GAME REVIEW LEFT 4 DEAD

GAME REVIEW LEFT 4 DEAD

When your favorite genre is survival-horror and your favorite enemy is the zombie, Left 4 Dead is a game on the very top of your list. If you somehow don't know what Left 4 Dead is, it is a first-person shooter survival-horror title developed by the people that brought us Half-Life. However, Left 4 Dead isn't overshadowed by its developers' legendary predecessor. Actually, Left 4 Dead is a wildly original experience with plenty of exciting moments and thrilling gameplay that compile together to make one of the best shooters on the 360 yet.

Left 4 Dead isn't perfect though. The main focus of the game is four-player co-op, but this is ruined by the fact that you can only play with two players offline. Obviously, if you have Xbox Live this isn't a big issue, but the only reason that Left 4 Dead doesn't support four-player offline is pure laziness. It's not impossible to do this; titles like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter prove that. So, why don't developers do it? Like I said, laziness, and Left 4 Dead's entertainment value does take a decently sized hit as a result.

That's not to say that the game doesn't still kick ass. You choose one out of four characters each with their own personalities, and whoever isn't picked is controlled by a surprisingly intelligent and useful AI. For once in a video game, you won't find yourself constantly babysitting your computer-controlled partners, but instead they will sometimes be babysitting you and saving your butt. Hell, they're as good as having a full team of humans controlling the survivors.

You are then free to choose the campaign you wish to partake in. There are four campaigns and you are free to choose which one you want to do at the very start of the game, and you can even choose which chapter (there are five for each campaign) of each campaign that you start in. This gives the game a lot of nonlinearity, but it also ruins the chance of there being a decent plot to get into.

Right when each campaign starts, you usually get a chance to load up on ammunition and healing items. You are stuck with a pistol the entire game, but it has unlimited ammo, and you can duel wield if you find another pistol. You can carry another gun with you, and there are shotguns, machineguns and sniper rifles for you to find throughout the levels.

You will very rarely run out of ammo with these weapons, but you can find ammunition. There are other items you can collect as well though besides just guns. Molotov cocktails can be found and used to set a giant horde of zombies aflame while pipe bombs work to a similar effect, except instead of lighting the zombies on fire it blows them to bits.

These secondary weapons are assigned to be equipped via the d-pad, and you can only carry one at a time. You can also only carry one medical kit at the time, and it returns roughly sixty points of health. Bottles of painkillers can also be used to give you a temporary health boost which definitely comes in handy when your health is low and you're out of medical kits, and they don't take as long to use as the medical kits. The d-pad is also used to toggle your flashlight on and off.

Why on earth would you want to turn your flashlight off in a game that revolves around a ton of zombies sprinting at you constantly? There's a special kind of enemy called a Witch that can be completely avoided if you don't shine your flashlight on it and if you don't walk by it. These creatures can kill you very easily, and you are warned of their location by their very audible sobs.

These aren't the only creatures you have to deal with obviously. Like previously mentioned, this game is about giant hordes of zombies rushing you at any given time. There are also Hunters that can leap through the air and pin you to the ground. These Hunters can kill you pretty easily if one of your partners doesn't shoot them off, and then you may find yourself saving your partner after a Smoker wraps their long tongue around his throat and pulls him away from the group. Boomers are fat zombies that can puke bile on you and your teammates which not only blinds you, but it also makes all of the other enemies focus on you. Finally, Tanks are like Left 4 Dead's version of Big Daddies from BioShock. They don't really feel like boss fights, but they sort of are in a way. They can throw things at you (even your own partners) and they can destroy walls just to find you. You will have to pump plenty of clips into these undead beasts to take them down.

Left 4 Dead isn't just running around and shooting your gun though. There are some things you have to keep in mind to progress through the game successfully. Setting off alarms can call forth the undead and getting to your teammates to heal them could really cost you the level, of which there are no checkpoints.

When you lose all of your health, you fall to the ground and you must wait for a teammate to revive you. Using your pistols, you can ward off the undead as they swarm to your nearly dead body, and a meter in the bottom right corner of the screen slowly depletes. If it goes to zero, you are officially dead and you will respawn in a closet somewhere in the level (maybe there's a little innuendo involved?). You can't continue playing until one of your teammates opens the closet door for you though. The AI is really impressive here as they don't only revive you but they know will heal you when you have low health and offer you painkillers when they themselves just don't have any medical kits to spare. Their own welfare is at the forefront, just like a human player, so they make smart decisions that can benefit themselves and the rest of the team.

In every fifth chapter, you are tasked with the objective of calling for help. Whenever you make a call for your help, your location is swarmed with all kinds of undead and these are the most difficult parts of the game. These segments will remind you of flash games online where you have to defend your area from zombies, and I'm sure you've played some of those, but they are just as entertaining on consoles, I assure you.

A versus mode accompanies the campaigns, but the versus mode is basically the same exact thing as the campaigns. There is one key difference though and that is you and the people you are playing with take turns being the creatures. That's right; you can actually take the role of the enemy in Left 4 Dead. Unfortunately, the creatures die extremely fast and it's almost impossible to pull off anything effective, but at least the versus is still a little entertaining offline (it only supports two-players as well). Online though, the versus mode is a little more fun, but it still won't hold your attention long enough to really matter.

I was initially a little worried that Left 4 Dead's depiction of zombies was a little too fast, as I prefer the slower zombies from the classic Romero films and in video game world, of Resident Evil fame. Thankfully, I wasn't disappointed by the fast moving zombies at all. You will probably be reminded of the Dawn of the Dead remake if anything, but that's not a bad thing, even if you're more a Romero kind of gamer.

For some reason or another, Valve, the developers, decided not to give Left 4 Dead much of a story at all. All four of the campaigns follow completely different plots and they ignore each other entirely, but the gameplay is just so solid that the lack of a real plot doesn't hurt the game really all that much. The opening cinematic is pretty damn sweet and it would have been amazing to see moments like that more times throughout a good story, but Valve dropped the ball here.

Another area where Left 4 Dead is lacking is that the graphics aren't really that awe-inspiring, and the game really has no excuse for this considering how unbelievably short it is. The textures are terrible and the environments are bland, boring, and repetitive. The level design is sometimes really in the gutter, but there are also some brilliant level designs that really make you feel like you're stuck in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Still, a little more variety would have been nice, and there are some weird graphical mishaps like seeing people's body parts fall through walls and such. The darkness that usually sounds the small glow of your flashlight can also make things a little bit disorienting as some of the game's environments are way too dark for their own good and at other times so bright that it makes your flashlight a little pointless.

The survivors rarely repeat lines, so unlike most shooters, they never get on your nerves. It helps that the voice acting is superb as well and the dialogue isn't written as bad as other first-person shooters. The soundtrack isn't really heart pounding or anything, but the sound effects come at you in full force and will get you wrapped in the simple everyday struggle to survive.

Left 4 Dead can be completed in a little over two hours. That's right; I gave a game that can be beaten in two hours a nearly perfect score. Why would that be? Left 4 Dead has a system where the items, and to a lesser extent the enemies, are randomized each time you play. This will force you to adopt new strategies and to adapt your skills accordingly to the new situations. This makes every play through feel a little unique, sort of like BioShock. There are a whopping 50 achievements to unlock and there are multiple difficulty levels. The versus mode may tickle your fancy, but it won't provide much. Still, the replayability is still gigantic. Who wouldn't want to relieve the zombie apocalypse a few times anyway?

Left 4 Dead proves that Valve can still make original and groundbreaking titles that will please the masses. Whether you have Xbox Live or not, Left 4 Dead still provides an awesomely glory experience, especially when you're taking on the hordes with a buddy or three. The action is intense and the game comes at you relentlessly, but there are some issues that need to be sorted out if there is another installment. The soundtrack could have been more memorable and the graphics definitely need an upgrade. There should be a more intricate plot and definitely four-player split-screen. Oh, and the game HAS to be longer. We may be lucky to ever see a sequel to this awesome first-person shooter, but if we do, and it has those improvements, we may very well have one of the greatest first-person shooters ever conceived on our hands.

Game Release: Left 4 Dead (US, 11/17/08)