Finally finished Back 4 Blood with friends. Played on veteran. Took 45 hours spread a bit over a month to clear, and man was that a journey. The difficulty was relentless at the best of times, seemingly insurmountable at worst. Sometimes the game will simply decide it wants to kill you and spawn more high health + high damage enemies than you could even pretend you have a chance against, and it similarly always felt fairly random when the RNG just decided to play nice and let us clear levels. What little I got of the story and character writing was as bad as one would expect from a game like this too.

But ultimately a very good squad game to sink our teeth into for a while. I had a lot of fun with it. The absurd difficulty is definitely offputting and (as fond as I ended up becoming of that) a very valid criticism of the game. But beyond that I mostly feel that it caught way too much flak at the start for the simple fact of not being L4D2. That backlash was probably going to be inevitable, given how revered L4D2 is.