There Will Be Blood

Turtle Rock Studios breathes new life into the horror of Left 4 Dead

- Tom Senior

The situation is a familiar one: hanging from a half-collapsed building shouting “Help! Help!” into a headset. Massed zombies claw at our feet, but we have three friends with machine guns coming to the rescue. We emerge crusted with gore, clamber across heaps of undead, reload and are ready to charge into the next building. The sound of distant screaming only adds to the sense that we might never escape the city of Evansburgh. The world has fallen to an infestation that’s turned almost everyone into a zombie – the fast, angry type, not the shambling specimens from George A Romero films. If you can’t work together, you and your comrades will end up as a pile of guts. If nothing else, Back 4 Blood works as an extremely stressful team-building exercise.

The game is the spiritual follow-up to the Left 4 Dead series. It’s been more than ten years since Left 4 Dead 2, and there’s a sense that the new game is a matter of unfinished business for Orange County-based Turtle Rock Studios. The original games’ structure remains intact: four teammates blast through gauntlets in firstperson, slaying hundreds of undead – both regular ones and mutant minibosses with the power to leap from walls, launch vomit at you, and smash you with huge, stretchy arms – as they move between the safe rooms that punctuate each level.