Left 4 Dead

"Left 4 Dead is a fun, but uninteresting take on the zombie outbreak."

Graphics: The source engine has come a long way. Its starting to age but it has been improved with plenty of new filters and lighting technique to give it a fresh coat of paint so to speak with film grain, deferred lighting, and soft shadows. Its a huge improvement but if you don't have the rig to use those new settings, this game will just look like any other source game which successfully ruins the presentation they were hoping to give for some, if not most, users. The environments and level architecture are superb. The city is littered with evidence of a once peaceful environment. Now houses are burning and littered, survivors scribble on the walls to talk to each other. Evidence of old stands against the infected, entire sections of cities burning and more. On the down side the environments are cluttered and very linear with very few alternate routes to take and almost nothing but rooms to explore. All four characters move as well as their Team Fortress 2 counter parts: Body movements such as shifting, leaning and aiming seem very smooth and precise without any hitches but some problems appear when interactive animations between two characters play. Often when being pulled from a ledge your rescuer will be grabbing onto thin air or through a wall. Same goes for being healed, or being pounced on by a special infected.


Summary: Fantastic lighting and animations. Bland but well designed environments even if they're a bit cluttered and straight forward. Physics have always been fully or partially included in Source games but not on this game. Now you can't pick up boxes or objects, and there's no way to move things to make a barricade. This keeps you moving forward but hurts the experience dramatically


Sound: When I want good sound in a game, I want small sounds to immerse me. I want the dialogue to be convincing, and I want guns and enemies to sound powerful and scary respectively. Sadly, Left 4 Dead does not deliver on any of these fronts but instead delivers a simulator-style voice approach to the dialog (Its like Microsoft sam with voice actors). Even though it has a B movie presentation which works almost too well, the sound department still lacks. When you enter a campaign, you'll immediately realize a droning sad violin that is way more than ambient: Its a part of the game. When a horde arrives, special music plays. When a tank arrives, special music plays. Not only does this completely give away the surprise it doesn't feel right and for all the smarts they promoted with the "Director" these obvious musical cues ruin whatever surprise there was.

Not to mention violent violin screeching and pounding drums from a mad medieval orchestra is the complete opposite of what I'd expect from a Zombie Apocalypse sound track. The characters themselves have a ton of built in things to say, for people without mics. These voices are extremely annoying and serve little to no purpose other than to grate your nerves. "Grabbing peels!" (Incorrect pronunciation of pills.) is painful to hear, and isn't near the first thing I'd scream when I saw medical supplies. Furthermore, when your character gets pounced by a hunter or wounded, they don't scream in pain. They just belt out "Help me!" in a monotone voice as if talking to someone a foot away. You're being eaten by 20 zombies. Be a little more convincing, Zoey. I have no problem with the gun sounds and the shotgun is quite powerful, and a flurry of pistol rounds can sound quite nice but amidst the over dramatic music and deadpan voices... eh.


Summary: Music ruins the atmosphere, the voice acting is terrible. Zombies sound alright and the monster snarls are pretty evil sounding but it all feels silly. It doesn't feel like a zombie apocalypse in ANY sound department. 4/10


Story: The story is almost non existent in Left 4 Dead. Instead the few pieces of writing on the walls and on desks will fill you in. At some point, an infection of rabies or something spread; The Army and Survivors tried to fight and lost badly. Most of wherever this takes place was evacuated and the four "Stars" of the "movie" are magically immune to this virus and work together to escape area after area as the ONLY survivors. That's it. No character back story, no reason behind the apocalypse. Just run and shoot. ??/10


Game Play: At the start of every round you pick one of four survivors with no differences besides looks. You're dropped into a "safe" starting area and you can pick between an uzi or shotgun and you can pick up one med pack. From there, you make your way forward through halls, streets, forests, closets and tubs fighting the undead in a rather linear and fast paced experience. Scattered around levels are around three "tables" where new guns, ammo or nothing can randomly spawn in a random order. This helps to make every fight (a bit) different because getting M16's and auto shotguns right at the start means it'll be easy for a while, but you can expect a tough boss at the end. And sometimes you get nothing... and still fight the tough boss. See, this is all because of the Director. Which is some new spawning system developed by Valve where the amount of enemies, "bosses" and weapons and pickups are always different and randomized, based on your skill in the current round (This last piece of info was said by them, but appears to be false.) achievements and teamwork.

If someone blitzes ahead alone, a Smoker will strangle them without someone there to help and if you work together, a tank can appear to split you apart for hunters to pick you off one by one. Its quite an accomplishment, but its not revolutionary. Once you learn the audio and visual cues, you can master these infected. Or you can camp in a closet and wait until the horde passes. Up to you.

The spawning system makes every FIGHT different but every single map remains the same which is one of the biggest draw backs of Left 4 Dead. If you're looking for a varied campaign, objectives, story and depth look *way* past this game: Its akin to Battlefield 2 in that its all about getting online and way, way less about experiencing an in depth game. Left 4 Dead is a fun game... for about a week.

Within these levels isn't much to do actually. You run forward and shoot, trying to out combo and manuever the bosses and trying to blow away the infected before you run out of medical supplies. If one of your team mates happens to fall, you can hold E for around six seconds to pick them up. Five drops and they die, where they re spawn in a nearby closet 60 seconds later. I know, I know. It feels like the game is holding your hand despite having such a vicious spawning system. Its ass backwards and just weird. Music will give away horde timings, you don't ever "die" unless all four people are wounded, pistols have infinite ammo and you will NEVER run out of ammo for anything even on Insane.

And besides for moving forward and fighting the undead, there is nothing to do. Few alternate routes, no sub objectives. Just "reach the safe house" and clicking levers, buttons and blowing up things to get to said safe house. This repetition does eventually sit in, great spawning system or not.


Summary: Left 4 Dead is a fun co op shooter, dependent on team work and mic communication. All four people need to be present to fight off the random hunters and smokers and such, and four guns is best when fighting big hordes. However, the game holds your hand the entire time and some huge aesthetic issues mar this otherwise amazing co op experience. But as a lengthy game, and as an in depth horror game, it does *not* deliver. Do not let the illusion trick you: There is no horror and no survival to be found in Left 4 Dead. Its a straight forward, static, run and gun co-op experience.


Replay: If co op shooters is your thing, this will last you a /long/ time. I managed to clock fourty hours in the demo which included 2/20th the whole game. I've clocked quadruple that in the full game and I'm finally done with it. I've got 90% of the achievements, 80 hours in total and my team has finally retired and moved on to new horizons. If you don't have a team to play with it will last you lass than 50 hours total.

Final: Left 4 Dead is a fun game. Its not very convincing at what it delivers and it appears way too easy at times, but denying the fun of blasting zombies while screaming over your mic to friends is crazy.


Misc:

Final Update-Updated October 9th: Overhaul of the guide, updated review score, etc. Final Update.

(Major Update)-Updated July 24th, 2009. Grammar errors and spelling errors were weeded out. Expanded on Gameplay, Graphics and Sound sections. Overall expansion of review. Bolded categories for ease of reading. Many other minor changes

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/23/08, Updated 10/12/09

Game Release: Left 4 Dead (US, 11/18/08)