Left 4 Dead 2

[zoidberg]

Valve / Xb360 / Shoot 'em-up > F.P.S.

Believe it or not, there are still some people who don’t get Left 4 Dead. They’ll bleat on for ages about how it’s easy and that they finished it in a couple of hours, missing the point entirely. Left 4 Dead 2 is not for these people, but this is unquestionably a good thing. The last thing we want is servers full of 12-year-olds (who shouldn’t even be allowed on Xbox Live!) ruining our game. Let them stick to Modern Warfare and Halo and let us play the best game of the year in peace. They’re not welcome here.

Left 4 Dead 2 is Valve taking the basic idea of the first game and running with it. Sprinting in fact. It takes the basic idea of the first game and add more of everything – more guns, more zombies, more campaigns, more ideas. At the same time, it doesn’t needlessly complicate things either and the core idea of four friends killing zombies is as enjoyable as it ever was. If ever you wanted an example of a sequel that gives you exactly what you want, this is it.

There are now five campaigns to play through. Dead Center; Dark Carnival; Swamp Fever, Hard Rain and The Parish. As before each is represented by a cheesy movie poster with an even cheesier tag-line. Each one has a number of highlights like a burning hotel, a crashed airliner or a frantic run for safety across a bridge but my favourite has to be Hard Rain with a witch infested factory (I had to sneak past seven playing on Easy!) and storms that reduce your visibility to zero.

Away from the campaigns sees the return of the Versus mode where the superb level design once again comes into its own. Survival mode is now included from the off but the multiplayer highlight is Scavenge where you try to survive as long as possible while collecting Gas cans to fuel a generator. Games are much shorter than regular Versus matches as they only take place in a small area so anyone who didn’t like Versus due to the time investment required is well served.

It must also be said that this game is significantly harder than the first but it’s never unfair with every death being a result of your own stupidity. There were moments when even playing on Easy that the team were overwhelmed and killed. However, playing on your own reveals some broken friendly AI that will happily stand there doing nothing while a Hunter or Charger kills you. If you do manage to complete everything on Expert (good luck!) then there the new Realism mode that removes most of the onscreen help and makes zombies harder to kill.

I can see myself still playing this game a year from now, just like the first. Valve have already started teasing potential DLC (go to www.midnight-riders.com) just to make sure that we do!

[paulpeter]

Sounds interesting, I'm loving L4D2 a lot so far. Hopefully valve puts a little more effort into creating DLC content and not just adding random stuff to the game (i.e. dumb lighthouse map). I would like to see one or two more full campaigns.