Left 4 Dead in Off Topic

ID:53785
 
Feb 2 2009, 11:02 am
Keywords: 4, dead, game, l4d, left, review, source, zombie
For those of you who enjoy zombie horror, Valve's FPS Left 4 Dead is worth checking out. Basically, you control one of four survivors trying to make it out of a zombie ridden area. In addition to 28 Days Later style "infected", there are "special infected"- mutant zombies with unusual abilities such as the pouncing Hunter and the zombie attracting bile spewing Boomer. It uses the Source engine, so nothing revolutionary, but adds some cool cinematic effects like film graining and color scaling (IE most colors look a bit washed out but red is quite bright) that do a good job of capturing the mood. The sound is very well done, and has a dynamically generated score that reflects what is going on in the game. So if you hear the music ramp up to a crescendo, for example, you know the Horde (a huge mass of zombies) is coming. And each zombie emits appropriate groans, snarls, gurgles and screams. Which can be quite disconcerting when you hear them before seeing them! The game also has an interesting scaling difficulty system based on the AI director. Essentially the director monitors character stress levels and adjusts enemy rations, item placement, etc. to fit the selected difficulty. So if you are getting savagely beaten on Easy, it will cut it back. But if you are cruising through Expert, it's going to ramp it up until you don't feel like such a tough guy.

Multiplayer offers two modes. Cooperative, where each person controls a survivor (AI controls any extras), and Versus, where players are assigned to the Survivors or Infected. Infected try to stop Survivors from making it to the Safe Room. Cooperative with friends is much more fun than using the AI, as you can coordinate much more effectively and actually employ something resembling tactics. Versus is a heck of alot of fun, but I found that I greatly prefer playing as Infected for the different playstyle (though a good Survivor team is hard to stop- given equal skill, Survivors should finish the round). Since the Survivors do seem to be much stronger, it is extremely satisfying to finish them off!

All around, a very fun game and has actually distracted me a bit from my reigning favorite, Company of Heroes. At least until Tales of Valor is released.
#1 Feb 2 2009, 12:42 pm
i played the demo and i thought it was terrible to be honest.
#2 Feb 2 2009, 1:28 pm
I've had countless hours of fun with this on LAN; either play with 3 friends on extreme (and get your ass handed to you unless you're *really* careful and play very well together), or play 8 people or so on LAN and watch the fun and games unfold.
#3 Feb 2 2009, 5:39 pm
One of the few issues I have with the game is that I would have really liked a Resident Evil 2 style 'multiple stories on top of each other' setup rather than the 'same characters, different movie' system they use. 16 characters, 4 paths, 1 city. Not that there's anything wrong with the current setup, I just think the RE2 approach would have been awesome.

Here's hoping for mountains of cool download content for this one. =)
#4 Feb 3 2009, 2:31 am
Once I played L4D for the first time, I managed to pursuade 3 of my flatmates to go out and buy it. Definitely money well spent.
CoH is also a great game which I don't play enough of at all.
#5 Feb 3 2009, 7:03 am
I absolutely love L4D and CoH but haven't had the time to play much recently. Would like to arrange a few games with you guys though.
#6 Feb 3 2009, 7:08 pm
DarkView wrote:
One of the few issues I have with the game is that I would have really liked a Resident Evil 2 style 'multiple stories on top of each other' setup rather than the 'same characters, different movie' system they use.

Originally, the four campaigns were connected. It started with No Mercy (right after the game's intro), but your helicopter crashes after the pilot's infection manifests. The copter crashes near the start of Death Toll, and the survivors make for the river to get a boat, which takes them across the river to another city. From the city, the Dead Air campaign begins, where the survivors head for the airport, and they find a refueling plane. For some reason (some believe to prevent the spread of the infection) the plane is forced down and the survivors make the rest of the trip to extraction point Echo on foot, hence Blood Harvest. The military APC that rescues them takes them to safety, and the main story ended there.

Unfortunately, the play testers felt disenfranchised that all of their work was for moot for the first three campaigns, so they split them up. I would have liked them connected :(

Here's hoping for mountains of cool download content for this one. =)

They're taking forever to release the DLC. At first, I was expecting it for Thanksgiving... then Christmas... then New Years, then whenever. I want the SDK so bad! (Vegas, baby!)

Curse you Valve Time!
#7 Feb 3 2009, 7:36 pm
DarkCampainger wrote:
Unfortunately, the play testers felt disenfranchised that all of their work was for moot for the first three campaigns, so they split them up. I would have liked them connected :(

I can get why they changed it. I like the idea but I think in action it would have come off as a little jarring. Do the entire level, get to the end, get to salvation, watch a 2-minute cut-scene and start again. The gameplay doesn't really have much story going on, and the game remains very single minded the entire way through (just keep going forward until you get to the safehouse/rescue point), so cut-scenes between the missions would probably end up coming off as being really crammed in.

Knowing Valve they'll probably release a directors cut mode where you can play through a single story mode. So we'll see then.
#8 Feb 4 2009, 8:36 am
I do think some of the playtesting was kind of whiney and should have been taken a little less seriously. The grey fog and unlinked campaigns come to mind. But they are minor quibbles.

I also wish that blasted SDK would come out. I have some ideas for levels that I think would be fun. The Vegas idea is a very neat idea since you could have action ranging from the desert, to the Strip, to the mountains and Hoover Dam!

I want to do a level where the action is on a sinking ship and they escape to a dock area! I also had some ideas for saferoom areas in places like a police station, a firehouse, a school fallout shelter, and a post office. One idea I had is that the survivors start in a suburban area and are trying to get to a school evac center only to find it overrun (this is hinted at in the NM campaign). So instead they go to the mall ala Dawn of the Dead then escape out to the docks (probably through underground steam tunnels that lead outside) to sail away.