Developer Turtle Rock Publisher Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series (version tested) Release Out now

Back 4 Blood is a Faustian pact, the gift of a devil risen from the earth like one of the game’s own bullet-sponge bosses. Of course you can have Left 4 Dead back, the devil begins. Here it is with the classic trimmings: four players fighting from saferoom to saferoom against regular zombies and superpowered Special infected; beeping pipebombs to lure the crowds away; desperate mid-scrum revivals; enemy spawning that functions like a personality test, with dawdlers pinioned by creatures they can’t fight off alone. Back 4 Blood’s desiccated United States burns brighter than Left 4 Dead’s twilit post-apocalypse, with colour choices that recall the developer’s ill-fated Evolve, but it strikes a familiar balance between archetypal spaces and twisty, Half-Life-2-era corridor design: malls and sewers, worrying hedge mazes, giddy paths of scaffolding over packed streets, and tumbledown arenas where you keep the undead company till a door finishes opening.

It sounds like everything a fan of Turtle Rock’s 2008 reputation-maker could dream of. But there’s a price, the devil adds, and the price is very simply: more. Not just more guns per category, but a generous sprinkling of scopes, barrels, stocks and magazines governed by a rarity system, with stat differences filling the screen as you pick through the loot crates that litter this undead world. A copper currency to spend on posher firearms in saferooms reminiscent of The Division’s outposts, with NPCs who talk to the air while you decide whether you need an Epic laser sight more than an Uncommon Molotov cocktail. A suite of power-up cards such as +2 health recovery per machete kill, sorted into decks of 15 and slowly unlocked over the course of each run.