Left 4 Dead presents the most satisfying zombie massacre-ing experience out there. The game puts you in the shoes of one of four survivors: biker dude Francis, hardened vet Bill, college student Zoey, and corporate office guy Louis. Plot? Who needs a plot? Zombies are everywhere, shoot them in the head! There’s no time for a story when there are zombies to kill! The four missions in L4D are structured like mini-horror films and take the survivors through a hospital, a rural train yard, an airport, and farm country with each mission divided into five sections with an extraction point on the final map. Only, once you make the call for evacuation, you’ll have a good ten minutes to fend off everything the game can throw at you until help arrives.
There are three ways to play L4D, by yourself with the help of the AI, with a crew of your friends or zombie versus human multiplayer. Yes, you can be a zombie. Now that our dreams of playing as a zombie have been realized, there isn’t much more games can offer until we can play as robot gun-toting ninja dinosaurs wearing kitten armor. Yes, kitten armor.
For the A.I. based co-op you may find that, despite sometimes being a little slow to get to the safe rooms, your fake friends play better than your real friends. They are always willing to lend a hand, through mime healing you, reviving you, giving you pills, and keeping the zombies off you. Their fatal flaw, however, is that since they act on their own volition, they’re not great at avoiding the witch - an emo zombie that can take you down in one hit. If you’re lucky enough to have friends, you can invite them or strangers into your campaign. Even on normal difficulty, you’ll quickly find yourself barking orders and working closely as a squad thanks to the excellent Director feature. This crafty addition developed for the game that keeps every encounter fresh and tweaks the play based on your performance. You’ll also frequently be in the position to aid teammates or leave them to be devoured by the undead if they just can’t make it to the safe house in time. Don’t worry. Those lost to the zombie horde can be rescued a little further up the road…if you survive without them. If you’re looking for a real challenge, just see how long you can survive on Expert mode.
Then there’s versus mode. In this four-on-four multiplayer experience, each squad plays through a campaign alternating between survivors and special zombies. The score is tallied by zombie damage done or how far you manage to survive in the level with bonuses for surviving. There are five classes of special zombies in L4D, four which are playable in this mode: the Boomer, who douses survivors in zombie vomit, summoning the horde; the long-tongued Smoker who pulls survivors away from the pack; the pouncing hunter who pins and mauls its victims and the Tank, who has massive hit points and deals ridiculous melee damage. Your zombie class is randomly selected for you and every so often, one of your team members becomes the Tank, which can often make or break it for the Survivors. No, you don’t get to play the witch, but we guarantee you won’t care.
The dead don’t so much walk the earth in L4D, they linger in dark corners waiting for you to set off a car alarm, or find yourself doused in Boomer puke or just until you’re slightly relaxed (oh, that’s never in L4D) and then the whole horde pours down hallways, through windows, through cornfields and onto you. Intense just begins to cover it, as no playthrough is ever the same. At times you will have to ask “How did that many zombies come from that area? It’s a clown car of zombies! How is that possible?”, only that point you’ll be to busy shotgunning them into oblivion to care. Obviously, no zombie game is complete without a shotgun, so you’ll find yourself with the choice of a weaker standard shotgun, a devastating automatic shotgun, assault rifle, submachine gun, the pistol (or two, with endless ammo), the Molotov cocktail for extra-crispy zombies, and the pipe bomb whose noise attracts zombies then turns them into a fine red mist.
Now, the Source engine may not have the graphics on par with what you’ll see from Unreal, but its zombie physics and art style more than make up for that. You’ll see zombies take a couple hits, falter then stumble and fall at your feet, or you can just coat the wall in zombie gore with a solid headshot. The horror movie intensity is also well represented in the games audio. Special zombies make their presence known with creepy audio cues and the characters are so insanely well written for that you shouldn’t be surprised if they say exactly what you’re thinking, or just said. The dialogue, and the scrawling of survivors on safe house walls is infused with a sense of humor and a builds a rapport with your A.I. teammates, which would seem tough in a game with no real character development, but Valve pulls off quite nicely.
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