Comprehensive review of EA/Beta

[kaiguy2222]

Intro:
This is going to be a comprehensive review of the game in its entirety, so if you're not down for a lengthy and detailed read or you'd rather not see anymore mostly negative reviews you should probably skip this one. For the sake of transparency, I'll try to quickly give a slice of my background with L4D as it of course biases how I see B4B even though I have tried to be objective. I was a pro player in L4D, my tag was [LoFR]Kaizoku and I was really active in both the casual and competitive community through writing guides on what I and my team discovered in the game. It went so far that my team jokingly named a hunter technique after me, and much to their amusement, the name stuck and spread through the population that played the game at the time. Nearly all my time was in private competitive lobbies and test servers, though I did play co-op campaign with friends. All of this is to say, I'm biased towards the original games and the VS campaign mode in them, thought I play a wide range of games and have attempted to check my bias in this review.
The review will be broken down in to three sections, Meta topics (monetization, management, advertising, etc), Bugs/Glitches, and Game play, with sub sections to try to organize my thoughts and make reading a bit more bearable. First, Meta topics:
Meta Topics:
If you don't care about the context the game is being released in or issues with the managing and monetization of the game, it's safe to skip this section. I've included it because these ideas affect the design direction and decisions in the game that I will discuss later.
The first thing in this section that tends to put me off of nearly any game is excessive monetization. This game is still pre-release, and there are four levels of monetization being used: Full retail price, "Special/Collectors" edition sales, season passes, and microtransactions. My rule of thumb is I'm okay with two layers of monetization, beyond that the game has to already proven to be exceptional for me to be okay with the devs asking/requiring money from so many angles. This would be less of an issue for me if the devs were more transparent about what will be monetized and what content will be in the game at release and down the road. A lack of transparency about most things plus multiple monetization models already puts me off the game, but we also have TRS's history with the poor monetization of Evolve, which gets rid of my confidence in fair monetization of this game nearly completely. Just for a reference, I currently live in a region where the base price of the game is equivalent to 80$.
The second issue that quite a lot of people are split about is whether or not TRS are or are not selling this on the back of L4D's success and name, and whether or not that's being done in good faith or not. I do believe it can be interpreted either way, in fact I think this is very deliberate on the part of TRS such that those that *want* to believe this is L4D3 can, and those that want to separate it in their mind can also do so. Personally I feel the connection to previous games has been used in bad faith given both the design decisions in B4B and the high probability that very few of the actual devs that worked on L4D have been involved in B4B.
Both of these issues make more skeptical towards the devs, and critical of design decisions. I will be clear, I do believe that criticisms levelled at the game for using similar elements to the L4D series and not using them as well as the older titles are totally valid, though I will try to refrain from framing my entire critique through the lens of Left 4 Dead. With that out of the way, I'd like to cover the bugs and glitches I encountered frequently throughout the beta since the primary purpose of a beta is feedback for polish and bigfixing.
Bugs and Glitches:
I'll just bullet point these and explain when more information is needed, but most of these have been covered by a lot of other players so I'll keep it brief.
Models/animations: There seems to be quite a lot of de-sync, snap turns, terrain weirdness, and animations getting cancelled/not initiating correctly in nearly all content. This causes zombie attacks and hitboxes to be wildly inconsistent at times, making it impossible or too difficult to react to or read enemy actions. Even with low ping, common zombie melee attacks can warp through your bash, clip through terrain, or hit with no animation. This is pretty severe as it impacts gameplay frequently.
AI: This has been hit hard by other players, but it's just not acceptable. They can't rescue players in many situations, and will outright kill themselves in others. We have no direct control over them, they teleport frequently, and generally feel like they are in an alpha state. This is also in the severe category, especially because of the following issue:
Matchmaking: Backfill is so bad currently that PvP is nearly impossible to play with full teams, and in co-op you are frequently left with bots, which are a liability in their current state. This is also a severe problem.
Lag/weapon misc.: Every round my secondary was unloaded for no reason. I also had the multishot glitch somewhat frequently along with periods of movement hitching. Minor issue individually, moderate all together.
Clipping/attacks: This connect with animation issues, hitboxes and clipping seem off, especially with the Tallboy. It doesn't seem intended that he can attack through walls and ceilings, and there's quite a lot of clipping nonsense even with player characters. Moderate issue if unintended.
Anything minor I decided not to include, as there are enough major issues that they should have the spotlight. With this out of the way, I'll move in to discussion of the game modes.
Game Modes:
I'm going to get the campaign versus elephant out of the room quickly first. The devs have yet to give a sensical reason as to why campaign versus wasn't designed into the game from the beginning. The one solid comment we have on it was that the mode would take too long for people to play, but that's not a valid reason when the co-op mode can take around two hours to complete. By most statistics that can be found, at any given point during the lifespan of the Left 4 Dead games the VS mode population was roughly equal to the co-op population, this is a huge chunk of potential customers to pre-emptively alienate for very poor reasoning, and this sits very poorly with me. This is likely the largest reason that has contributed to my decision to not buy the game or suggest it to others.
The remaining modes are co-op campaign and PvP Swarm, no other modes have been announced and the amount of content in the final game has not been announced either. I haven't been able to get a solid enough source for how much content will be in co-op campaign on release to include a hard number here, but the lack of transparency about how much content will be in at release, and how much will be monetized behind DLC paywalls, is disquieting. Functionally co-op is fine, I'll hit the gameplay in general below but as a mode it delivers what it says and is a boiler plate standard in the genre.
PvP though... Swarm was a trainwreck for me. I'll touch on the gameplay later, but this mode was absolutely plagued with matchmaking problems to the point where in about 6 hours of trying to get info for this review I got in to exactly one game that was actually 4v4. For this reason I can only speak about the balance from a surface level experience in the gameplay section. As a mode in general, this isn't the PvP mode most wanted, and seems to be a "party" mode to fit in between campaign sessions to blow off some steam. I don't see much developer effort here, which is fine if it is indeed intended as a fun pick up and play quick mode. I don't put much value in such modes, and they're usually afterthoughts which seems to be the case here.
One important thing I wanted to include here is the hard "no" on community workshop or mod support. This means all content will have to come from devs, will likely be monetized, and there will be no chance for any community modes, balance changes, fixes, or add-ons. Not all games need community mod support, but it is quite a lot of potential content to miss out on. This is conjecture on my part, but because of the aggressive monetization of the game and TRS's past decisions, it is my suspicion that mod support would undermine the prices they plan to charge for official content and that is why it won't be included.
Gameplay:
I'll be breaking gameplay into a few sub-sections for clarity:
Zombies: Most of my issues are with visibility, feedback, hitboxes, and lack of counterplay. As I said above the animations and clipping create a gameplay imperative such that players need to avoid direct interaction with the zombies. To be more specific, because of random clipping and unclear animations/ranges even common zombies can get lucky and get unavoidable damage in on the player. This results in the best strategy being killing everything before it even has a chance to interact with the player. This is true with the special zombies as well, none of the attacks have any counterplay other than deleting the enemy before they attack, or not being within their range of threat to begin with. Melee and bashing just don't seem reliable enough to be worth taking what could be permanent damage from de-sync when you can crouch through the whole map and kill zombie one by one.
Beyond this, hit feedback feels weak and it is not always immediately apparent when a zombie is dead, staggered, etc. Heads don't come off on a lethal headshot, and sound feedback is unclear or strange, such as the "double" hit sound/echo when landing a headshot. The last issue I have is with the AI director and spawn/aggro. With the prevailing strategy being slow, consistent, and total clearing of every area, how the AI director spawns things seems to contradict this design. This is especially noticeable during events, but the AI director will spawn zombies in areas that have been cleared, and seems to have nearly no respect for player proximity either. The only thing the director seems to have for spawning criteria is line of sight, which creates really illogical, annoying, and jarring situations where zombies magically spawn in place you know are clear, or entirely too close to the group to react properly to.
Gunplay, Cards, and Combat: The cards are a genuinely interesting design choice, but implementation feels confused and flawed, and particularly ripe for MTX abuse. As is, many cards seem to be facilitators for things that would be default in other games. Rather than feeling like your character gets "better" at doing something, it feels like your ability to move, shoot, heal, etc, is intentionally bad from the start and cards are necessary just to get you to where other games start. This is especially limiting with the stamina system, movement speed, and healing. Later in the game it also feels as though cards are necessary progression for veteran and nightmare modes. This creates the problem of players without the necessary cards joining veteran and nightmare games, dragging their teammates down.
The attachments feel like they have a similar problem, the base guns are far below how effective guns usually are in this genre, and they require rare bases and good attachments to do the same thing vanilla guns in other games do. In another game, I can hop into a game, get a rifle, and so long as I have the aim to tap a zombie in the head from across the map, the zombie will die in 1 headshot. In B4B, I have to get a specific weapon class, get cards to support damage, and get attachments to boost both damage and range, and even accuracy to hit the same "1 shot headshot" breakpoint. Even then, nearly no gun in the game retains this breakpoint at long range, and many lose this breakpoint even at mid range. This is why the attachment and weapon system feels cluttered and unsatisfying right now.
The *only* thing that matters for any gun in this genre are a few breakpoints. 1 shot headshot, and 1 shot body shot. In other games these breakpoints are intrinsic to the weapon, but in B4B you have to calculate your cards, the base dmg and rarity of the weapon, the attachments you have, and what point in the campaign you're at, again all just to achieve the same clarity that other games give you up-front. Both the cards and the attachments feel very much like a system of having power taken away from you, then drip-fed through the game, rather than becoming more powerful.
Map Design: Commenting on the design direction from the beta, the maps we were given are serviceable. Map elements seem inconsistent or used/placed without much consideration or thought in to how it impacts the flow of the map and the choices players must/can't make. Here as well the game seems confused as to what it wants to be at times. In earlier sections I made the assertion that slow and deliberate progress while clearing every zombie is the optimal way to play currently. Some horde events go directly against that without much signaling or warning, specifically the infinite horde sections are poorly signaled and don't function well.
This is something that must be compared against Left 4 Dead since few/no games do this in maps and this is the most fair comparison. In L4D events are clearly marked and signaled, and the game is designed for "stop and go" combat where sometimes caution is better, sometimes going full auto and pushing through the horde is best. This game is not designed, at all, for rushing. The guns are simply too inaccurate, the stamina system is too oppressive, and because of the trauma system and the difficulty of negating damage players with inevitably take damage in rush sections. The events really need another pass to align with the design direction of the rest of the game, as they are they aren't very memorable set pieces and they just feel out of line with the rest of the game.
Other minor issues are clarity for birds, alarm cars, and alarm doors. They are all too easily shot from too far away and not visually clear enough in many areas. The mechanics with the birds are totally unclear and inconsistent, there is no signaling to the player what will or will not set them off, or if you can kill them without causing a horde or not.
Conclusion: All dev teams are comprised of individuals doing their job to the best of their ability. I know I did not mention many if any real positives in this review, and to a dev reading this that could be disheartening. I do not mean to criticize any individual with this feedback/review, the reason I took this time and took the beta seriously is because of how passionate I was about L4D, and about gaming in general. Recently my policy towards developers has become to follow individuals, not studios, and TRS is not an exception. I do not see much passion from TRS in this game, even outside of the context of L4D haunting this release. There's so much that seems confused in the design, and the monetization/advertisement decisions seem very predatory and in bad faith. If I had to place blame for any of this, it would be on the higher ups, and not the devs, the money people, not the designers. This game may release and be a monetary success, but from my perspective there was a lot of missed potential and a general lack of care with Back 4 Blood.
On its own, this is a bog standard 4 person zombie shooter with slow game-play, predatory monetization, and pre-planned grind for progression. I could be expecting too much from TRS, but if my expectations were too high they were only allowed to get that high because of TRS's previous games, and their own advertising. As such, the beta did not meet my expectations, and there are core flaws/lacking features in the game that cannot be fixed or patched. I cannot recommend that people buy the game on release, and if you are interested at all, you should at least wait to see what content will be monetized post-release to assess if the actual content in the game is worth it to you.
For those that made it through this massive wall of random opinion from one player, thanks for taking the time to read through this and consider my perspective and opinions.

[Sleep0]

My god man.

Short review: Game is underwhelming and over priced

[Talviuni]

Thank you for this comprehensive review. I don't think this audience appreciates the details but I find your observations interesting, many of which seem accurate and in the core of good game design.

Seems like I can safely give this game a pass. What a shame. I had my hopes up from watching some footage already.