Left4Dead – The Geekscape Review

“Oh shit, Boomer!”

“Oh shit, Smoker!”

“Oh shit, Hunter!”

“Lights off! Witch!”

“Oh fuck me, it’s a Tank!”

Left4Dead is as much a game about screaming and cursing as it is a game about shooting zombies. It’s also one of the most entertaining multiplayer experiences I’ve had since the old days when we would crowd around a television for some split screen Goldeneye.

The game comes from Valve. A company that knows a thing or two about how to make multiplayer experiences work. Team Fortress, anyone? Here they do something a bit different though. It’s hard to describe Left4Dead, as it’s quite unlike anything that’s come before it. It manages to exist in its own space between the competitive multiplayer of a game like Counterstrike or Team Fortress and the co-op campaigns of something like Halo or Gears of War. It bears a similarity to both but adheres to neither.

You and three friends take on the roles of four survivors of the zombie apocalypse and you play through four different scenarios or “movies”. Using the term movie is a bit misleading because the story is thin enough to be nonexistent. Just get from point A to point B and try to have at least one man standing. There is no character development, no long cut scenes, no conspiracy. Just a whole lot of fucking zombies.

Now, I’ve been talking specifically here about the co-operative multiplayer aspect of the game because that really is the heart of it all. However, you can also play a versus mode where some players take control of zombies while others play the survivors. This is an interesting diversion but doesn’t come near to matching the brilliance of the other mode. You can also play by yourself, but I don’t know why you’d want to. Almost all of the enjoyment from this game comes from the screaming and cursing emitted from you and your friends (microphones are a must). The actual gameplay is fairly shallow and repetitive and there is no story to become engrossed in, so playing alone is a pretty empty experience.

Get four people together though, and the game takes on a real life. You experience the shock and surprise of the randomly generated zombie attacks (the game employs a sophisticated A.I. director that tailors the game around your skill level and makes sure each playthrough is different) together. You rely on each other to survive. You plan together. You are a real team. As long as one of you survives you win and as such you’ll give away the last of the health packs to the person that really needs it. I’ve seen people sacrifice themselves to distract a horde so the others can get to safety. Stuff like this just doesn’t happen in other multiplayer games. Walking through a dark and seemingly empty hall only to have a swarm of zombies come busting through a wall and hearing four people repeatedly yell “Oh shit!” in unison while firing wildly never gets old.

So is the game perfect? No. Like I said, the game only really comes to life when you can get several people together and with microphones. It really is a shallow experience otherwise. There isn’t much game here (if you manage to not die a lot you can breeze through everything in a few hours) so you really need other people to make it an experience worth revisiting. Also, the difficulty is wildly uneven. Normal is incredibly easy. Expert is damn near impossible. Advanced is the mode we default to but it fluctuates between being Normal easy and Expert impossible. This can be very frustrating if you’ve breezed your way through a level only to have the game fuck you at the very end. There are no checkpoints, you just start over. This can lead to severe fatigue if you’ve had to replay a level several times because even though it’s different each time, you’re still just shooting zombies and without that feeling of forward motion it becomes hard to enjoy yourself. It becomes a grind.

The game was made using Valve’s aging Source engine. The same thing that powers Half Life, Portal, and Team Fortress. Other reviews mention this as a negative but I don’t agree at all. The Source engine is still incredible and looks great here. It also won’t tax your system the way a Crysis would, which is good since speedy play is necessary for survival.

So, if you want an unequalled multiplayer experience then you are doing yourself a disservice by not picking this up. However, if you are primarily a single player gamer, I would suggest passing on this one.

If you do pick up the game, look for me on Steam. My username is Renegrenade and I need someone to keep the hunters off me.