The opening of a new era of coop games, yet another masterpiece from Valve, or just Left 4 Dead.
Year unknown, and it's a zombie apocalypse, in short. We are given four scenarios, where desperate survivors battle armies of the undead while trying to get to an evacuation point. The four memorable characters are(were) normal people being somehow immune to the infecting virus, so they get locked and loaded to fight their way to safety. Zoey is a student, Louis looks like an average clerk, Bill is a war-hardened veteran and Francis is a typical bad-ass Biker guy, who constantly throws dirty jokes regarding the hopeless situation.
The gameplay is as simple as hell: Your goal is to reach an armored room at the end of the level, where you can grab a rest and then continue the genocide. You have 2 weapons(One of your choice and a pistol or two with infinite ammo), a medpack for healing, painkillers for temporary health boosts, and an explosive of your choice(A basic molotov or a pipe bomb which attracts hordes of the undead before detonating). Also, you have a company of 3 intelligent AIs, or by better luck, friends at nearby computers. The AI Director does the rest.
What is this "innovation" exactly? Well, it's everything regarding the tension in the game. It is what controls the dynamic difficulty of the levels, and provides "unscripted scripted events" in controlled doses(Sorry for the lame wordplay). That is, if you are playing like a pro, tearing heads of unsuspecting zombies(They usually have a hard time noticing you) without a pinch, well, the director will smirk and send a small army of the dead racing from every direction, climbing over fences, making them look like an unstoppable flood. On the contrary, if the team is in bad shape the sudden attacks will chill down and you'll have some time to patch up. The director also controls the music, which changes for every player, and ups the beats if zombies start to flood you again.
Speaking of which, you won't be dealing with just zombies, who charge like mad and drop dead from a few bullets. There are five mini-boss-type guys, which each one of them being a major pain in the... you get me.
The Boomer looks like a guy from anti-McDonald's commercials, enormously fat, a little slow for a zombie and blowing up from a few shots. The only thing is, if he blows up close enough to you, you'll get covered by his, well, whatever he has inside, and a horde will be attracted to you. The basic tactic is to kill the fatty from a distance, seeing as he is very noisy and the player almost always knows when to expect him.
The Smoker, on the other hand, attacks from behind, strangling a character with his kilometer-long tongue and pulling him towards himself. The guy loves rooftops and generally hard places, and acts as a zombie sniper. Taking him down before or during a strangle is the trick, but after his death he leaves a smoke of poisonous gas which blurs the vision. He can also be heard, usually, as he constantly coughs like, well, a smoker.
Now, the Hunter is usually a little quieter, only shrieking time to time. The guy's like Spiderman infected: He jumps around, crawls on walls and lunges himself at the player on nearest sight. It takes a while to bring him down, but he can be a tough enough foe amidst the chaos of the standard zombies.
The artillery of the undead is called the Tank. If the Hunter was Spidey, Tank is the Hulk. The enormous infected will charge toward you, destroying everything in it's path, and is extremely hard to kill. You will need all the teamwork and coordination to lure him with one player while the rest pour the rain upon him. He usually resists dying more than the other bosses.
However, all of them are nothing compared to the Witch. She's usually sitting somewhere, sobbing to herself(Payment bills?...), but a shot, flashlight or even a close step can break her meditation. She will charge and most surely incapacitate the first player she gets to, but with decent reaction she is not that hard to kill.
And those guys(Except for the Witch) are all playable in the glorious Multiplayer Versus mode. Four Survivors against armies of the undead and four player-controlled bosses. Playing for zombies is loads of fun, every guy has it's own control nuances and weaknesses(The Hunter jumps like mad, The Tank needs to kill, kill, KILL if you don't want to lose control over him, etc.) and makes the game even more tensing. And that's considering that the zombies can see the survivors through walls, probably thanks to the heat their bodies are emitting.
The variety of the levels isn't that big, you get farms, hospitals, airports, empty streets, all in the middle of the night. However, sneaking in a corn field or a darkened subway station still proves creepy as hell. So yeah, no miss here either.
The result of the above is a crazy mix of coop survival horror-multiplayer goodness. The players literally need to whisper to each other(The Witch reacts to loud mic-shrieks), which makes the role play even deeper. What tops the experience are the final climatic endings of the four scenarios. You're given a temporary rest from the zombies, while you get ready for the evacuation(Helicopter, armored truck, boat etc.): Placing explosive barrels, manning turrets and healing up. When you're ready, you press the evac button and all hell breaks loose: The site begins to swarm with zombies and zombie-bosses almost in the same quantity(Well, on the hardest difficulty, that is) as you desperately use every pre-defined trap to keep them at bay until rescue arrives. Sometimes, if a teammate dies you understand that it's better to leave without him/her than to risk a rescue(Murdered team members spawn in closed rooms, you have to release them). Situations like that scream for a big thank you for the excellent multiplayer/coop.
The game is running on the some-say-outdated Source Engine, the unnofficial trademark of Valve. Nevertheless, the visuals impress. Models, textures, HDR, dynamic lights, everything is on a steady next-gen level, with only the animation being a slight miss. Considering that it constantly renders hundreds of zombies racing across the level, with 8 players needing a sync for the multiplayer, Source is still one of the better engines out there.
And the sound design, yes, it's gorgeous. The shrieks and gurgles and all of the horrible zombie-noises feel just cut out from horror films. The voicework does good, it's just that the overall tension reflects little on the actors. The dynamic music and ambient sounds top the experience and crown the game as one of the best survival-horror shooters out there.
Left 4 Dead seemed like an odd move from Valve: How far can they go without spoiling their reputation? This far, for sure. Even if you think you've played every possible zombie game, or even if you're full from the setting, play it. The multiplayer is plain awesome, and the cinematic feel doesn't wear off until the final steps to freedom. And even with all of this aside, you get to kill thousands of zombies old-school style, with a shotgun and a handy molotov. Still not worth it?