#Back 4 blood open beta early access full
#Back 4 blood open beta early access series

After the debacle of Evolve, I was feeling slightly wary as to whether Turtle Rock could pull off a spiritual successor to L4D, but it seems - at least as far as I can see right now - that my caution was unnecessary. Honestly, everything about the missions in Back 4 Blood is dripping in its predecessor’s glory. Once you decide to leave the safety of Camp Hope and head out into the Ridden-infested world for some PvE Acts, the whole Left 4 Dead feeling floods in. But then again, that’s probably the point.

It’s obviously a personal preference and definitely not a problem with the game, but I feel it needs a little more tense atmosphere swirled into it, especially seeing as everywhere you look when on missions and in PvP is surrounded in death and despair. One issue I did have with Camp Hope was that the threat of impending doom just wasn’t there. The camp looks great and felt like a safe part of the world, giving you a natural way to move about the game. I say plunged because you’re sent straight to the Cleaners' base called Camp Hope which acts as the game’s menu, giving you the ability to speak to various camp members to start missions, customise your character’s card loadouts, and other bits and bobs that you’d expect to see within a game’s main menu. I left those menus feeling fairly good about the level of care Turtle Rock wanted to display with this title and was plunged into the main menu. This was all front and center before the main menu - not hidden within the settings options, just plonked on my lap before I went anywhere, just to ask, “hey, how do you want/need to play me?” It even had options to turn off profanity and toggle cross play etc. The first thing that struck me when booting up the game was the pop-up menu covering all aspects of accessibility, such as speech-to-text, font sizing, language, and a whole heap of other options aimed to create a good experience for a wide range of players. It was quite the amount of content and only says good things about the state of the game’s development with only a few short months left until release.

#Back 4 blood open beta early access full

Mixed in with the game modes were every weapon, five playable Cleaners, customisation cards, and the full camp experience that acts as the game’s main hub.

There was also a PvP mode called Swarm which tasked two teams of four players to go head-to-head in a battle for the longest survival time, with one team playing as the survivors, called Cleaners, and the other as the Ridden specials. This test offered us two of the game’s PvE Acts - Act 1 and Act 4 - comprised of four missions each as well as three difficulty levels, although I can’t imagine there were many people playing on the hardest of difficulties.

#Back 4 blood open beta early access series

But when Turtle Rock Studios decided to open the Back 4 Blood beta doors to those of us lucky enough to be granted Early Access, what we found when loading it on the Xbox Series X was a decent-sized chunk of the game waiting to be explored. Interactive Entertainment Xbox Game Pass Online Multiplayer Xbox Series X|S Article First Person Shooter Tom West A beta test for any game is generally a small portion of gameplay that players can experience repeatedly for as long as the test lasts.