Disclaimer: All screenshots are provided by me at 1920x1200 at the highest possible settings. Names of users I was playing with are blanked out for privacy. Click the image for the full size.
Also, review was written before Survival update. Not added into text, but overall score was changed because of it. 
System(s): Xbox 360, PC
Reviewed On: PC
Release Date: November 18th, 2008
Genre: First Person Shooter / Survival Horror
Developer: Valve
Publisher: Valve
The ever so popular PC developer Valve is at it again with their new IP “Left 4 Dead”. With the always popular “zombie mods” on almost every First Person Shooter on PC, Valve is looking to bank on that popularity and create something that will be truly successful. Was Valve successful or did they get eaten a few feet short of the safe house?
Background
There is not much of a story present in Left 4 Dead…well….practically none at all. All we know is that there was a zombie outbreak and you are fighting to stay alive. The game puts you in one of four different scenarios where you must fight your way through horde after horde of zombies to be extracted to safety. None of these scenarios seem to tie into each other, since you have been rescued several times but constantly end up fighting for your life again. The scenarios were never meant to correspond with each other, and never meant to provide a deep story. They are simply challenges provided to the players who must complete them. This is definitely a pretty old approach to a game and because of this, the game must stand out in gameplay and replay value for it to be worth it.
Gameplay
As mentioned before, a game like this must excel at gameplay to be worthwhile. I can say that the gameplay formula used in this game is
old, but feels great and serves its purpose. What I mean by old, is the shooting mechanics feel very similar to that of Half Life and Counterstrike. While this isn’t too particularly a bad thing, I feel like they could have attempted something new. I will talk more into detail about the shooting later on.
I said earlier that the game provides 4 different scenarios. These scenarios range from a hospital, airport, forest, sewers, farm, etc. You start off at one area and must make your way from safe house to safe house until you reach the end and ultimately get extracted. When starting off, you are provided with three base weapons; the pump shotgun, Uzi, and a pistol that you use as your secondary weapon. They also provide one health pack to aid you on the beginning of your mission. Every mission starts off like this, and while it may feel repetitive, it is a pretty nice start to the game. It provides enough to get you by, but enough to keep it somewhat challenging. The further you get into the scenario, the more weapons that will become readily available to you. You will find the occasional Molotov and Pipe Bomb, and eventually coming across some stronger “military-ish” weapons; Automatic Shotgun, M16, and a Hunting Rifle. The pipe bomb has a blinking light and an alarm on it which will attract all nearby zombies and explode after a given time. Otherwise, all of the weapons represent their real life counterpart, so there really is no reason explaining which one does.
I want to address some of the complaints that are commonly brought up by users dealing with the weapons. A common complaint is the lack of variety of weapons. This is a logical complaint, and most people would agree…however, when playing the game, you don’t really even think about it. When I played the game, I just grabbed a weapon and went, there is no unnecessary nit picking between what gun you should use. Since it is a 4 player co-op game, the weapons provided give a good balance between the players and is enough to derive sufficient strategies to fight the zombie hordes. Too many weapons might have thrown off this balance with the possibility of some weapons being much stronger which results in everyone using that one weapon. They covered the general basis of weapons; a shotgun, a submachine gun, rifle, assault rifle, and a pistol. There isn’t much more than that other than weapons such as rocket launchers which would not fit well into this game at all. Valve probably saw no reason to provide multiple variations of each weapon type, and I agree with them. It would be completely unnecessary. They provided what you need and kept it all realistic. Another complaint being that of not being able to look down the iron sights of weapons. Who cares? You are fighting off zombie hordes, are you really going to zoom in with a shotgun? The shooting from the hip is good enough and fits this game fine. The hunting rifle however does allow you to look into the scope obviously.
Two grips that I have with the game, although not major, are how you obtain new weapons and the fact that safe house doors are often left open. Throughout the level, the game will provide you the new weapons at some point. Now this is determined by the “director” which I will touch on in the next paragraph. These weapons are often nicely laid out on a table in a sometimes remote area, or often in your direct path. There is a zombie infection, and weapons are laid out like as if someone did not want them and just placed them down neatly when there are zombies surrounding the area. I think Valve could have went a bit more creative and had the new weapons lying on the ground next to bloody eating corpses of military soldiers, or something like that which would fit into the game. The other problem is with the safe house. I always wondered how safe houses were “safe” when the doors are often kept wide open and available for any zombies to raid. I just always thought that was awkward. This does not affect the game in any way, shape or form however, so it isn’t a big deal.
The “Director” is essentially an AI that determines the amount of and placement of zombie hordes and special infected. This feature was extremely hyped up by Valve to keep the game fresh during every new play through…I however say this feature is highly overrated. It doesn’t make things feel any different at all, and sometimes it makes no sense. I fought more tanks when my whole team was under 20 health and about to die, compared to when I am having a great run. When I am doing well, there is often no tank to be found. To me the Director seems like nothing more than coding that randomly chooses things, since I have hardly seen it be impacted by how my team is doing in the play through. The one good thing about it however is the zombie placement is always different, so it isn’t a game where enemies walk the same paths no matter how many times you play it.
The biggest selling point of Left 4 Dead is clearly the cooperative play. With just playing offline, the AI is smart enough to do its job, but don’t expect to be easily beating expert or even hard with them. They are good enough to help you get through easy and normal, but for the harder difficulties you have to get some human partners. There is an upside and a downside to this just like every other cooperative based game. The amount of fun you have is practically decided by who you play with. There is nothing more frustrating than being matched up with the crappiest team when trying to beat Expert. You may as well wait to play with some friends that you are know are good, rather than rely on matchmaking for your expert playthrough. Especially around Christmas time, you have about a 90% of getting a horrible team that won’t get you anywhere. This game can get undeniably frustrating, especially when you are on a team that doesn’t realize a hunter has pounced on you until you are practically dead. When you are on a skilled team, there are good times to be had.
As mentioned, it is a 4 player co-op game, so the game provides you with 4 different characters to choose from. Francis, a hardcore “biker”, Louis and everyday “office worker”, Zoey the girl :P, and Bill the war veteran. This is a pretty good contrast between characters, and they often talk back and forth to each other or make comments, especially during parts that a void of zombies (safe rooms, elevators, etc). The four survivors depicted in this game are immune to the virus that has infected most people, which explains why they are even surviving at this point. Also, the character models went through a pretty drastic change through the development cycle of this game.
Before:
After:
Before, it was close to the same concept except Bill looks like a more pissed off war veteran, Francis looks like a more pissed off biker, Francis looked like a pissed off black guy, and Zoey looked pretty close to the same despite clothes changes. They are now looking a bit more realistic and believable. I think it was a good change for Valve to make.
If any of the characters are hurt or in trouble, you can either take a health pack which permanently restores your health, or you can take pain pills. Pain pills are a temporary health boost which gradually wears off over time. Pills can be given to other players and you have the ability to heal other teammates. On the occasion that a player is downed, you can simply pick them up by pushing and hold the E button when near them. Any zombies that will attack you will interrupt the process, so it is better to do it when the area is clear.
On expert, you must rely on teamwork to get you through the levels, and the game is quite challenging. There are often little strategies you can do to easily get you past certain parts such as getting all 4 people to sit in a closet or in a corner with one or two of the people constantly meleeing to keep the zombies at a distance. This strategy works well, but it can’t be done every time. Unlike the easier modes, you take a lot of damage from normal infected. On normal, you only take about 2 damage per hit, while on expert you take about 20. This makes fighting off the normal infected a pretty large priority as a small group of them can take you down fairly easy. Even more deadly are the special infected.
There are 5 types of special infected in the game, and they all can do some pretty heavy damage. The first one is the Hunter. The hunter is a fast and agile zombie which has the ability to pounce on its prey and tear away at the torso. There is a window of time where an ally can shoot or knock him off of you before he does damage, but if left alone, the Hunter will kill you extremely quickly. Another type is the Smoker. This special infected is good at long range. It can shoot out a long tongue like thing, out of its mouth and constrict an enemy. He will then drag you in close and start to claw at you. Just like the Hunter, allies can save you before taking damage, but you should try not to get too far behind as your allies might not know you are gone until it is too late. The next type is the Boomer. You don’t necessarily have to worry about the boomer directly doing any damage to you, but you will have to worry about a rather large horde of normal infected if he gets any of his barf on you. His barf will attract zombie hordes which could be deadly if not dealt with accordingly. The boomer can either physically barf on you, or if he is shot, it will spray any nearby humans. It is important to knock back the boomer and shoot him from a safe distance. One of the most dangerous special infected is the Witch. If you leave her alone and keep your distance, you won’t have to fight her. In the often occurrence of her being right in your path, you will have to kill her. She can take a lot of bullets, and she will only go after the person who startled her. An easy way to kill her is to approach her and shoot her in the face with the shotgun as she turns her head. This is often hard to do, and failure will result in you being downed. The last and most feared infected is the Tank. The Tank is clearly the most dangerous and is very hard to take down. They are not much of a problem on Easy and Normal, but on the harder difficulties, the Tank could easily change the outcome of the game almost instantly. It has two main abilities; a normal “punch” attack, and a rock throw. The Tank can move quite a bit faster than you, so to avoid him, you often have to keep your distance, or use obstacles around you to prevent him from getting close. His rock throw can sometimes be deadly accurate, so you must put yourself behind cover to avoid it. A common strategy to fighting the tank is to light it on fire and run, occasionally shooting at it. The fire will kill it after some time, but it will keep chasing you until it dies. All of these different zombie types provide a relatively varied gameplay and makes you rely heavily on teamwork.
Throughout each scenario, there are moments in the game where you must complete a certain task that will alert a horde. This includes opening a door that has an alarm, lowering a lift to make a ramp, or other objects such as that. Like I said, this will alert a horde, and these are the most challenging parts of the game. Doing some of the strategies I mentioned earlier will help during most of these sequences, otherwise they will be pretty challenging. This keeps the game going at a pretty good pace, and not keeping everything the same. Just like these sequences, the horde is alerted at the end of each level when you are waiting to be extracted. This however is much more challenging. These sequences often last 10 minutes of nonstop hordes and several special infected. You often have to fight at least 2 tanks in that duration. The hordes can be dealt with easily with some of those strategies, but the Tanks can change everything. You have to be careful to not be punched off a building, or to be killed at all. Being killed will result you from not getting any achievements at the end of the levels.
Multiplayer
I mentioned the fact that it is a co-op game, and it can obviously be played cooperatively online with others. The only thing that really needs to be said about the online aspect of coop is the fact that searching for a server can sometimes be troublesome. Sometimes it won’t find one, or sometimes the server that is found runs very poorly. This doesn’t happen alarmingly often, but was apparent especially during Christmas when several new people got the game.
Now besides Co-op, the game offers a Versus mode. It is a nice spin off of just the normal coop where instead of 4, there is 8 players per match. Two teams of four take turns playing co-op through sections of the scenarios while the other team controls the special infected. The gameplay plays the same for the survivors, but for the infected, this is where it changes up. All of the special infected are the same, but now you can control them. You will be prompted to a “spawn” screen, where you can run around and chose your own spawn point. The only restrictions is you can’t be seen but he survivors or be too close to them when spawning. You will be allowed to use the Hunter, Boomer, or Smoker, and it chooses which one you will be mostly depending on what everyone else is, otherwise it is random. You can not be the witch, but you can however be the Tank. During certain parts of the game, a Tank can be controlled by a player, and the responsibility is often given to the person with the most points, but not always. All of the special infected have the same abilities that they use in the normal campaign mode, and using them is all pretty straight forward. You must use team work even on the infected side to be able to stop the survivors however. This can be pretty troublesome if you are playing against a really good team.
Graphics
The graphics are not bad, but they definitely feel a bit out dated and old. Sort of the same problem with Epic games, the creator of the game made their own engine, so of course they are going to use it for all of their games. This results in not much of a drastic change between this game and some of the ones in the past. The game is definitely polished up, and the overall presentation is good, but the game is not anything spectacular. This may have simply been because the game must handle several enemies on screen at once, or they kept it this way to allow the game to be played by a broader audience. All in all, the graphics are nothing that detracts from the game, but it isn’t something that adds to the experience. One thing that really stands out is excellent character models. Here is an example.
Presentation
Just like the graphics, the use of the same engine sort of hurts the presentation. This becomes apparent when you hear nearly identical sound effects that we hear in Half Life and Counter Strike. Almost everything in the audio aspect has been reused from past work. This is a common trend between Valve games, and I suppose “don’t fix what isn’t broken”, but I can’t help but feel like the game is outdated because of this. The good thing however is that those sound effects don’t become so apparent underneath the zombie moans and suspenseful music that sometimes comes on. This provides some pretty excellent presentation when put next to the variety of environments and pretty nice lighting. The game has a good amount of dark creepy areas, and some better lit areas that show off the ugly aftermath of the zombie infection. The overall presentation is great and does the game justice by providing a suspenseful feeling through the campaign.
Lasting Appeal
This is probably the most important section for this game. This game must do well in lasting appealing to be able to justify the $50 (or $60 for 360 players). The game itself is quite short, especially on the normal difficulty. You could probably knock it out in about 4 or 5 hours. Expert it gets a big longer, but nothing too long. I can say that I really wasn’t expecting much gameplay out of Left 4 Dead due to the short campaign and somewhat lack of variety, but boy was I wrong.
The difficult expert setting causes you to replay scenarios over and over again. This happens often when you are constantly paired with horrible teammates, which can be frustrating, but nonetheless, it keeps you coming back for more. With the addition of the Versus mode, I got a lot of playtime with friends and it was a blast. Sometimes it is just fun to put it on easy and put in a few console commands and go crazy. Now that Valve is soon to release free new scenarios and versus maps, I could imagine the game will get a lot more play time out of me. Also, the PC version even has Achievements which are (I am assuming), the same as on the 360 counterpart. This will get many players to keep playing. Most of the achievements are easy, but some will need a lot of time to complete.
Conclusion
The game is great and will provide more play time than most games this generation. I can say that this game is superior on PC. Although this review was only on the PC, everything is the same on the 360 version expect for graphics and controls. After playing the 360 demo, I can honestly say that it controls rather poorly to its PC counterpart. It may be simply because of being spoiled by playing it on PC, but the controls were awkward, and the graphics were not nearly as good as the PC version. It would still be fun for some players, but by all means, if you have a decent enough PC, do yourself a favor and get it for that.
Otherwise, the game has a great atmosphere, good enough gameplay, and a good amount of challenge to keep you coming back for more. I recommend this game.
Gameplay: 8.8 Graphics: 8.7 Presentation: 9.0 Lasting Appeal: 9.5 Overall: 9.0 
