Back 4 Blood Final Expansion Review: River of Blood

As a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood hits a sweet spot of playing just like how you remembered playing its predecessors in the past, while mixing up the formula more than enough to make the experience feel fresh and new. The game achieves this with a combination of unique and charming playable characters, allies and NPC’s, A gruesome mix of zombies, or Ridden as the game calls them, and well crafted maps brimming with detail and personality. All of the mechanics and characteristics you loved in previous games from Turtle Rock are there, with enough variations and new content to make Back 4 Blood an enjoyable, fresh experience.

Turtle Rock has done a great job of consistently expanding Back 4 Blood’s content post-release. Their most recent expansion includes Act 6, “River of Blood”, a five chapter story arc that takes you through to the culmination of the Children of the Worm cult’s story. The expansion also includes a new game mode, “Trial of the Worm”, in which you chain four missions together for an increasingly difficult challenge with online leaderboards and supply points on the line. The new game mode, while releasing alongside the River of Blood expansion, was made free to download to all players who own the base game.

The level design is where Act 6 really shines. Every new chapter follows its own theme, and the level of detail, care and craftsmanship that Turtle Rock put into each mission earned a lot of my admiration. I truly had a great time making my way through all of the unique twists and turns of each chapter, and developer Turtle Rock used the varying setting of each mission to its fullest extent. The gameplay, level design and atmosphere of each mission are fully intertwined, and one complements the other. River of Blood certainly isn’t a slog from point A to point B, I felt engaged and entertained by each new twist that came around the corner.

Act Six kicks it off with “No Sanctuary”, where you fight your way through the summer camp-esque Lazy River Resort. From there, you meander your way through a series of varied, intriguing settings like the newsroom studio in “Emergency Broadcast”, the ridden-infested museum of “Grim Discovery”, the horrifyingly worm-infested promenade of “The Waterfront”, and finally, to the grand stadium final showdown of “Behold the Harbinger”.

The summer camp from hell that you fight your way through in “No Sanctuary” delightfully complements the atmosphere and story being crafted around Act 6’s leading baddies, the Children of the Worm cultists. There’s a particular section where you’re tasked with explosively demolishing a few of the cultist residences, and the waves of cultists and monsters that swarmed my character made me feel like the one person who said “I’d rather not drink the punch” on the last day at Jonestown, Guyana.

Fighting through the cult compound brings you to “Emergency Broadcast”, a hellish TV Newsroom studio filled with recorded scenes from the apocalypse. As you work your way through the studio you will hear the last moments of many of the anchors, as well as a behind-the-scenes peek into how a children’s television icon might come to terms with impending doom. I got a few good laughs at what the cast of playable characters had to say throughout this level, and the way all of the different storytelling, level design and voice line elements come together to weave an atmosphere of impending doom is nothing short of exciting.

Next, your group will embark on a field trip through a museum of natural history, complete with interactive dinosaurs, a planetarium with a trippy warp-speed slide, and a whole bunch of rotten shambling monstrosities. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I again want to commend Turtle Rock on their ability to create an engaging, fun to explore world. You really do feel like you’re experiencing the reality of an apocalyptic museum full of fun, albeit ridden horde-triggering, exhibits brimming with character. From start to finish I was fully engaged in what was happening throughout this mission.

The setting in “The Waterfront” has a little less going for it than its preceding chapters, but it makes up for it in sheer Clive Barker levels of disgusting gore. The level is overrun with tentacles, worms and growths of all different sizes, and offers a menacing view of the approaching Harbinger’s stadium throughout the level. It offers a few tense moments as you wait on the world’s slowest public transportation to move you throughout the level.

The stadium you find yourself in for the final chapter, “Behold the Harbinger”, definitely lacks some of the world-building detail you find in its preceding chapters, but makes up for it by filling most of the level’s free space with the Harbinger, the final boss of the act. You’ll find yourself in a stadium stocked to the brim with explosives and cultists, and it’s your job to mix up a recipe of the two that ends in good times for all(but the ridden). I found the boss fight to be somewhat easy with the right weapons on Veteran difficulty, but I’m looking forward to testing my mettle against it again at Nightmare and No Hope levels of difficulty.

All in all, River of Blood was a great ending to a great game. Turtle Rock did a good job of putting out quality content that broadened the scope and experience of what was offered in the base game of Back 4 Blood. Each new expansion offered not only more weapons, skins, characters and enemies, but added more depth to the world you inhabit as a Cleaner. The borderline rogue-like elements of the Corruption cards and your own collected card decks add a lot of re-playability, and the detail and soul imparted upon the world on display in Back 4 Blood makes it hard to resist getting sucked right into the game. Grab a few of your friends, make some new ones online, or play on your own with some bots and have a great time in this newest horde-slaying carnival ride from the studio that brought you Left 4 Dead!