bigtruckseries's Full Review: Left 4 Dead for Xbox 360
LEFT 4 DEAD is a perfect example of why VALVE software will go down in history as one of the most important companies in game development. Rather than try and wow us with sophisticated graphics or attempt to recreate the wheel, what Valve does is simple. They take proven graphics/game engines and they make them shine by creating a coherent theme piecing together stellar gameplay, well balanced artificial intelligence and addictive multiplayer.
Half Life put Valve on the map, with its innovative design, story and gameplay - and that game was modded to create Counter Strike, a wargame based on well-armed cops vs. well-armed robbers. There is also Portal, a game that totally rewrites the rules of the first person shooter and turns it into a puzzle/strategy game and now we have Left4Dead, a surprise end-of the year title that is sure to be a hit once more people learn about it.
I had never even heard of this game before, or paid much attention to gaming news. My cousin Brandon who works at a Best Buy picked up two copies and wanted me to play it. I figured I’d give it a shot since Valve usually makes great games. What I didn’t know was how good it would actually be. To sum up my overall recommendation: YOU MUST BUY THIS GAME !
GAMEPLAY
Left 4 Dead’s Gameplay is simple. The game is a straightforward First Person Shooter designed directly after Valve’s Counterstrike Source engine. You take on the role of one out of four “survivors” of a mass Zombie infection and you attempt to make your way out of the hellish remains of a city in absolute chaos. The characters are all just regular people and none of them have special abilities. From the start, you may pick up a weapon (shotgun, machinegun or assault rifle) to accompany your pistol, and a health kit that you will carry with you.
You and the other players must make it from one checkpoint to the next. The goal area is a “saferoom” where the door you entered will be shut and the next area will be loaded and opened up in an adjacent door.
If one of you are killed in between areas, that player will spawn in a saferoom where the other players must unlock the door to let them back into the game. This is a great spawn-in method because it resembles those moments in survival horror movies where a person barricades themselves in a closet and is later rescued. Though this description sounds like the average flow of a first person shooter, Left 4 Dead is anything but. Rather than the slow, persistent plodding the “Resident Evil” zombies exhibited, Left4Dead’s zombies more closely resemble those from the movie “28 Days Later” and “Dawn of the Dead” because they come running at you like Olympic track stars doing the 100m dash. Since the game spawn’s them into the map nearby, all of the battles are close combat.
But what’s amazing is that entire “hordes” of zombies can spawn in under certain circumstances and you can be quickly overwhelmed do to their sheer speed. None of your weapons - not even the assault rifle - can fire enough rounds to take out an entire horde without you reloading at least once. You simply cannot hold your own ground because as you reload, you’ll quickly be overrun. And this is where the game shines. All 4 players must work together in order to efficiently combat the zombie hordes. If the zombies manage to overrun a player, he will lay prone until a teammate comes to assist him. It takes a full 3 seconds to ready a downed player, so the other players must provide covering fire while managing not to be overrun themselves. If a player accidentaly slips off a ledge, they will cling to it screaming for help - if no other players assist, then its bye bye !
Some of the Zombies, such as the “Boomer” and the “Screamer” can attract a zombie horde at the most inopportune time causing you to have to quickly prepare for a swarm of undead. Other zombies such as the “Smoker” can surprise you with its 50 foot tongue and trap you, drag you away from other players and strangle you to death. Other infected members such as the "Hunter", can quickly climb obstacles or jump onto rooftops when least expected. While Resident Evil had the Tyrant, Left4Dead has "TANK". Tank is basically a zombified version of The Hulk with 5 times the regular health points and even bigger muscles that can smash you dead or hurl concrete slabs at you with precision.
If you are injured, you must heal yourself with your health pack (if you have one). If your friend is injured and has no health pack, you may share your health points with him to bring him up to a stable condition. When you or your teammate are hurt, they will begin to noticeably limp or clutch injured body parts. They will also verbally let you know through moans or screams their condition. A player who is downed will constantly scream for help until you assist. The player models are solid and you can visually see what weapon they are carrying and whether or not they have items such as health packs. If you are for whatever reason separated from the group, you can see them through the walls as a ghost image that allows you to instantly locate them so you can catch up. Their bodies will also glow yellow or red to indicate their condition. A Downed player with health will be yellow, but a moribund player will be glowing red urging you to hurry.
The game takes its locations directly from reality. Abandoned apartment buildings, subways, the hospital, the airport and the countryside make up the four large scenario maps you will fight through. These handful of maps are huge and because of the unrelenting violence of the enemy, it will not be easy to move through them.
The Artificial Intelligence, like most other Valve games, is brilliantly designed. The game spawns in enemies and artifacts randomly in order to keep you on your toes. The game will change each time you play it as a result. In fact, the game monitors the health of the group and spawns in items such as ammo or health to assist you. If the game thinks your doing too well, it ramps up the difficulty, if your team is suffering, it lowers it a bit. During multiplayer matches, you can even ask for votes as to whether or not to change the difficulty on the fly.
MULTIPLAYER
Left 4 Dead, as you have gathered from this review revolves around teamwork due to the highly deadly zombies. 4 players can COOP play the campaign. Xbox Live allows players to invite their friends to fill empty player spots at any time. The game has been well designed to reward teamwork with success and to punish those who wish to go it alone with a swift death. If you venture off in your own direction, you will quickly be overrun by spawning zombies - regardless how good you are at FPS games.
I was simply astonished how afraid this game actually had me. There were moments when I was simply scared as a Screamer noticed me and alerted the hordes. I shouted to the other players to get ready and within seconds we were swamped with assailants. This game has a lot of brilliant voice-overs where your character will automatically shout to other players to warn them or tell them your situation even if you don’t have a headset. “reloading”, “cover me” and “watch out !” are just a few I heard, but there are plenty more. The game perfectly matches the voice over to the situation. In fact, the A.I. of this game is totally unscripted and the hordes will spawn in at any point in the game, especially if something happens unpredictably like a car alarm sounding when you damage it. Many zombies can be found simply dazed and alone after their spawn in and won’t pursue you unless they hear you or see you. But, once they know you are there - be somewhere else !
There is also a player vs. player mode that pits 4 survivors against 4 zombies. The survivors handle as I’ve already described, but the zombies are equally interesting. The zombies are given clues and hints by the computer as to the pathways the survivors will go to escape and the game spawns the zombies ahead of their path. In addition, it shows you where you can perch to stage a surprise attack.
The balance between teams is superb. The zombie team has very little health, but very powerful attacks. A good zombie team will be able to put together offenses just as much as the survivors coordinate a defense. One member of the team gets to be Tank at a time, while the others may be Hunter or Boomer. Boomer can vomit on survivors, which will summon the horde. As the crowd of horde zombies attacks the survivor team, the Hunter, Boomer or Smoker can sit back and take them out at ease. If you are killed, you simply pick a respawn point and start the planning all over again.
This mode reminds me of the innovative design of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. The whole game is so brilliantly designed, it never leaves you feeling left out. Even if you die, you respawn with the help of teammates and keep on infecting others !
The only downside is that currently, the zombies can only be used on two of the scenarios. Mostly likely, a mappack will come along to update this.
DISSAPOINTMENTS?
Despite the brilliance of the game design, this game still is a straightforward First Person Shooter, which does not include the common suspense building cliché’s associated with survival horror movies. For example, Resident Evil included puzzles: find a battery to install here so you can open a door. Basically, the puzzles were Mcguffins to keep the game moving and to keep you exploring frightening places. George A. Romero’s movies also usually included a situation where people needed to provide cover for someone while they accomplished a goal too. I’d have liked to see basic puzzles rather than simple door switches, that holds up the group until someone can solve them. This would build suspense and fear as the horde’s numbers intensify. It wouldn't be so bad to have players searching together for a key or a tool to help them access the next area - it would be alot like those Gauntlet arcade games.
Though this game, like Counterstrike Source, includes impressive death animations, it woulda been nice to include a full Rag Doll Physics engine, or even nicer, a gore rendering engine such as “Ghoul”. All the zombie movies were filled with brutal amputations, decapitations and disembowelment so it would have been so much nicer to see those same effects here. The lighting effects are near perfect. Most of the time, you're in darkness and the only source of light is your gun mounted flashlights which will be lowered during reloading leaving you vulnerable. When it does get dark, it does give you an authentic frightened claustrophobic feeling.
This game also includes Counterstrike’s signature crosshairs for aiming your weapons, but, I’m a little disappointed the aim-down-sights feature made popular by Call of Duty isn’t here. This is missed mostly because friendly fire is always on and there is no way to zoom in for a precision headshot.
As for the controls, this game has tight, responsive controls but there are a few things I would alter. For instance, when dual wielding pistols, the game does not offer the Halo style dual trigger mode where right and Left triggers fire their respective gun. Instead, it sticks to Counterstrike’s “one trigger fires both”. It feels kind of strange and takes getting used to since most of us will be used to Halo’s style by now. The [RB] performs a quick spin to let you turn 180 and pop zombies behind you, but the [LB] doesn’t do the same thing. I think it would be best if both buttons spin you 90 degrees at a time in the left or right direction respectively.
And when was the last time you played a game that used {b} to reload instead of {x}?
And why are there no chainsaws? How can you have a zombie game without chainsaws? Or is it that Gears of War played out chainsawing people in half?
OVERALL
This is the game I’ve been waiting for. Resident Evil games were good but this game is Survival horror taken to a whole new level. The first game I played like this was Half Life’s mod “They Hunger”, but, the technology at that time wasn’t sophisticated enough to create a game like this. Working together with others has never felt so desperate. Halo 3, Gears of War 2 and Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 don’t even offer a player experience this intense. What’s best is this game is easy to pickup and play simply because a ‘quick match’ selector allows you to jump right into a match rather than have to configure and maintain a host server. If a player drops out of the game, the computer changes their character to A.I. so the other players don’t suffer the loss of a member.
Even the Sound design is superb. The clips are taken right out of Friday the 13th and the zombie movies. My favorite is a drum beat that feels like the stampeding of hungry zombies. The sound pumps up the action and increases adrenaline which only makes the close quarter battles that much more scary. As I mentioned, the characters have a lot of different audio clips to drawn from. If one of the survivors is killed, just like in a movie, they will say things showing their frustration like: "Oh no, not Louis" or "Oh My God, no" or even franticly shouting "shlt shlt shlt".
The difficulty level is best when its high if you have a LAN party. This game can be so hard that just completing a level gives you a feeling of unparralleled excitement and achievement.
“Left 4 Dead” easily stands out this season as a must have game for Christmas. Its more fun than Gears of War 2, and a fresher experience than the recycled CoD: World At War. In fact, this game is ripe for a more technologically sophisticated sequel such as a Massive Multiplayer Online Version.
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