Left 4 Dead Review
For whatever reason, online co-op is something of a rarity these days, especially on the PC, so it's refreshing to see a game like "Left 4 Dead" offer an opportunity for gamers to connect with people around the country (and the world) and work together towards a common goal. That goal in this case happens to be mowing down hordes of flesh-eating zombies, and "Left 4 Dead" makes it an absolute blast to achieve it.
The story is pretty simple: a zombie plague has infected an entire city and there are only four survivors who have not been infected and just want to get out of the city alive. These zombies aren't slow and ambling, though; think more like the fast, semi-intelligent zombies from "28 Days Later." On top of that, there are stronger types of zombies with unique abilities, known as special infected. The smoker can entangle and drag you with its tongue from long distances, the hunter can pounce and pin you to the ground as it rips your guts out and the boomer, which can vomit on you (which in turn attracts hordes of common infected) explodes when shot. There are also the two most powerful special infected: the tank, a behemoth with massive amounts of health that can send you flying with a single swipe of its fist, and the witch, who creepily sits on the ground sobbing, but becomes alerted if you get to close to her or shine your flashlight on her. Once alerted she stands up and charges at you very quickly and can kill you in one hit.
The atmosphere of the game is conveyed superbly through the dark and dreary environments. Lighting, shadows, and bleak color sets all generated by developer Valve's Source engine come together nicely to make some genuinely spooky maps. Character models and animations look great too. Even as literally hundred-plus zombies swarm your screen at certain times, they never look like static, generic models. There are many different kinds of common infected, and they are all surprisingly detailed and smoothly animated, even in their mass numbers.
The game's four campaigns, each of which consist of five missions, take place in different locales which all make for substantially different experiences. If I really had to nitpick, I would say the game should have incorporated a few other campaigns, simply because after four or five hours of gameplay, you've already seen them all and from then on it's just running through the same maps again and again. That's just me being greedy, because they're still insanely fun to play through and each time is a different experience, which I'll get to later.
The campaigns can be played through in single player with the other three humans controlled by the computer, or you can team up with up to three other players to make your way through the game in co-op mode. You can play with people you know, or you can just run a quick search online for any games that are being played with open slots, and you can just hop right into the action, even if they're in the middle of a mission. "Left 4 Dead" puts a huge emphasis on teamwork, which differentiates it from a straight run-and-gun title. For instance, inevitably, you will be overwhelmed by enemies and your health bar will reach zero. When this happens, you are "incapacitated," which means you aren't dead yet, but you have been knocked to the ground, cannot move, and can only fire with your pistol. In this state, you have another health bar that begins to slowly decrease and you can only be brought back to your feet by a teammate. Your teammates must act fast though, because time isn't the only thing working against them; zombies can team up and swarm around a fallen comrade and continue to attack them, causing their secondary health bar to plummet and eventually killing them for good.
Fighting off the special infected requires teamwork as well. Players can only be untangled by the grasp of a smoker or released from the claws of a hunter with the help of a teammate, while everyone needs to team up and focus-fire on the tank if they want any chance of bringing it down.
Playing with other human players is always a better idea than letting the computer control the other survivors. The AI is mediocre at best, with computer-controlled characters often running into blazing infernos caused by a Molotov cocktail or refusing to help players who are either incapacitated or in trouble with special infected.
Beyond the frustrating AI, though, the gameplay is straightforward and fun. In a single mission, you and your team will kill at least a thousand zombies, a result of adrenaline pumping moments in which you must fight off swarms of infected with an arsenal of 10 different weapons. There's not much to it besides making it to the end of the level alive, but working together to figure out how best to take down hordes of zombies and special infected in co-op will never get old.
The way "Left 4 Dead" is set up is very open-ended, giving players an opportunity to just hop on and play any mission in any campaign whenever they want. The game doesn't have to be played straight through, and it doesn't have to be played with the same people that you played with last time. A set up like this makes it really easy for gamers to just play for the sake of having fun, rather than getting stuck on one particularly hard mission and not being able to play anything else.
To top it off, the content stays fresh and different every time you play. The game features a built-in "director," which randomly generates enemies, weapons and health according to how well (or poorly) you and your team are doing. If your team has died five times in a row in the same spot on a level, chances are good that next time you re-spawn, there's going to be a stash of med-kits, powerful weapons and explosives waiting for you, and maybe even a smaller amount of enemies. Likewise, the areas in which enemies are spawned, as well as the types of enemies you encounter, are different each time you play. It keeps you on your toes, and brings the challenge of the game to another level in that you are never completely prepared for what you're about to run into.
Such an open-ended, randomized set up makes for some excellent replay-ability. Blazing straight through the campaign on the easiest setting will probably only take you a few hours, but there are four difficulty settings - the hardest of which is freakishly difficult - which, when combined with the director, can make for a fresh experience each time through.
There is also a versus mode which is incredibly fun and so well done that it doesn't feel tacked on at all, which is often the case with multiplayer modes in certain games. In fact, versus is nearly a whole other game in itself. In this mode, four players are given the opportunity to play as special infected (which special infected you play as is randomly decided each time you are spawned), while the other four play as the survivors. The eight players make their way through the same missions of the regular co-op campaigns; only the special infected team must stop the humans from reaching the end of the level. Basically, it's an attack-and-defend set up, and if the humans are successful in reaching the end of the level, they will advance to the next mission within the campaign, whereas if the special infected are successful in killing off all four survivors, the teams are switched and defense gets to play offense. It's wildly entertaining to play as the infected, but playing as the survivors and facing off against other human players is great fun, too.
Playing "Left 4 Dead" is like playing through your favorite zombie flick, and it's every bit as fun as you would imagine. Beautifully presented with some high-octane cooperative gameplay, this is one of those games that can be played for hours on end because it doesn't really have a terminus for gamers, like "Counter-Strike" or "Team Fortress." Sure, technically there are campaigns that you work your way through, but it's not so much about beating the game as it is just playing for the sake of fun. In that sense, there's no real end to "Left 4 Dead."