Back 4 Blood Beta Hands On (Steam)

by Jim Smale · August 9, 2021

Our Back 4 Blood Beta Hands-On shows off this thrilling cooperative first-person shooter from the creators of the critically acclaimed Left 4 Dead franchise. We experienced the intense 4 player co-op narrative campaign, competitive multiplayer as human or Ridden, and frenetic gameplay that keeps you in the action.

Back 4 Blood Beta Pros:

Decent graphics.
18.52GB Download size.
Full controller support.
Graphics – fullscreen, target GPU, resolution, v-sync, anti-aliasing, motion blur, graphics preset, adaptive FX quality, post-processing quality, texture quality, effects quality, shadow quality, foliage quality, HDR, brightness, contrast, saturation, graphics API (DX11/DX12), sharpening, resolution scale, and screen space.
Controller – four layouts, custom binding, Invert axis and sensitivity sliders, deadzone, and toggles for sprinting and crouching.
First-person shooter gameplay.
Can set if guns are set to auto or single shot, cursor color, coaching tips, auto switch, and hit markers and numbers.
Accessibility options – text to speech, male or female voice, speech to text, profanity filter, camera motion strength, and Colourblind.
Centre camp where you can group up, buy from the shops, do some boxing and use the gun range.
Cards – you get a starter deck but you set up decks of unlocked cards that can be played at the start of a level. They may give more ammo, health or make reloading faster.
Decks are for camping and versus.
Four-player co-op.
Has PvP and PvE.
Crossplay support (optional).
Three modes – campaign, quick match, and versus.
Profile personalization – unlock and equip emblems, titles, and banners.
Three difficulties – survivor, veteran, and nightmare.
Acts are broken down into levels.
Mute all button.
Easy party-up system.
Bots will take the place of dropouts and can be taken over if someone joins.
Fast-paced combat.
Saferoom – ends the current level and serves as the start of the next level, here you can buy items and weapons, heal up and plan.
You can ping items or enemies.
Emote/chat wheel for those who don’t have mics or want to interact with the Internet.
Healing stations can be found and used multiple times.
A lot of loot to be picked up from money to healing items to ammo and guns.
Loot has rarity levels.
Guns can have attachments like scopes and fast reloading mags.
You can heal/resupply teammates.
Many different types of enemies from one’s that can stick you to one’s who knock you flying or huge massive behemoths.
Good gunplay.
Teamwork to make the dream work.
Boss encounters.
Characters will chat amongst themselves or give call-outs.
A lot of little set pieces.
Setting off alarms or alerting birds can trigger massive hordes to appear.
Melee doesn’t stop you from reloading.
You can heal and move at the same time.
Levels are big enough that you can play a scenario in multiple ways.
Every run will have the enemies and loot randomized each time.
3 continues them its back to the beginning.
Environmental hazards are plenty with exploding barrels and Breakable doors/walls.
Intense and stressful panic atmosphere.
Fluid controls.

Back 4 Blood Beta Cons:

Playing with bots is less than ideal.
The difficulty is always up and down.
Performance issues happened a lot from lagging to pop-up to server disconnects.
Can sometimes be hard to see your objective.
Any sort of disconnect and reconnect results in your load put getting wiped.
Randoms seem to play the game like it’s a speed-running event.
Few times I got caught on the level geometry.
Being able to pick out your teammates is hard as the names don’t appear clearly and once they are covered in blood it’s nigh on impossible.
No way to turn off team damage/killing.