Left 4 Dead Review

Left 4 Dead offers the greatest multiplayer experience with strangers so far. Even if you do not like FPS games, or western zombie culture with its pretentious assertion that it all represents something else a little bit deeper, I warrant you’d like this. Both its gameplay and soundtrack are procedurally perfect; it might even be mentioned in the same breath after/as Mario cart.

The four distinct characters fill the spectrum of your preferred styles of playing at surviving an apocolypse. You have Bill, the irate Vietnam Veteran who acts as a sullen father figure to the survivors. On the other end you haven the other end you have Zoe, the eager student. In between you have Francis, the permanently angry biker who seems a bit too skilful with a shotgun. Finally you have Louis, an ICT office worker whose banter with Francis forms the basis for a tenuous society vs freedom metaphor. All I know is that the banter is funny as hell; these don’t feel like bots.

The crux of the gameplay is that you are forced to work together as a team. While the standard infected merely run after you (terrifyingly fast, like the zombies from 28 days later) the special zombies trap you. For example, the smoker zombie wraps a massive tongue around you and constricts you. The only way to be freed is for another survivor to shoot the smoker; you can't do it yourself. This simple mechanic ensures that the team can only function if it works together as a team. Even with the new players. The first time I played online I was saved by a teammate in moments. Even though I accidently sprayed him with shotgun pellets (to which he complained bitterly), it made a healthy change from being annihilated by teenange FPS Dougs.

The range of weaponry reflects a range of playing styles. The assault rifle (usually best of laggy online play) kills in three bullets. It also delivers accurate distant headshots. The sniping of the hunting rifle is good enough to make a game of its own. My personal favourite is the automatic shotgun – it can clear a room of zombies close up, although it loses potency longer distance and suffers from a long reload time. Fortunately, while ammo can be scarce, pistol ammo is infinite and very John-Wooish. In addition, the melee attack is very effective (especially when combined with the automatic shotgun. Push a zombie back, blast them away, repeat.)

The lighting is superbly evocative on each level, too, offering a variety of settings both indoor and outdoor.

The replay value is superb; I managed to rack up 48 hours of gameplay on this in a few months while working a 50-60 hour week. Multiplayer offers perfect matchmaking as the game doesn't crash if a player drops out. Single player is also immensely playable.

My favourite level, though, has to be the finale of Blood Harvest. You are forced to defend a fortified farmhouse from waves of zombies. While you can hold up upstairs or downstairs, there are always more entry points for zombies than you are capable of covering. As a result, you are forced to move, rather than just camping, which makes for moments of frantic scrambling as your team struggles to react to an overwhelming mass of zombies climbing through that window you didn’t have your eye on. There is also something suitably disturbing defending a boarded-up bedroom from zombies too. Online, I find the tension between players deciding where to defend to be particularly enjoyable too.

Games seem to be increasingly adopting moral decisions. These decisions, when played, make the experience of playing better than a win/lose scenario. For example, when the outside world enters the game to save you in the final moments of the finale, often one or more survivors are incapacitated. The decision of whether to save yourself, or to risk certain death to rescue a fellow survivor, is a immensely difficult decision after over an hour of desperate action. Often I am inspired by the example of others rather than an inherent altruism in myself. Fortunately I am yet to make the decision on the basis that I refuse to play through the finale AGAIN (although I have been close!)

As a game to pick up and play in the evening, this is still amongst the best in my collection. Even now I enjoy jumping into online games as much I enjoy playing single player (although the online community seems to migrated to Left 4 Dead 2, save for a few usermaps). However, as a case where the steam matchmaking system works perfectly, this is a game without peer.