Preparation for the Inevitable: A Left 4 Dead Review

If you’re anything like me, whenever you go to a new restaurant or store for the first time, you can’t help but assess the best ways of locking the place down in the event of a zombie attack. This is an especially nasty habit whenever you go apartment shopping; rent should always be cheaper for ground floor apartments with large windows. Thankfully, these borderline psychotic musings are finally coming in handy in video games, thanks to Valve’s most recent foray into their beloved multiplayer first-person shooters, Left 4 Dead.

We all know the zombie uprising is going to happen; whether it’s in our lifetime or not, whether they’re fast or slow moving, whether they’re dead or just ‘infected’ all have yet to be determined, but we can never be too careful. Valve assumes they’ll be fast-moving dead zombies akin to the most recent adaptation of Dawn of the Dead. Sadly, unlike Dawn of the Dead, a lot of basic survival issues don’t affect gameplay at all.

The game comes with four campaigns, or “films,” that are designed to run for about an hour or two with players taking on the roll of an archetypal horror film character. There’s Bill, the hardened war veteran, Francis, the bar-fighting biker punk, Louis, the skinny office worker (and token black guy) and then Zoey, the horror-film loving college student, and much needed dose of estrogen within the group.

Characters don’t have any special abilities or stat differences so each character plays exactly the same. The only real difference is the voice that comes out of your character. Every time you find an item or reload, your in-game counterpart will inform the rest of the team. This gives your character, well… character, but it doesn’t affect your actual play aside from keeping your in-game partners in the know.

Since the game is focused purely on playing like a film, sometimes events and situations can get a bit over the top. Every level is littered with weapons; ammo; and small, but super-effective, explosives for the survivors to utilize. Also, in what horror film do mini-gun turrets conveniently sit facing spawn points in open field locations? I personally would have liked this game to have a bit more emphasis on actual survival techniques: melee weapons, the need to secure food and water, and some method of having to identify easily defended buildings.

Those are really just a couple of nitpicks from a nerd who takes zombies way too seriously, though. Had Valve implemented half of these ideas, the game wouldn’t play well as a gore-filled co-op shooter and more like a tutorial for the end times. As an over the top shooter extravaganza, this game delivers in a big way.

Each campaign has its own unique flavor with varied set pieces and equipment to utilize. Even the types of zombies differ depending on the setting. In the farmhouse area of the film “Blood Harvest,” zombies will be wearing flannel, where they wear business suites in the law offices of “Death Toll” and they even wear ass-exposing night gowns in the hospital level of “No Mercy.”

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