An interesting use of of decent AI, multiplayer capabilities, and on-edge gameplay.
- The AI director keeps you guessing, but tends to follow a pattern of making the game tough when you're doing well and easy when you're doing terribly.
- Decent multiplayer fun (however, see "Negative" next).
- Definitely intimidating to new players, in terms of horror (becomes old hat as you play along however).
- If you are a game recorder, the built in Source Recorder works beautifully if you know how to use it.
- The AI tries to help you when you are in bad shape, sometimes at the risk of another characters health.
Negative:
- Multiplayer players can be biased against newer or inexperienced players (as with all online games), but some are even willing to kick you from games because of this.
- On the harder difficulty levels such as Expert, gameplay becomes nearly intolerable by the time you reach the middle of the level.
- Very teamwork based. If you have a poor or incompetent team, you will more than likely be defeated easily, making even good players feel a bit overpowered; likewise, a very good team that sticks closely together will be much harder to defeat.
- Poor timing by the AI sometimes mean that a player being healed is a sitting duck.
- The AI director can sometimes overcompensate and give the Infected a huge edge against the survivors, even when they are almost dead.