Best blend of zombie killing, cooperative multiplayer, action-horror-survival gaming ever!
The premise of the world gone to hell with a zombie apocalypse with pockets of survivors trying to escape to safe zones is well done. The game focuses on four everyday people; Zoey, Francis, Bill and Louis, who are portrayed with complex emotion and character qualities with the use of AI behavior and spot-on voice acting. In fact, I think the foursome here are better characters than many games' mute or generic primary characters. The group must survive each of four campaigns to escape the zombie infested areas, and they must work together as a team if they want to live to the end.
Each of the four campaigns; No Mercy, Death Toll, Dead Air and Blood Harvest are self contained and set up like action-horror movies, complete with a movie poster at the beginning, and credits containing the game stats at the end. Each campaign is divided into five levels and begins with the survivors determining where they need to go and ending by calling for an escape vehicle and eventually escaping. If, of course, they survive.
L4D can be played in single player mode. When you do so, you will play one of the four survivors and the AI will control the other three. The AI does a competent job with them, and will keep you alive unless you quickly run away from them allowing yourself to get ambushed. You can play all four campaigns in about 4 hours, but the replayability of L4D is evident even when playing alone. Single player may be the best way to obtain more than half of the achievements in the game.
You can also play two-player split screen. This allows you and a friend to play together, while letting the AI take the remaining two survivors. Since L4D is designed from the ground up to be a cooperative multiplayer game, it really begins to shine here. Not only are you trying to survive, but now you can begin working with another human being, and even compete with them for stats in each level, most of which reward working together.
The meat and potatoes of L4D is the online four-player mode. Here, each of the survivors is played by a human, and it is your group against the AI controlled hoard of zombies. And since the entire game can be played in about 4 hours, replayability is key. And the Director, which is what the AI is called, does a good job of keeping the game fresh. Everything is generated dynamically on the fly to keep the game challenging and interesting, without dull repetitiveness.
The Director manages the placement of items and weapons, which could be in many different places on the level, or perhaps not spawned at all. It also manages the spawn points and types of infected, as well as how many. It keeps track of your progress, and lays off the difficulty if your group is struggling, and ramps it up if you are doing well. The music is also dynamic keying in at critical moments to help heighten the tension and suspense. Periods of quiet help build tension and dread between the frenzied firefights, and at several key junctures, there are crescendo moments where you must fend off waves of infected while waiting for something that will allow you to continue on. Lastly, there are the intense battles of the finale where you call for a rescue over a radio and must fight to survive while waiting for your saviors to arrive.
There is also one other online mode to play L4D... where you get to play as the special infected and it is your job to kill the survivors who are played by others. Consider it a blend of team deathmatch with an escape mission. Each team takes turns to see how far they can get as the survivors, while the infected see how may of the survivors they can kill. Playing the special infected adds a lot of variety, since each one behaves differently and has a unique attacks. The Smoker is the sniper of sorts, hiding in the distance to pick off survivors and drag them away from the group to their doom. The Boomer wants to vomit on survivors to draw packs of infected to attack them. The Hunter is a quick and agile killer, and the Tank is pure power and destruction.
Overall, Left 4 Dead is perfectly executed. It is short, yet designed in such a way that allows replayability. It fosters and rewards teamwork over lone-gunners. It blends beautiful visuals with perfect sound effects and fitting music. And it has a mix of tension building and intense action. L4D is an homage to action-horror movies and zombie slaying fun, and it is perhaps the best zombie game ever made. So long as you enjoy your zombie games with friends instead of alone.