Back To School is a little hit-and-miss with its Chapters, to say the least.

The first two Chapters are very well made overall (other than the first building’s attic’s hole’s sloped overhang, which drops and instakills anyone unfortunate enough to try and walk on it), and are very thematic and atmospheric with the rain, storming, ambience, and ambient radio broadcasts.

However, with Chapter 3 and onward, this map starts to get a little messy and obnoxious.

One of the strangest things about this map, IMO, is its RNG-based Hard Gauntlet events, which it has not one but two of. These RNG-based Hard Gauntlets have very high Common Infected spawn rates, feel rather arbitrary, and have a chance to simply not appear at all; for some reason (these RNG-based Hard Gauntlets appear at the end of Chapter 3 ‘Town’ and the penultimate Gauntlet of Chapter 4 ‘The Cinema’).

Chapter 4 is where the difficulty massively spikes; quickly turning it into a slog on Expert if you’re not with some great players (especially if they haven’t played this map before). Chapter 4 is vastly more difficult than the Chapters before or after it, with the final crescendo being a Very Hard Gauntlet set in a dead-drop theater room, where the Commons and Specials rain down upon you from above (during which Commons are ofc bash/stumble-immune until they’re ready to try and hit you, because of both dumb L4D2 game design and bad BTS level design, which only highlights the former).

This particular infinite Megamob event is a massive pain if you haven’t stockpiled multiple Bile/Pipe Bombs specifically for the Axe-pulling event.

On our particular first playthrough of this event, we even had a pub player pick up the objective-critical Axe and hold it, without knowing what to do with it, thus preventing the Tips on what to do from showing up, and resulting in us being confused and defending the fuse room until we eventually ran out of ammo and were overwhelmed.

It doesn’t help that there is an RNG-based Hard Gauntlet event and random Tank that can also show up just before the Cinema event, making Chapter 4 even more frustrating if you’re not with A-team players.

Comparatively, Chapters 5 & 6 are far easier than Chapter 4, which is odd pacing-wise.

The Chapter 6 ‘School’ Finale is a pretty easy Defend-Tank-Find Flasks-Tank, and is easy and underwhelming compared to the previous three Chapters before it.

The Finale Chapter before the Finale event itself is also far too long, and starts out far too maze-like for first-time players. We had to look around quite a bit before finding the right gate to go through (in the center area).

Besides frustrating difficulty, length, RNG, and pacing issues, there are also several other key issues that prevent this Custom Campaign from being more enjoyable.

These include issues such as cluttered environments (lots of random props and environmental objects that you can get physically stuck on/caught up on, sometimes unexpectedly/inconsistently), there are obvious Navigation Mesh (navmesh) issues that cause Common Infected to behave strangely/jittery/spin-in-place in various areas throughout the Campaign (can needlessly result in a lot more missed shots/damage taken), and the nigh-omnipresent Riot Infected Uncommons that show up on Chapters 2-6 quickly become a source of frustration and annoyance rather than fun on Expert difficulty (especially during some of Back To School’s frustrating Hard-Very Hard Gauntlet events).

The latter issue is also particularly annoying when the Riot Infected glitch under objects/map geometry and become bash/stumble-immune, which prominently highlights some of the worst glitches/design choices of Left 4 Dead 2 itself.

Some of my friends also notably had game-crashing issues at the start of Chapters 1 & 2, and some of the pubs complained of invisible Tanks (probably because they were able to join without having all of the required files downloaded).

If not for these many multifaceted issues, Back To School easily could have been a 9-10 out of 10, with its excellent and varied thematic environments.


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