Today's Game Awards finally gave players a good look at Turtle Rock Studio's four-person zombie shooter, Back 4 Blood. The spiritual successor of Valve's Left 4 Dead series is proof positive that a good zombie formula, much like the zombies themselves, never really dies.
Despite years of speculation over a Left 4 Dead 3, the title in the groundbreaking zombie series just never managed to make it into production, although Valve didn't seem particularly bothered by it. But the good folks over at Turtle Rock Studios saw the value in cooperative survival games, and began developing Back 4 Blood, which they announced in March of 2019. There wasn't much revealed since then, other than concept art, until today's big reveal at the 2020 Game Awards livestream.
Back 4 Blood's first official trailer hearkens back to the Left 4 Dead intros and trailers of yore, and features four characters (three guys, one girl, because some things never change), battling it out against swarms of zombies, along with a few specially mutated monsters with individual abilities, in a world ravaged by the zombie apocalypse. There are familiar weapons from the old series as well, including nail bats, Molotov cocktails, shotguns, handguns, submachine guns, and M-16s. But where it differs from Left 4 Dead is in that there's actually an origin story as to where the zombie plague originated, which may indicate that Back 4 Blood might be a little more story-oriented than its spiritual predecessor. But otherwise, the action is largely the same, which is absolutely fine.
So it may not be Left 4 Dead 3, since Valve has basically abandoned the series entirely, but it's extremely close. Back 4 Blood is about as on the nose as you can get about being a reincarnation of L4D, down to the spelling and the punctuation marks (and swapping out "for" for 4 is a pretty blatant move). Turtle Rock seems determined to remind Valve that they had the golden ticket with the original L4D series and that they wasted it - Turtle Rock is clearly determined not to make the same mistake. It's familiar enough that diehard fans of Left 4 Dead will undoubtedly be snatching up a copy when it's finally released.
The "when," however, is still the question, since that's the one big question that the trailer hasn't yet answered. While the game was originally slated for release on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, the fact that the first actual trailer is only now released, a month after current gen consoles hit shelves, it's fairly likely that the game will be adapted for the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X/S. But fans are more likely willing to wait, considering that just last year, they didn't think they would be getting another 4-person co-op zombie shooter at all.
Source: The Game Awards