Back 4 Blood - Expansion 2: Children of the Worm (DLC)

My first run through Children of the Worm took about two hours, and I walked away thinking: this is what the base game's DLC roadmap should have looked like from the start. The second expansion for Turtle Rock's co-op shooter ditches the first expansion's shallow rogue-lite side content in favour of a proper new act - Act 5 - split across six missions that take you through a shipyard, a prison block, and tunnel corridors crawling with a brand-new enemy faction called the Cultists. These are not your standard shambling Ridden. They retain human intelligence, carry ranged weapons, and hit your squad from angles the base game rarely bothered with. The four new enemy types - Slashers with iron claws who close distance fast, Crones who rain arrows from range, Pusflingers lobbing toxic jars, and armored Sniper variants - force genuine build adaptation in a way the first expansion never did. If you've settled into a comfortable card deck for the base campaign, Act 5 will punish passivity. The new playable Cleaner, Prophet Dan, is a highlight: an Irish-accented preacher with abilities built around buffing teammates on revive, which slots well into squad play and gives card-builders something fresh to optimize around. The new melee claw weapons are ridiculous in the best way - leaning into a melee-heavy card build and tearing through a horde with them is one of the more satisfying moments the game has produced. Not everything lands. The Duffel Bag loot system introduced in Act 5 is the expansion's clearest stumble: rewards are randomized, can only be earned by carrying bags to safehouses, and there is no alternative path to unlocking the new cards and cosmetics they contain. Players chasing specific cards will grind repeated runs and still come up short. Bear traps scattered aggressively through the levels add tension at first but tip into irritation by the second playthrough, especially since enemy AI ignores them entirely. The final mission is also a weak close to an otherwise decent act - short, low-stakes, and undercutting the momentum built earlier. The controller aim issues that dogged Back 4 Blood at launch are still present here on console, and the mission objective design leans on familiar fetch-and-hold structures without adding much that feels genuinely new. At roughly two hours for a single run, the content ceiling is low for solo players who do not plan to replay on higher difficulties. The value equation shifts considerably if you have a regular co-op group willing to run the act multiple times with different Cleaner builds - that is clearly the intended use case, and it works. One notable upside: only one person in a party needs to own the expansion for the whole group to access Act 5, which is a sensible policy. Children of the Worm will not convince anyone who bounced off Back 4 Blood's base game to come back. But for players still invested in the co-op loop who felt let down by Tunnels of Terror, it is a genuine step forward - new enemies with tactical teeth, a Cleaner worth building around, and enough chaos in the firefights to keep a squad loud on voice chat.

Alex · Scout Team

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