Just tried a little run in single player. It's a lot of fun. They really got a lot of things down pat. Shooting the zombies feels satisfying. The guns sound nice, and the zombie death sequences (they're basically a euphoria type thing; death animations with some active physics to allow you to manipulate the animation a bit) are so incredibly well-done that it feels awesome to kill each and every lowly zombie. It seems like bullets penetrate enemies to some degree, so it's not like you're firing into the oncoming mass and slowly killing the guys at the front.
Overall, I'm really liking it. Few things I don't like, though.
It can be hard to not shoot at your own guys sometimes. I foresee this being a real pain in some narrow hallways when you get blitz by zombies or especially mashed between them from in front of and behind you. If you try to selectively shoot in those instances, the zombies absolutely will crowd around someone in the party and start beating them up, forcing someone to save them. If you try to shoot madly and just kill them as quickly as possible, everyone will probably remain unassailed but you're likely to hit your own guys. Punished as a team for being careful, punished as a team for not. So that's a little something I'm not liking.
I'm not really liking the mouselook as much as in most shooters. They have different values for horizontal and vertical mouse sensitivity, with vertical being slower, and it feels awkward. There's options for those in the menu, but you can't change them in the demo. Don't ask me why. On top of this, something else isn't right. It's sort of floaty, yet it isn't. It's not floaty in the sense that a lot of ported shooters are with mouse input lag gimping your effectiveness. It seems like maybe they made the mouselook pan slightly more slowly when you're trying to move your vision slowly, but not proportional to how much slower you moved the mouse.
I'll tell you what it feels like. You know how on the analog sticks of a controller, they turn your vision at different speeds depending on how much you tilt the stick? It feels like they didn't get rid of that for the mouse, so if you steadily move the mouse at one speed and then steadily move it a good bit faster, it feels like you're turning disproportionately faster to how much faster you actually moved the mouse across the mat. It's honestly barely noticeable, but I swear I can juuust feel it. There've been a couple times where, for instance, there was a zombie next to my reticle running to the right, and I tried to move the mouse at just the right speed to keep the reticle on him. But my vision was turning slower proportionally for how fast I was moving the mouse compared to when I had been darting my vision around really quickly left and right to take a bunch of zombies down, so it felt like my precision aiming was just barely off. So I turned about twice as fast for a second to get the reticle to catch up to him, and it felt like suddenly my vision moved 2.5x as fast as a second ago when I was inching the mouse, and not 2x as fast, and I overshot my turn. It was like when I turned at 2x speed, I passed the next "turning speed increase threshold" that normally is triggered by pre-defined analog pivot degrees on controllers, and that added further speed to my turn and effectively skipped my intended turning speed.
I wouldn't bring this up if this wasn't the first time I've felt a phenomenon like this in a game. I really must say again, it's hardly noticeable (I've always been very sensitive to the smallest discrepancies with controls), and in a game like L4D with the very slight auto targeting (HL2 and Portal have it on the PC, too) and almost always large masses of predictable enemies, it's not something that will cause problems and most I'm sure will not even notice it. But I've been playing plenty of shooters recently (Crysis, Far Cry 2, Battlefield 2 and 2142, others), and I don't feel this at all in those (FC2 has some input lag, but that's it), so I'm certain there's something just a little off in this game's mouselook.
Okay, so the next thing I don't like, and this is the biggest one. I don't like it when the hunters and smokers have you in their clutches and there's nothing you can do about it. I know this is to keep players looking out for each other and working truly cooperatively, but I think they should have found another way to do it. Getting pounced on by a hunter I didn't see and watching myself get torn to shreds in third-person, helpless to do anything until someone decides to get it off me, effectively takes me out of the game experience. That is a HUGE no-no in my book. I'm sitting there in my chair, watching myself die. Nothing I press does anything, nothing I do slows the process, nothing to at least eventually free myself. As soon as I'm caught, I may as well sit back, fold my arms, and wait, because it makes no difference.
So yeah, I don't like that mechanic. I also think it'd be wise to play only with friends at least for a little while during the game's beginnings. I suspect there will be tons of newbies that won't know what the heck they're doing online, and you'll just be screwed if you get caught because they won't know they need to save you. Oh yeah, and don't forget the teamkillers, they'll probably be common enough for a while.
I'm also not into the constant hand-holding signs of keyboard keys or a mouse doing a certain action to tell you how to do a certain function. We don't need that on the PC. Just have a discrete bit of text come up saying "press XYZ to pick up something or another," or "press ABC to open door." The symbols are just excessive and sometimes a little annoying.
Finally, I'm concerned about the length. It's evident from the demo that it won't take more than five hours tops (and I'd say three hours or so, more realistically) to get through the whole game. Now, it's easy to tell just how randomly generated enemies are, and I can see that giving good replay value to all the levels, as will coop play. But it won't last too long. I see it starting to get old in two weeks. Valve is going to have to pump out new levels as fast as they can, but I know it won't be nearly fast enough. So this game is going to depend pretty heavily on quality user-made levels, I think.
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