Back 4 Bloods Swarm Mode Needs Big Improvements

Back 4 Blood’s Swarm Mode Needs Big Improvements

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Back 4 Blood’s Swarm PvP has players control the Ridden and Cleaners in a series of competitive rounds, but structural issues plague the game mode.

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Back 4 Bloods Swarm Mode Needs Big Improvements

Turtle Rock Studios’ Back 4 Blood acts as a spiritual successor to the developer’s previous Left 4 Dead games under Valve in many ways. Its gameplay has a more deliberate feel than L4D’s run-and-gun approach, however, but where Back 4 Blood truly differs is in its PvP game mode, Swarm, which needs serious improvements on some glaring issues.

Back 4 Blood’s PvP Swarm mode pits a team of human Cleaners against a team of zombified Ridden in a round-based, competitive deathmatch. The Cleaners use Back 4 Blood’s card system to gain buffs and advantages, while the Ridden use earned XP on an upgrade tree called the Zombie Mutation System. Rounds begin with a scavenging period for the Cleaners to find weapons, defenses, and consumables. Once the round proper starts, the Ridden team, aided by AI zombies, tries to kill the Cleaners as fast as possible. When all the Cleaners are dead, the teams switch sides, and the best survival time wins the round.

The idea is sound enough; a simple mode in which players use both the Cleaners and the Ridden in a best-of-three match is an admittedly enticing alternative to a L4D-style versus campaign. In practice, though, Swarm is often frustrating or outright boring. The combat mechanics of both teams – and the gunplay especially – are very well done, but Swarm has protracted periods that aren’t the least bit engaging.

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Back 4 Blood’s PvP Swarm Mode Doesn’t Flow Well

Following the load-in screen, there is a long period where the Cleaners select their characters and cards and the Ridden choose their variety of monster. This happens between each round, and the menus (particularly the card system’s) contain unnecessarily lengthy animations. Add in the intermission scoreboards that count up the Cleaners’ survival times, and players are forced to sit and wait for far too long during each game. These processes could potentially be expedited with menu and animation changes, but issues with Back 4 Blood’s Swarm mode gameplay structure itself pose a more difficult problem.

Swarm mode’s scavenging period leaves the team currently playing as the Ridden with very little to do for 45 seconds. They can wander the arena and observe the Cleaners setting up defenses, but that’s about it. The HUD highlights the Cleaners for the Ridden during matches anyway, so there’s no need to keep tabs on them beforehand. If the fortifications systems were a bit more robust, watching them get set up might help with strategizing, but the small rows of barbed wire are quickly destroyed once the round starts, and the Cleaners rarely stay bunched up in one place. The long wait between Swarm rounds, with even more waiting on the Ridden side, makes it feel like Back 4 Blood’s PvP is wasting players’ time and becomes frustrating when the Cleaners don’t survive long, pushing players into the menus once again.

There are some other, minor oversights, like players not being rewarded for their win when the opposing side disconnects, but these will likely get ironed out now that Back 4 Blood’s Swarm mode is reaching more players. Unfortunately, the mode’s structural issues might not be easily fixable. Still, Turtle Rock likely has plenty of feedback from players to this end, especially after Back 4 Blood’s popular open beta, so hopefully Swarm will see some much-needed improvements in the near future.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/back-4-blood-pvp-swarm-mode-bad-boring/

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