Back 4 Current Blood Review: “One shotgun blast of absolute joy”

Back 4 Blood’s zombie co-op chaos puts so few barriers between you and its bloody fun that you’re knee deep in Ridden’s guts before you even know what you’re really doing. There is a brief tutorial or option to play the single player campaign with friendly bots, but there’s nothing stopping you from going into battle without a clue of how any of the systems actually work.

It’s a strength and a weakness, it’s great to have zero barriers to jump into chaos with your pals, but it also means it’s easy to miss the basics of Back 4 Bloodsystems. Take the card game mechanic used to improve your stats and add special perks to your team. When a section starts, the game assigns Corruption cards to the level, which affects the type of threat you will face. It can be the weather, like a fog that can hide enemies or a mutated type of Ridden that has impractical armor on its weak spots.

Card sharks

You can then draw from a random selection from your deck – cards that are in your starter set, that you found, or bought with points for completing levels – and maximize your chances of survival. Some are simple like the Combat Knife card, which turns your melee hit into a knife attack, some apply to the whole team, like a 10% team health boost. My favorite – Living On A Prayer Card – gave me life for killing Ridden while in critical health and saved my ass more than once. You can make custom decks and people smarter than me probably already come up with complex Hearthstone-style collections for different teams and situations, but by the end of the night I was still a basic bitch.