Left 4 Dead

Written by Jason Cisarano  on January 28, 2009

Reviews: The zombie apocalypse is here, and it is good

Tweet

Comments

There are three ways to play Left 4 Dead: single-player, co-op and versus. The single-player campaign is the place to start, since you'll play through the four campaigns to get a feel for how the weapons work and learn where the set-piece battles take place. The horde may appear at different times during the missions, but there are events that always happen at the same places. For instance, in the Dead Air campaign, the players fight their way to and through an airport in hopes of finding a plane ride out of the city, and in order to make it through the terminal, they have to use a van to plough through a fence that impedes their progress. It has to be done every time, and every time, the horde respond with several balls-out wild charges against the survivors. During the single-player campaign, the shoes of the other three survivors are filled by some of the best A.I. bots in any game today. They're sharp enough to stay with you, but stay out of your way. They'll watch your back and help you up when you get overwhelmed by too many zombies and get knocked to the ground.

Unfortunately, the №ber-zombies, the Уspecial infectedФ are also powered by the same superlative A.I.. The specials are six unique zombie types that are there specifically to make sure the zombie apocalypse is the worst day of your life. Just when you think you have the horde under control, a Hunter will pounce on you, pin you, and proceed to rip you to shreds. Under a Hunter's attack, you're helpless until a teammate comes along and rips him off you. Or maybe a Boomer will come along and vomit on youЧyes, vomit on youЧto temporarily blind you and draw waves of commons to the stench of the bile coating your body. At times, these beasts are devilishly clever. Stray a few yards from the protection of your group or lag behind just a moment and one of the specials will invariably appear to put you in a fix. Maybe it'll be a Hunter, or even a Smoker able to constrict and drag a survivor with its tongue from a hundred feet out. Either way, it feels a lot like that classic horror movie moment where one guy wanders off on his own and then pays the ultimate price.



The drama is ramped up even further in the co-op campaign, which on the PC version is available only via LAN or Internet. Other players inhabit the bodies of the survivors, but the horde and special infected remain under the control of the A.I. Director, which makes all the clever and vicious little decisions as to where they'll spawn. Teamwork is essential if the players want to overcome the Director's cunningЧone survivor has little chance to make it through a campaign unscathed. A survivor can be knocked to the ground by particularly vicious attacks from the horde or specials, and when incapacitated in this way, there only way up is if a teammate stops to help. The only thing an УincappedФ survivor can do is blast away with pistols and hope for the best. A good teammate will fight her way to you and defend you until she can revive youЧand you'll return the favor later as the shootouts intensify from one chapter of a campaign to the next until the finale. To help things along, the game ships with a built-in voice chat that's easily set up and used. With the voice chat, you can coordinate your attacks, making the co-op play one of the best things going on the PC right now.

The third and final mode, Versus, is the only head-to-head mode and it's also the only chance players get to don the guise of the infected and attack other players. Players alternate, running through the same maps as survivors and infected, building scores by covering ground and beating up on opponents. The survivors win points by covering ground in a chapter and making their way to a safe roomЧthere are four of them spread through the campaign that serve as save points between chapters. The distance score is the base score, and multipliers based on health, map difficulty, and so on compound the score. There is no persistent score tracking or ladder built in, so match winners get momentary bragging rights and that's about it. If teamwork is essential for successful survivors, it's doubly important to the special infected. They're generally a pretty fragile bunchЧa few well-placed bullets are plenty to knock a special out of the game, and a zombie player going it alone with find himself constantly waiting for the respawn counter's twenty seconds without having racked up a single point of enemy damage. Smart players use the specials' strengths in concert: blind survivors with the Boomer, separate them with the Smoker, down them with the Hunter. And then, when someone is lucky enough to spawn as the hulking Tank, the specials can bring a little Pandemonium to the table. The slow-moving Tank bulges with muscles and hit pointsЧhe can incap a survivor with one or two swings of his beefy arms, but it takes sustained fire from all the living to bring him down. When he's on a rampage, the other specials should be doing all they can to add to the chaos and bring the survivors down.