Blood Tracks gets some extra points added to its quality for its unique sound/musical score, custom melee weapons, custom Infected skins, and some original voice acting from the two NPCs that you encounter in a shack.

However, right away on the first Chapter, there’s some jank. The first issue is that the first primary weapons are just single guns rather than x4 pickups for the full team. The second issue is with the crane Crescendo event summoning a Megamob before you even activate it. Then after you survive that, the crane summons a second Megamob when you actually interact with it (for this reason you should cancel one of them out, by immediately running and hitting the crane button when you drop down from the warehouse window, but good luck knowing this trick on your first playthrough). Fortunately, you can largely trivialize both of these Crescendos by just sitting on the bulldozer’s bucket and crushing the Common Infected.

On my first playthrough, the First Aid Kits oddly didn’t load in the second Chapter’s Safe Room, although they did on my second playthrough of this map.

The second Chapter is long, dark, has lots of uneven/vertical terrain, and is largely forgettable; other than the Very Hard Gauntlet at the very end of it, which seemingly should just be a regular Crescendo event and end normally, but doesn’t (no alarm or anything sounds to explain this in-universe, so hopefully you have the in-game directions option enabled).

Be sure to save explosives for this event, as you likely won’t have your desired Tier 2 weapons by this point (there are several random single Tier 2’s in the tower, but that’s it).

Chapter 3 is where the difficulty spikes to the point of being borderline Unfair. For starters, on this Chapter all of the enemies appear to be speed-boosted, which is only vaguely indicated by a scripted No Mercy-originating voiceline of Zoey mentioning that it’s unfair ‘how fast they all are’.

After likely taking some hits from animation-glitching speed-boosted Commons, you reach a fake Safe Room, which when activated summons a Megamob and a silent surprise Tank; the latter of whom can immediately take a swing at whomever opened the door, if they don’t know to immediately start backpedalling after activating the event.

The speed-boosted Infected and sheer length of this map was presumably done to discourage rushers from simply looping the Tank once and then running through the level with impunity, but it only serves to make the Commons’ animations glitchy, pathing strange, and the difficulty of the Chapter frustrating as a result.

The Finale likely retains the speed-boosted Infected(?), and in addition was oddly causing map lag and input delay for everyone on the server (including me as Host).

This combined with invisible walls, and a somewhat janky Finale map layout, made this otherwise-standard Defend-Tank-Defend-Tank-Run To The Train Finale extremely difficult, and very frustrating.

It also certainly didn’t help that pub players appeared to be crashing when they tried to join on this campaign (likely due to Consistency issues), leaving us with 1-2 Bots on both playthroughs.

Which only further added to the Unfair difficulty, frustration, and jank of this Custom Map, as the Bot(s) rapidly munched and wasted all of our excess Pills/Adrenaline/Medkits.

Ultimately, the jank, glitches, map lag, and extremely poor game design choices on the last two Chapters of Blood Tracks, as well as the pub-crashing issue, unfortunately saps any potential enjoyment that one could expect to get out of this campaign on Expert, even if you overlook its jank and glitches on the first two Chapters.

Which is a shame; because you can tell that the Map Designers put a lot of time and effort into this Custom Map.

It’s also worth mentioning that the map writing on Blood Tracks includes some crass vulgarity; which not all players will appreciate.


For more Expert Custom Map Reviews and ratings, see my full Collection here. https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2252724380