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Review

Release Date: 11.18.2008
Platform: Xbox 360
Developer: Turtle Rock Studios
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Reviewed by Samuel Altersitz on 12.3.2008

Review Rating: 9/10

User Rating: 9/10

The Zombie Apocalypse is here! Grab some of your uninfected friends, any weapons and ammo you can find, some medical supplies... and run like hell to get to somewhere safe, slaying any zombies that try to get you along the way!

Or as Valve puts it: It's the Zombie Apocalypse. Bring friends.

There, we have the basic premise of Valve's newest game, Left 4 Dead; a game developed with co-op play as its main focus. Sure, there's zombies, blood, gore, puke (no lie), lots of guns and even more running for your life... but the main focus of Left 4 Dead is the cooperative playing through of the game's four campaign "movies." Yes, I said movies. The campaigns are each set up in the style of four interconnected zombie flicks, each starring the same four survivors fighting their way to safety. And, though each campaign is fairly short, they have a lot of replayability due to their unpredictable nature.

Valve decided to try something new with the campaigns and added what they call the "A.I. Director." The director is supposed to keep tabs on what the players are doing, how well they are doing in each chapter of each campaign and then adjust the game accordingly. This means that the director will spawn new enemies or reduce enemy spawns as needed based on the players' current health. It also means that enemies spawn in differing amounts and in different places each play through. Essentially, every time a player plays through the campaign movies, it is never exactly the same. Well, this is how it is supposed to work, anyway. I've yet to see the game be slightly easier on parties when we're all battered and bruised from a particularly bad run-in with the zombie horde or a tank zombie, but I have seen it throw tons and tons of enemies at us when we are doing pretty well just to try and shake us up.

The director also chooses where health, weapons and ammunition will spawn (there are presets for weapons and ammo, but they are randomly chosen each play through).

The director is also in charge of how often and in what form the special infected will spawn. There are a few types of infected in Left 4 Dead, each with their own feel and attacks. There's the general zombie horde run of the mill infected who run fast and are attracted to loud high pitched noises (car alarms, smoke detector beepers attached to pipe bombs), these aren't that tough to kill on their own but can become bothersome en masse. The boomer is a huge obese pile of vomit, almost literally, who regurgitates bile upon the survivors, which blinds them -- and it has the added disadvantage of attracting the horde to attack just the survivor covered in bile. Oh, and he explodes when killed, showering any nearby survivors with said bile. Another infected type is the hunter, who leaps at his target and pins them to the ground while slashing them, requiring you to either shoot him or shove him off. Then there's the smoker, who is surrounded by a foul cloud of vapor and has a 50+ foot tongue that ensnares survivors and pulls them towards him, incapacitating them after they have been dragged a certain distance. There's also the tank, who is described in more detail later. And there's the witch...

Now, see, the witch deserves her own little space to describe. Picture a skinny late teens to early twenties girl, sitting alone, crying to herself. Now picture this same waifish girl with eight-inch claws for fingers, blood red eyes, insane strength and a homicidal rage that she focuses on anyone who disturbs her. Oh, by the way, disturbing her is as easy as shining a flashlight upon her, or just walking too close, as well as of course shooting her. She is so powerful that on the lower difficulties she instantly incapacitates whoever she hits, while on the expert difficulty she can pretty much one shot anyone unfortunate enough to get in the way of her claws to the grave. If she is disturbed, then players who attempt to kill her should be warned, she has a massive amount of health -- almost as much as the tank -- but if left alone to deal with the survivor who disturbed her, she will run away to go bemoan her wretched existence again... after killing said survivor. She is best just avoided.

The other thing the director is there to do is keep players moving forward. Stay in an area too long, excepting safe areas, and the director will spawn the zombie horde behind the players and mercilessly have them swarm all over the group. Keep moving or die, I suppose.

Left 4 Dead's campaign movies allow players to take control of one of four survivors. There's Bill, the old vet who has been waiting for a new war to come along so he can do what he feels he does best: fight; Francis, the biker, sarcastic tough guy and outlaw of the group; Louis, the IT junior systems analyst turned unwilling combatant; and Zoey, the twenty-something coed/horror film buff who has discovered that watching all those zombie flicks in her dorm room might just have prepared her for survival in this infected new world. Players may play any of the characters in the single player campaigns (bots control the others), or must choose one or be left with whoever is left in the online co-op mode. No character is different from any other gameplay-wise. They all have the same health, same movement speed (dependent on current health), same strength for melee attacks, and same accuracy with weapons. I suppose this was done so that no one would automatically want to be Character X and not Character Y. Some people might prefer certain characters for what they say, look like or the voice actor playing them, but other than that there are no meaningful differences between them.

Each campaign consists of five chapters, each starting in an area in which you can gather guns, ammunition and medical supplies and ending in a safe room consisting of the same thing -- with the exception of the final chapter of each campaign. The final chapter of each campaign has the great escape moment in it, where players fend off a seemingly never ending rush of the zombie horde and special zombies until the rescue vehicle is able to pick them up. But, there's still some fighting to do to get to the rescue vehicle. Most chapters also have what is known as a crescendo event, where the players must fight off the zombie horde massing upon them for a set amount of time before they can move on, normally after using something to make a path to move forward in the chapter (an early example is waiting for an elevator to arrive). Overall, with a good group the pacing feels pretty much spot on; though with groups who refuse to work together or with 2 or more people with no microphones... well, it can be a bit overwhelming, especially on the harder difficulty settings.

Sticking together and watching out for your teammates is the key to survival in Left 4 Dead. Players who try to gung-ho it or who feel they don't need the rest of the survivors are going to cause problems for themselves and the rest of the group. This is definitely a game where it is better to play nice with others. It is the entire focus of the game's core campaign design, after all. Oh, and friendly fire? Yeah, that's always on. Players really need to watch what they're aiming at, as they can accidentally kill each other.

Now, as mentioned before, the game really tries to keep you moving forward, even when players die. Valve, however, decided against their earlier thought of only letting players back in at the safe rooms of each chapter in co-op mode (as heard in the commentary of the game), and instead allow players to respawn in closets scattered throughout the chapters if they do die -- making it seem as though the group is picking up more survivors who have barricaded themselves in the closets to keep the infected at bay and wait for help. With luck, this should mean that players only need sit out maybe five to seven minutes, maximum, before they are rescued from a closet and can again join the foray towards safety -- provided the other players let them out of the closet, that is.

Since it is a co-op game, players can help each other out in various ways. Players can use first aid kits on those who are injured and don't have their own kits, hand them pain pills for temporary health boosts and most importantly of all help them up after being incapacitated or knocked to the ground by a special enemy that needs removing. This encourages players to stick together and watch each others' backs. Just remember, players may only be incapacitated twice without using a first aid kit or the next incapacitation is death.

Left 4 Dead also comes with a fairly addictive multiplayer versus mode. Two teams of four get set up, one as the survivors and one as the special infected. The special infected can respawn, the survivors cannot. The idea for the survivor players is to make it through the campaign while the infected attempt to kill them all. After each round, consisting of a chapter in the campaign, the players switch sides. Team score is based on the average distance traveled and/or how many survivors made it to the safe zone for the survivors and how much damage was caused to the survivors by the infected, along with a multiplier based on the difficulty of the campaign map. The infected get some advantages, such as AI-controlled zombies to hassle the survivors and all the pitfalls of the crescendo events falling upon the survivors. But the survivors have some advantages as well, such as the fact that most special infected have far less health than the survivors and that they have guns which can hit infected from a distance. On the flip side, most infected need to be fairly close to the survivors to do damage, and they have a fairly long (20-plus second) respawn timer. In addition, the infected have no control over what they spawn as, though they can move anywhere on the map to spawn -- provided it is not too close to the survivors' present location and that they are out of sight when they spawn -- but they must follow the normal pathing routes to get to where they want to spawn, no ghost cam. The idea here being that each infected should have a chance at spawning as the tank zombie before someone gets a second shot (though this is currently not working correctly).

Now, the tank zombie. Man, he's literally a monster. He has lots of health, does massive amounts of damage and can throw ripped up concrete and rocks at the survivors -- basically pure unbridled rage in a huge hulking zombie. Fortunately, he is slower than a survivor in good health. In addition, Valve smartly added a way to prevent the tank player from simply going to the door to the safe room to ambush the survivors. The tank player has an extra bar on his screen, called the patience meter. Whenever the player playing the tank is not attacking the survivors, this meter counts down. When it is depleted, the AI takes control of the tank and that player thus loses his or her turn at being the tank. So, while strategy and team work play a big part in playing the infected, when playing the tank that player is expected to just bum rush the survivors. Because of his huge health pool, he should be able to take out lone survivors fairly easily, but he can have a hard time when all four survivors unload their weapons into him.

As a note, the only special infected players may not be spawned as is the witch. Due to her AI behavior, she simply couldn't be effectively used except to place her right in the path the survivors need to go through.

This mode is extremely fun to play, again provided the players' teams work together to achieve their goals.

The sound design in Left 4 Dead is incredible. It has all the feelings of a good zombie flick between the desolate sounds of the open world, the superb dynamic musical score, great (if not slightly cheesy) voice acting, grunts and moans of infected and special effects sounds (car alarms, gunfire, etc.). It's clear that a lot of work was put into L4D's sound design.

The graphic design is also very well done. Cinematic effects such as color correction, film grain and others are used to their fullest to enhance the visuals, and the overall design of the levels is fantastic, with the lighting effects really adding to the feeling of a post-zombie apocalyptic world. The animations of the survivors and infected are insanely good, especially the running of the infected and facial animations on the infected and the survivors. There is also rarely any slowdown of frame rate, even in a particularly graphically intensive scene in the Dead Air campaign (which I won't ruin for players who haven't played it yet). However, the Source engine is really starting to show its age. When compared to newer games like Gears of War 2 and Dead Space, the graphics seem a bit dated. Granted, compared to early videos I saw of Left 4 Dead, the improvement is drastic, but overall I think it is time for Valve to debut Source 2.0 for future games. The Source engine is four or so years old now, and its time is just about up. This isn't to say that Left 4 Dead looks bad, because it doesn't; I'm simply saying that games on the PC and the Xbox 360 have advanced beyond how L4D looks. If this was released a year ago, it would have been one of the best looking games on the 360.

I've spent most of this review praising Left 4 Dead, but there are some issues.

There are three main problems with the A.I. director. First, the A.I. director can be a real pain in the rear when it comes to spawning ammo, guns, molotovs/pipe bombs or health when players are faring badly. Quite often, players will find themselves trying to do half a chapter or more with very little health, grenade weapons or ammunition, especially on expert difficulty. Second, the director has this insanely bad habit of placing witches directly in the path players need to go, with no way around her... this forces players to have to deal with her more often that they would want and makes getting the "avoid the witch for an entire campaign" achievement a real pain to get. Third, the director can literally spawn special infected almost right on top of players, especially boomers who often suddenly appear behind the party and puke bile upon them, inviting the wrath of the horde before the party can even figure out where the boomer is.

Another issue with the AI is the way it handles players going idle. If a player checks messages or tries to invite some friends while playing, then the AI may decide that the player is taking too long and take over the character they are playing. This wouldn't be much of an issue, but even before a chapter begins and everyone is waiting in the safe room, it only takes about a minute of being idle (bathroom break, drink, etc.) before the AI takes over. This can be problematic when going for specific achievements, such as only using pistols for an entire campaign, as the AI will often pick up other weapons the player might not want at the time.

Xbox Live usage also has its issues. Creating your own public campaign or versus lobby is simply unintuitive. First players must create a friends-only campaign or versus lobby, then change it to public. If players try to make a lobby public first, it instead sends them looking for someone else's lobby. The other way is to look for other games and pray no other games are available for joining, in which case the game will set up a public lobby with the current player as the host. This sort of setup is simply unacceptable. Given the team-focused game play of Left 4 Dead, I know I want to make sure everyone in my campaign or versus lobbies has their headset on and that everyone has some modicum of intelligence before starting the game, which means I want to start the lobbies to have control of who stays and who goes before we get into the game. This also causes problems when I want to set up a certain campaign and have to go about it in this convoluted manner.

Sometimes the game will send players to a versus game already in progress and never let them get out of spectator mode. This is fairly annoying, because it seems that those players stuck in spectator mode also can't talk to other players currently in spectator mode. I have also had something happen that caused a massive amount of lag for a few seconds right before the loading screen of the second chapter of a campaign. After this, I was unable to hear my teammates and they were unable to hear me for the next two chapters. This seems to be a problem with the dedicated servers Valve uses. The best solution I have found for this is to make sure everyone in the game is in the same Xbox Live party; then you should have no problems talking to each other.

And those dedicated servers seem to be having problems. Granted, I'm happy to see an Xbox Live game that uses dedicated servers but often between chapters of a campaign I see a message about a problem connecting to the dedicated server for a few seconds. Also, every online game, even friends-only, has to go through these dedicated servers.

On a more general note, the load times between chapters and from the game to the main menu are pretty long. I have not installed the game to my Xbox 360 hard drive to see how much that can be helped, if at all, so I can't say if this is beneficial. There are many games where installing does help, but I know there are also a few where it does not. If anyone can comment on the load times when installed, I would appreciate it.

One problem I have with the final chapter of each campaign is the area the rescue vehicle approaches when it comes to pick you up. It is often a fair distance from where you have to hold up and fight the horde until it arrives... and then when it arrives the horde attacks, again, en masse -- tank and all. Even if a team keeps everyone alive for the waiting event, it is very likely some will die on the way to the rescue vehicle. And the amount of zombies that attack makes it extremely difficult to help other players up if they fall to the horde on their way from the area they defend to the rescue vehicle. This is kind of a pain, because until players play each campaign a few times, they won't know exactly where they need to be for the rescue vehicle.

I might as well mention that since the game was designed with co-op in mind, the single player experience is just mediocre. Yes, the AI-controlled team is very capable, and they do smart things like give players pain pills and such, but they can also be downright stupid at times when they don't pick up pipe bombs or molotov cocktails and thus never use them to help out. The single player AI-controlled teammates were definitely an afterthought of the design of Left 4 Dead, most likely just so they didn't need to make Xbox Live a requirement for owners. You can be certain of this: the best way to play Left 4 Dead is with other people.

Also on a general note, the lack of content could potentially be a downer for many people. Yes, it's 20 levels spread out over four campaigns. However, it's only four campaigns that are intertwined enough as to basically make it one long campaign. Unfortunately on the lower difficulties each campaign can be completed in around an hour; they really only get longer on the expert difficulty (mainly due to deaths from the increased damage). While the director can help keep things feeling fresh each time a campaign is played, eventually people will tire of the limited campaign selection and desire new content. Thankfully, given the nature of the semi-stand alone design of each campaign, the possibility of Valve releasing new campaigns is high... I'm just wondering how much each will cost me, both in money and in hard drive space. The game I paid $60 for is a 5-7 hour game. Sure, it's a very replayable 5-7 hours, but it is still only 5-7 hours of non-versus game play, which leaves me saying "More please!" because of just how good this game is, overall.

So, if you like co-op games with a healthy and addictive versus mode, and you love slaughtering zombies (and let's face it -- who doesn't?), Left 4 Dead should definitely be a game to look at. Play the campaigns and versus modes with the right people and expect to have a lot of fun.

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12.3.2008 - Trailer