Back 4 Blood has always been a strange curiosity. Created by Turtle Rock, the same studio that made the epochal zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, it’s never managed to attract the same acclaim and attention as the Valve-published FPS. Nevertheless, to this day, three years since it launched on Steam, it retains a committed playerbase, and now, out of nowhere, it’s been updated, and no longer uses the oft-debated Denuvo Anti-Tamper.
An FPS game in the same mold as Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood pairs you with three other players to battle against swarms of zombies of viral monstrosities, as you attempt to survive from one end of its nightmarish stages to the other. Its ancestry dates back to Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, when the original Turtle Rock created a beloved mod aptly named ‘Terror Strike.’
Eventually, the mod was reshaped, revamped, and developed into a full game, the first Left 4 Dead. Turtle Rock was purchased by Valve, but later left the Half-Life and Team Fortress giant to become independent. After launching the similarly asymmetrical horror shooter Evolve, the studio created Back 4 Blood.
At its peak, Back 4 Blood attracted more than 65,000 concurrent players on Valve’s platform. Three years later, it’s still pulling in around 4,000 people at any one time – Left 4 Dead 2, which was developed by Valve in-house, has a regular player base of some 21,000. Nevertheless, Back 4 Blood is still being updated. A small fix has just arrived for Steam Deck users, and it seems that Denuvo Anti-Tamper has just been removed.
Designed to protect games from piracy and cheating, Denuvo remains controversial among PC gamers, as some claim that the software can have an adverse effect on games’ performance. A variety of popular games use Denuvo, including Street Fighter 6, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Mortal Kombat 1, and the just-released RTS game Homeworld 3.
If you like Back 4 Blood, maybe try some of the other best zombie games, or perhaps grab some friends for the very best multiplayer games available on PC.
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