The game thrives on this constant communication where you try to ensure people know you have two grenades ready to frag large mutated, but are also after some more shotgun shells as you’re empty? It’s nightmarish, and also the sort of interactions that define a play session.
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It’s another resource really, health and trauma coming together to make sure even with a ton of supplies, you’re still always on the razor’s edge, constantly just one rough engagement away from a full wipe.
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Making sure you keep yourself free of trauma is, like the real world, essential to living a long and healthy life. As with everything else in the game, you can get cards or perks that mitigate trauma, either making you more effective at healing it or more resistant to taking it. The best way to avoid trauma is to avoid being hit, but considering a death in Back 4 Blood is often a case of succumbing to a thousand tiny Ridden-inflicted cuts, it’s hard to avoid feeling worse for wear after just a few fights. These offer a single heal – traditionally given to the person with the most trauma – and additional heals for a slightly eye watering 400 copper a pop. Trauma is the killer in this game, as it lowers your maximum HP and there are very few ways to heal it, with the most common being the expensive first aid cabinets built into walls throughout the levels. Not the life-ruining trauma of watching your fellow apocalypse survivors getting Ridden to death, but the mechanical trauma Back 4 Blood imposes whenever you take damage. The weapons, which you’ll trade often due to a star rating which mandates constant upgrades and switching during a campaign run, all behave fairly differently although none of them are truly incredible.īack 4 Blood is also a game about trauma. These are randomly tossed out into the world, but using them correctly is key to success in the game. Throughout your run through the zombie-infested levels, you’ll find the currency Copper, a bunch of throwable items, medical supplies and even just guns and attachments themselves.
You’ll be doing this a lot because if you wipe away the splattered zombie gore, Back 4 Blood is a game about resources. This is Back 4 Blood at its frantic best, pumping round after round into the tide of undead while you’re constantly doing the mental gymnastics of managing your health, ammo, whatever else you’re carrying and then the same three things for everyone else in the team. Swarms of undead pour through every window as a staccato of gunfire kicks in to welcome them.īack 4 Blood. The opening notes of Spiderbait’s ‘Black Betty’ cover play as a low undulated groan comes from a thousand mouths at once, all of them heading to us. We use our medical supplies, set up a turret and try to cover our choke points in barbed wire, positioning fuel and propane tanks to use as improvised explosives if we have to fall back – not that there is anywhere to fall back to. The noise, we’re told, will bring all of the zombies to us and give survivors somewhere else a chance to start rebuilding.
This is my default state in Back 4 Blood, although for a nice change of pace, here we’re standing in a bar about to turn the jukebox up to 11. We’re ankle deep in the (re)dead, splattered in gore and patching up our wounds with scarce medical supplies.