Left 4 Dead is a multi player FPS game, that's set during the zombie apocalypse. The 4 playable survivors Zoe, Francis, Bill and Louis, have to make their way across across multiple given maps to eventually reach their rescue vehicle. There are currently 5 official campaigns, each campaign has 5 maps (except crash course), they take about an hours play in single player mode.

Left 4 Dead is probably the greatest FPS multi player game this reviewer has yet played. It is addictive as hell. The single player game is OK for just a casual way to kill time, but it's in the multi player mode (vs) that the game starts to shine. Playing campaign with your buddies can be great fun as it's absolutely imperative that you work together. Solo players beware, this game will rape you if you try to go rambo and take on everything by yourself. The game has many different aspects to cover, we'll start by looking at campaign mode. As you progress through each map you're looking to get from 1 safe room (a room where the infected cannot get you) to another. Thus one maps ends and another begins. During each map there's usually what's referred to as a crescendo event, an event where you have to activate a switch of some kind, that will alert a horde of zombies to you and you have to persevere till said crescendo event is over. At this point you can continue down the map to the safe room. It sounds easy in principle, but there is one major thing that stands between you and victory, the special infected. The special infected have unique abilities to each kind, there are 4 kinds, the boomer, the smoker, the hunter and the big daddy, the tank. Technically you could say there is 5 if you include the witch but she isn't playable in vs mode (I'll get to that later). Witches are a pain, although easily dealt with if you head shot, point blank with a shotgun. Its easy enough to do in campaign but with vs mode it's a whole different kettle of fish.

Now I'll touch on vs mode. Vs mode is similar to campaign in that it's all about getting survivors to the safe room, but it's different in that you also play any given map as the special infected also. Team work again is paramount with the special infected (si), if you don't co-ordinate your attacks as a team your probably not going to do that great, so hitting it up with some buddies is probably a good idea. Vs, unlike campaign is a game of points. When you play as the si your trying to deny your opposite team from gaining points as opposed to gaining points yourself, you really wanna trounce em before they get to the safe room. Vs can be horrendously addictive, I've seen myself with some of the other HC guys putting in masses of hours trying to perfect quads (quad capping = getting all 4 survivors in 1 wave), which is easier said than done.

There is also survivor mode, which puts 4 survivors in any chosen closed off map and you basically have to fight against the timer (and zombies) to survive as long as you can. This can also be great fun, perhaps not as much fun as vs, but it's still a great way to spend time gaming.

L4D also has a great mod community pumping out some great maps to help expand the games longevity. One of the best ones I've played lately is the I Hate Mountains campaign from the same guys who made Portal: Prelude. It's excellent, in fact it's as good, if not better than the official maps, so comes thoroughly recommended, you can find the link at the bottom, in the related links info.

Frame rate wise, L4D is easy going. It's built on the source engine, which is starting to show it's age a little now, as long as you have a relatively modern computer you should be fine to play L4D at decent frame rates with the eye candy turned up.

So to cap it all up, L4D is awesome. Plain and simple. A truly orginal and horrendously addictive horror FPS that will no doubt give any gamer many hours of zombie shooting fun. Strongly recommended.

Related Links: http://www.l4d.com/l4d/home.php --- http://left4dead411.com/ --- I Hate Mountains --- Amazon.com

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COMMENTS  

Posted On

2010-07-28 22:30

Posted By

SkilgannonTheDamned

+1 Agreed....Mostly lol
Good review of a good game :)

I've a lot of hours playing, the only thing I'd add that whereas I consider l4d to be a good game, it was let down from day 1 by a wretched updates schedule. 6 months iir to get 2 of the 4 launch maps enabled for versus? And even then they were broken! Not to mention some play bugs that took forever to fix.

That aside, it is a good game, maybes even a great game, but the simple lack of attention given to updating it prevented it from being a legendary game. Still, there's a whole lot of hours fun to be had in it, and at least they've had a 18 months to release updates

Thanks for the review :)

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Posted On

2010-07-29 06:58

Posted By

Ramius Scythe

0 RE: Left 4 Dead (2008) PC Review
Quoting SkilgannonTheDamned:

Good review of a good game :)

I've a lot of hours playing, the only thing I'd add that whereas I consider l4d to be a good game, it was let down from day 1 by a wretched updates schedule. 6 months iir to get 2 of the 4 launch maps enabled for versus? And even then they were broken! Not to mention some play bugs that took forever to fix.

That aside, it is a good game, maybes even a great game, but the simple lack of attention given to updating it prevented it from being a legendary game. Still, there's a whole lot of hours fun to be had in it, and at least they've had a 18 months to release updates

Thanks for the review :)

Thankyou for your comment. You raise a valid point about the updates, however all of the major bugs that were there in the original release have now been resolved. It's true that Valve should support the game as much as say, L4D2, but then i can only review the game on the basis of what is there and what is there, combined with 3rd party add ons (ie I hate Mountains), make for a very long and enjoyable gaming experience, in my opinion. Certainly longer than most games, that cost more.

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