A definite co-op experience you simply must play.
It’s been an untold amount of years since we’ve had anything remotely close to a zombie survival game. Sure Horde mode in Gears of War 2 is fun and zombified Nazis in Call of Duty: World at War is fine, but nothing substitutes for an invasion brimming with true undead bodies. Valve has found the secret ingredients to authentic zombie survival and fused them with containers of adrenaline and an internet connection.
First things first, despite the addition of a single-player mode Left 4 Dead is not a single player game. Play it if you will, but it quickly grows old as your AI teammates don’t add nearly the same depth as real people. There are a total of four campaigns and each is playable with up to four people who can hop in at any point. These campaigns are broken up into five-part segments requiring you to reach a Safe Room at the end of each segment to continue… safely. Just come prepared, as poor team-work and solo operations often result in violent screams and a bloody mess.
You’d think only four campaigns would become terribly drab and meaningless after a few play-throughs, but the incorporation of the A.I. Director puts a whole new spin on things. The Director is an invisible aspect of the game that increases the volume of features in numerous ways. For instance; it’ll increase zombie intensity if you’re doing well, gives you breaks, health, etc, when you’re bleeding out your ears, and will deploy special infected if people are wandering away from the group. It’s this feature that makes every game completely different from the next, giving it virtually unlimited replayability. You could complain about the short selection of weapons but then that’d just be nit-picking.
Game reviews have a habit of telling you that team-work is required in a game when it’s really just an option. That may be the case for the easy and even normal difficulty settings here, but amp it up to advanced or expert and cry. People running off just for a second are likely to become zombie fodder, especially those who get attacked by special infected. It should also be mentioned that friendly-fire is on and becomes more deadly the higher you raise the difficulty. All of this adds immeasurable amounts of grief when situations go from bad to horrific. It’s intense but when you’re being hounded by several hundred zombies should it not?
When it comes to story, well, there is none. Zombies are here, you kill them and you survive. Do you need to know anything else? Alright, Valve thought so and instituted their astute humor in the form of graffiti and/or writing on the walls of the Safe Rooms. It’s humorous and serious expressions are reminiscent of things you may have seen in Portal. In any case, you aren’t playing Left 4 Dead for a story but the fact is that you’ll be telling others about stories that happened to you and your team. Weird how that works…
Being a largely multiplayer experience, Left 4 Dead also introduces the ability to play as the special infected in the versus mode. An additional four players are added in this mode and both teams swap back and forth every time they hit a Safe Room. Perhaps the only aggravating issue is dying when playing as infected. It’ll happen often as a few bullets will completely tear you apart but the 20 or so second wait that incurs after you’re killed is the real dilemma. Why can’t we play as the little crappy zombies while we wait? That and unfortunately you’re going to have to experience the same campaign over again until new downloadable content comes out.
Left 4 Dead is a culmination of the very best horror films and survival games; a truly eclectic experience. That said, the game gives an incredible contemporary horror feeling and that sense of urgency and dread is genuine. There is little reason to pass this one up and if your excuse is that you have no one to play with then start making friends. That is, until you wake up the witch.
