill a Kaiju-sized Ridden creature that came out of nowhere to attack the survivors' settlement.
• Sniper Pistol: Slap a scope on a sufficiently high-powered pistol like the Desert Eagle or .357 Magnum, and you'll be able to make one. It's no replacement for a sniper rifle, of course, but very handy if you want to keep your main weapon slot free for something else. With enough cards improving accuracy and attachments added you, you might not even need to aim down the scope to hit distant targets with it anyway.
• Sprint Meter: A stamina meter dictates how much you can run, jump, and melee. In addition to maximum stamina, there are also stats to determine how much stamina is used for those actions and how quickly the meter recovers.
• Stone Wall: Enemies in Back 4 Blood are typically much slower than their Left 4 Dead equivalents but can also take a lot more bullets to bring down too.
• Streamer-Friendly Mode: A streamer mode can be enabled, which primarily changes the "Bar Room Blitz" level to only play stream-friendly music.
• Take That!: Dialogue in the River of Blood DLC campaign, which was made in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, mentions that the only reason the Ridden outbreak got out of control is because people refused to follow orders, a clear jab at those who objected or refused to comply with the COVID-mandated shutdowns of civil society and institutions such as schools and churchs. The logic of this breaks down when you consider there's a huge difference between the government telling you to stay indoors at home for a year and them telling you to shoot your loved ones in the head.
• Temporary Online Content: Roving vendors can appear during special events with items that can only be obtained during that period.
• Token Heroic Orc:
  • In "Children of the Worm" you very briefly meet Derek, a young boy who seems to be a Half-Ridden, but isn't crazy like the cultists are. He saves you from a cultist ambush before leaving to go save his sister, with the Cleaners promising to come back to help them in a later DLC.
  • "River of Blood" introduces Jeff, a "friendly" Tallboy (who has had electrodes inserted into his brain to reverse his "friend or foe" instincts) who serves as a summonable ally of the new Cleaner, Tala (Derek's sister).
• Universal Ammunition: Ammunition is divided among the types of pistol/SMG, rifle, sniper rifle, and shotgun. All weapons use one of these types, no matter the differences between actual ammunition that the actual weapons would use.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Better teams will complete their optional objectives for their levels to give the team more copper to buy more items and team upgrades to make subsequent levels easier to complete. Less-capable teams will lose out on this copper and probably get themselves roughed up by trauma damage more and have to spend more of their copper on first aid cabinets to continue on.
• Violation of Common Sense: Want to avoid startling birds and alerting a horde? Chuck an explosive at them! If you hit a flock with an explosive they will all die at the same time and avoid the horde alert while you can get/enter whatever they were in front of.
• Wrongfully Attributed: Hoffman seems to do this for three separate works at once in one of his lines for being chosen as your cleaner, though his first quotation may just be quoting Henry V before segueing into separately mentioning that he loved Hamlet.
  "Once more unto the breach, dear friends"...I loved Hamlet, that donkey guy was hysterical.
• Your Head Asplode: One corruption card causes Ridden to have a large, yellow boil coming out of their head which will explode when they're killed while shot in it. This is variably useful - they'll cause damage to anything nearby them meaning they can kill a bunch of other Ridden when they're nearby their fellows, but this explosion can really hurt any cleaners when they get close to them. Notably this can cause chain reactions with others nearby for more explosive fun/pain.
• Zombie Apocalypse: This one is caused by parasitic worms scientists found and were studying. The worms got loose and eventually caused an outbreak across Canada and then the United States.

---