Left 4 Dead

December 3,2008 - Normally, we like to whet your appetite for a great game by giving you a few paragraphs of sharp descriptions concerning the gameplay mechanics, visuals, characters, story, etcetera. We’ve decided that with the abundance of heavyweight titles floating around this year, it’s best to tell you up front that you’re a fool if you don’t own Left 4 Dead. If you have any interest in one of the finest tuned co-op experiences ever created, zombies, infected, undead, first-person shooters, or in general, games that scare the crap out of you, please purchase.

Now that’s out of the way, we can tell you why this game is so awesome. Firstly, it’s a game designed to be played by four people. The AI allies are very astute, they have your back, and we never found ourselves cursing them. But they don’t move as quick a person playing, or with as much purpose, and the whole point of Left 4 Dead is to be living out your Zombie movie fantasies—which means you should be playing with your friends.

The four survivors you play as in the game are perfect representations of their movie archetypes. There’s Zoey, the small, attractive, hard-nosed requisite female; Bill, the grizzled, bitter, smoking war veteran; Francis, the beardy, tattooed, leather jacket wearin’ guy; and there’s Louis, the optimistic young black guy.

For some, Left 4 Dead will have one gleaming Achilles’ heel—lack of a narrative. What Valve gives you instead is a polished intro movie to set things up (infection, no other survivors, end of the world, la-di-da) and four “movies” to play through. Each one was meant to remind players of the good old zombie movies and their campy scenarios—plane crash, hospital, abandoned on the highway, through the forest and, keep this quiet, a cornfield.

The game is basically about playing the same levels over and over again, on increasing difficulty (Try it on expert...we dare you) and dealing with whatever the AI Director throws at you. It spawns enemies and boss infected (these are the nasties who you really need to worry about) based on your ease or difficulty progressing through an area. If you suck, you’ll have fewer swarms, less tanks (raging behemoths of muscle) and plenty of ammo and health packs. If you’re swaggering, expect things to get much more difficult, very soon. Like now.

Other than that, the game moves in starts and stops. You thrash your way through one onslaught, fight the boss infected, eventually limp to a safehouse, replenish your supplies, and start the next area. Closing doors behind you is integral to staving off enemies, and staying in any one place more than fifteen seconds means another swell of zombies will undoubtedly arrive.

The visuals are surprisingly detailed, and with the Half-Life engine, interactive. Textures are not what they could be, but who cares when the engine is rendering swarms of hundreds? The game never has slowdown issues, and there are minimal glitches. The audio is superb as well, with every boom of a shotgun blast bursting brain onto floorboard. The sounds the boss infected make are the stuff of nightmares, and you’ll quickly learn to identify them.

The infected multiplayer mode is a great diversion, where you’re able to be “turned,” and end up killing for the other team if you die by way of zombie. You can play as the boss infected—Smoker, Hunter, or Boomer, and it’s quite fun to stack the odds against the increasingly feeble survivors. Online co-op is silky smooth, and the presentation and options work great—there’s even a veto option if a player is being an ass, or if people want to change the game.

The complaints a few and minor: not enough narrative, not enough enemy types, not enough weapon types. Here’s what we think: there’s a reason they make sequels. Overall, the concept is executed with great aplomb, and we are pleased with Valve for giving us our zombie co-op euphoria in time for the holidays.

It comes down to this: Left 4 Dead is a hell of a lot of fun to play. The eerie calm right before a stampede of bodies comes chasing down a vacant street is amazing, and there’s a palpable sense of teamwork in the air. The little touches are what makes this game so memorable and worthy of survival tales—being able to shoot even when incapacitated, zombies being able to break through doors eventually, the pitch-black office buildings lit only by the torch of your flashlight.

If you don’t watch your friends’ backs, they’re going to die. If you wander off to explore and search for molotovs and ammo (we’re guilty of this), you’re going to die (we did). You constantly need to pay attention to the location of your three buddies. If you don’t fight together, you’ll die alone, bleeding slowly, screaming for help.

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