Left 4 Dead HUNTER! BOOMER! SMOKER! F*&#ING TANK!!!

When I first downloaded the demo for Left 4 Dead I was unimpressed, so I was happy to leave it as the one game from November 2008 that I would let someone get me for Christmas. When I got it home and played it I was still unimpressed. The weapons are about as generic as an FPS can get, with not one single innovative inclusion. When it comes to FPS games I am all about the weapons, which is why I find the Resistance series for PS3 particularly attractive. Sure, Left 4 Dead had fast running zombies but that gets old quick. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about this game! Then I played Versus. The Versus mode in Left 4 Dead will probably be played competitively for years to come and I think we will see hundreds of mods and updates. The formula of Survivors vs. Infected for a level, and then switching, going through that process 5 times in a single campaign, is endless entertainment. Yes there are some balance issues but those should be ironed out in time. If you haven’t had the opportunity to try it yet, let me explain. You have teams of 4 people. Each campaign is split up into 5 chapters with 2 rounds each. One team plays the survivors for the first round, the other plays the infected, and then they switch. That is repeated for all 5 chapters of the campaign and the scores are tallied at the end. When a player is on the infected team they will spawn as one of 4 possible creatures. The Hunter, who can pounce on his enemies from a distance, disabling them until a teammate comes to the rescue. The Smoker, who can throw his tongue long distances and pull a survivor back, or up to a rooftop, and then choke them until a teammate comes to the rescue. The Boomer, who can vomit on survivors and blind them while a horde of zombies runs out of nowhere to attack them (or he can explode bile all over them if he is shot near the survivors). Or if they are lucky, the Tank, which is a massively powerful brute that requires a full team to be taken down. Currently you can only play 2 of the campaigns on Versus mode, but there is an update coming out soon that will introduce a new campaign, full versus compatibility on all campaigns, and a new type of infected to play as and against. I really love playing this versus game and would throw it in anytime in the future to play with friends or if looking for a good time. Of all the games on my shelf, if I had a hankering for some FPS multiplayer it’d be between this and Shadowrun. The co-op isn’t bad either. Now that I’ve come to an appreciation of the versus game, I can see how the co-op experience is not only good practice but a good time to explore and find where items can spawn: knowledge that is invaluable in the versus game. Some friends and I took a whirl on Expert mode last night, as well, and at first I was highly annoyed by the unreasonable difficulty, but after we died 5 times on the 2nd chapter we almost made it through the 6th play. I could see how we were learning to survive on Expert mode, and that in time maybe we could actually finish a campaign. Is a good challenge to look forward to and won’t be easy. The graphics and sound are not up to par for modern standards. Neither is the gameplay. The game feels, looks, and sounds about as good as Half-life 2. Now that ain’t all bad, but compared to their modern competition it falls behind. I think the designers were more focused on creating a great, expandable game, however, and for that reason kept the technology simple. I admire that, I really do, but the game would have been just that much better if they had spent more time improving the engine itself.

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