Left 4 Dead
Valve the designers of some of the biggest and best games in the world (Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, CSS, TF2) have returned bringing us their new multiplayer experience Left 4 Dead.
This game pulls you straight into the action, fighting a number of weird and wonderful zombies including Boomers, Tanks, Hunters, Smokers, Witches and of course the zombie. Like all Valve games there are limited or no cut scenes meaning the game play is nonstop, once you step out of your very small safe house you are thrust into a world filled with zombies. The actual destroying of the various zombies is quite entertaining, shooting them in the head with a shotgun will cause their head to explode covering part of the screen with blood for a short amount of time. There are 4 characters to choose from Louis, Francis, Zoey, Bill who are all equal in strength, agility, etc the only difference between the characters are their looks, Zoey been the only female in the game apart from the zombies.
The main game has two game types been campaign, which really is co-op, and verses. The campaign basically explains its self, just like any other games campaign, but unlike most games verses this game mode allows 8 people to replay the campaign but instead of killing the zombies you now have a chance to kill the last surviving humans. This game mode is quite ingenious and fun.
The screen has a very valve familiar layout, your stats at the bottom right of the screen including your health and any items you are carrying. The difference is that instead of just showing your stats you can see your entire teams stats, showing how much health each team mate has what items they have, etc. The Keyboard layout is very familiar with most FPS games, nothing new here.
The AI (enemy’s) in the game depending on the difficulty differ between quite smart to idiotic, if you set the difficulty on easy you can easily walk on by as the zombies simply spew and moan at you, but if the difficulty is raised then they can be quite un zombie like they basically know where you are at any given moment in the game. Your friendly AI are, for AI, quite intelligent and helpful of course a real human is much more assistance they can still be very useful and handy.
They graphics are very good, although they cannot compare to that of Crysis or Far Cry 2, they still are a great improvement from the old HL2 engine. Although the graphics are not nearly some of the more important things to a game it is always nice to see pretty pictures and models.
This game is a very involved game, like all games made by valve this is a must get.
8/10
by Dr_Ownage
