If you enjoy playing first-person shooters with a team of friends or even complete strangers, Left 4 Dead offers an unparalleled social experience. Once Valve gets around to releasing the SDK, Left 4 Dead will join the ranks of Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source and countless other multiplayer games driven by community – I certainly don't envy the console-centric Left 4 Dead fan.
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On the PC side, the rabid modding community is slowly climbing to its feet, and private servers are springing up. There's also a woeful lack of content – especially if you're playing on Xbox 360. Versus mode felt in need of some serious balancing when I first attempted to compete. The goals remain the same: Survivor players must escape, and Infected players must stop their progress. Versus mode takes the formula established by the campaign and adds four more players as the "Boss" Infected: mutated zombies with special abilities. Yeah, it's kind of hard to feel bad for people when they're alive and well in a little while, but the occasional respawn point is literally a godsend with maps this long and brutal. While an entire team getting wiped out will simply have to start the map over again, if there's at least one Survivor, and a room with a closed door nearby, you might just hear someone clamoring for help. There are a few safeguards: For starters, it takes quite a bit of damage to take a Survivor down, and once you are incapacitated, you can still fire your pistol at passers-by – with unlimited ammo, just like in the movies!īut you will die, and sometimes you'll die often. As an added caveat, friendly fire is mandatory, so be ready to apologize for accidentally mowing down a comrade every now and then. Your fellow Survivors provide more than a few extra guns – without them, you can be easily knocked onto the ground, or overwhelmed. There are major events that remain the same – always expect a Tank at a campaign's finale – but for the most part you'll need to stay in constant communication with your partners, as it's hard to predict what will be around the next bend. The end result is that you can repeat the same map countless times and get completely different experiences: Weapons aren't where they "should" be, power-ups appear in seemingly random places, a previously empty hallway becomes a hellish firefight. While there are traditional difficulty settings, these only affect how much damage a Survivor can take before collapsing. But if all four of your characters are limping along, the Director can be a bit merciful.
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Approach a barricaded building armed to the teeth with full health, and you can expect a gruesome experience. The AI Director is Valve's answer to traditional spawn points, adjusting the pacing of the particular level based on how you're doing. While the maps are fairly linear and there are major set pieces – a bridge to lower, a radio to respond to – every element of the action is generated on the fly. The game is divided into four Campaigns, with five maps each. There aren't many scripts of any kind in Left 4 Dead.
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The writing is on the walls: Who is Chicago Ted, whom no zombies are safe from? Did any of these people – shuffling from safe room to safe room as we are – make it out alive? The four Survivors you can choose from banter amongst themselves, cracking jokes to liven up the mood and even flirt, casually. We've all become fairly used to paging through dialogue trees and sitting through scripted sequences, so this might seem a little trite, but here goes: "Use your imagination." Beyond a few snippets of background information on each character, there's no traditional narrative to be found, which is actually refreshing. Nevertheless, you aren't playing a "movie," racking up kills as you move from cut scene to cut scene.
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There's a comic, almost tacky, Day of the Dead sort of vibe, bolstered by the kitschy movie posters, graffiti-based arguments and conversations on the walls, and even the credits rolling at the end – complete with "In Memoriams" for. Left 4 Dead's environments are dark and foreboding, and you might panic as a seemingly endless horde pours through the walls, but chances are you'll spend far more time cackling with glee at a timely escape (or crushing defeat).
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Please note: While it technically fits into the survival-horror genre, the game isn't remotely scary. Valve's Left 4 Dead, on the other hand, takes the idea of interactive cinema and runs straight for the haunting, zombie-infested hills. Plenty of games tout the cinematic experience, coupling melodramatic cut scenes with explosions, visceral combat and a story that's some variation on saving the world from Evil – the standard Hollywood formula pressed onto a disc. (Left 4 Dead is available for Xbox 360 and PC.