Lawrence.com

It’s been a year since Valve delivered a zombie apocalypse experience that would never serve up the same game to play twice, four-player online cooperative play and consistent free updates. While the original Left 4 Dead was impressive, it seemed to be an incomplete game and the consistent free updates felt more like tweaks that should have been in the original release.

So it’s no surprise that Left 4 Dead 2 has brought out the skeptics in most gamers, myself included. Rest assured, L4D2 makes substantial improvements on its predecessor, feeling much more like a complete game, and justifies the purchase of a whole new game.

The biggest selling point of the original was integrated software called the “AI director,” which controlled all aspects of enemy spawn points and factors. I was impressed with how often the presence of the AI director seemed valid and it truly felt as if it was screwing with you. In L4D2 this has been brought up a notch with the AI director able to control various aspects of the environment as well as the spawn points for enemies. In addition, there seems to be plenty of hidden and available areas that the director can either spawn enemies in or leave empty, thus increasing the likeliness that you will never play the same (or even similar) scenarios over again.

L4D has made cooperative play a necessity in order to survive the waves of the infected, especially when you consider the fact that all special infected enemies focus on getting you away from the group and incapacitating you. In the previous game, the computer-controlled characters often played better than human players because of great aim and the fact that they focused more on self-sacrifice, unlike actual gamers. This has been updated in L4D2 to make the computer players less helpful and thus encourage human players to get along and strategize instead of leaning on the computer for backup. Computer players will still work hard to keep the infected at bay and healing the group, but don’t expect them to be particularly speedy and they will never satisfy a level’s objective. This was frustrating at first, but definitely assisted in recreating the frantic nature of the series. The down side of this is that this game has no strong value to an offline single player anymore; unlike the original title or Borderlands, which were enhanced with online coop, L4D2 almost seems to require it. Then again, hardcore gamers who play the hardest setting may find a new challenge in completing the game alone.

On that note, several significant changes have been made to assure that this game is much more difficult all around. There are now three new special infected that join the classic characters: the spitter, the jockey and the charger. The spitter will launch corrosive pools on the floor that your team must avoid. The jockey will leap on your head and drive you away from the group to make you an easy target. The charger quickly smashes you against the wall and pummels you. These new characters combined with the hunter, the boomer, the witch, the smoker and the tank make for a much more dangerous combination especially in large mixed groups.

The damage dealt to you by infected, special infected and friendly fire has increased on all difficulty levels making it much harder to ration your health. The new objectives placed in the levels are no longer about holding up and surviving the horde, but rather accomplishing objectives that require you to move around. This makes it more like a zombie survival film in that you can’t just find a fortified room and try to stay alive — you now have to be mobile and cover everyone.

If that doesn’t seem hard enough, most objectives also require at least one player to carry something, rendering them unable to shoot at oncoming enemies. And if that still isn’t challenging enough, there is also a realism mode that removes the glow around your friends, enemies and objective items. We’ll get into the new items in the next section but one of them is a defibrillator that allows you to bring dead survivors back to life, which is also removed from realism mode.

With all this stacked against you, it can seem overwhelming to imagine how you can survive the five campaigns. In order to survive you need to know your weapons, items and maps well. Aside from the traditional weapons from the original there are now updated versions of the SMG, various shotguns, an AK-47 and a grenade launcher. Also integrated are melee weapons like a chainsaw and axe, allowing you to swap out your pistol for close combat. These new weapons didn’t seem like a smart addition when I heard about them, but once you get in there and start using them on legions of infected, you find that they are quite effective. In several cases they can be more useful than pistols in taking out large bunched-up groups that stand in your way.

New items have been added to your arsenal allowing you to carry portable ammo drops (with fire ammo no less), the previously described defibrillator and a new adrenaline shot that gives a 25 percent health bonus and quicker character movement. These new items are helpful but they can also be compromising when you realize you gave up a health pack for an ammo drop without knowing it. It’s best to get familiar with what new items replace traditional items before grabbing them on the run, lest you be stuck without that critical boost when you most need it.

Campaigns don’t seem to be much longer than the first, in fact they may be a little shorter if you know where you’re going. The maps in L4D2 are much more open and less linear than the previous game, which basically gave you a road or path to follow at all times. Now it’s common to lose your way, backtrack and even get lost running from endless hordes. I get what they were trying to do by opening up the levels, but I’m not sure that it works to recreate the realism that the second game is going for. When you get lost trying to find your way and give up precious ammo and health to fight small groups of infected that keep re-spawning, it breaks the realism. This changes significantly once you’re accustomed to the maps and know what is expected in each challenge. I recommend running through each campaign on the easiest setting first, playing some rounds in multiplayer and working with those that know what to do while you’re getting acclimated.

The multiplayer now seems more complete. In competitive, where two teams of four take either the survivor or infected side of the fight in the campaigns, all five campaigns are available from the beginning. In L4D, once you knew how to combat the infected, it was very difficult for the infected to team to come out on top and required strong teamwork. This time around it seems much more balanced, if only because the strategies from the previous game still hold up but the infected have the numbers in their favor.

Survivor mode, which puts a team of up to four people against waves of the infected to see how long they can stay alive, has returned and is now more fun than ever. The wide-open spaces and extended maps work well in both modes to give more freedom to the players and make their actions less predictable.

A new mode, called scavenge, is similar to versus except that instead of completing a campaign, the survivors are trying to grab gas tanks and fill a specific device or vehicle. This mode is strictly timed and feels almost like a sports game. Like survival, this mode doesn’t feel like a quick add-on, but rather Valve’s ability to see the potential for various modes in the type of game they have created. All modes are fun to play, no matter what side you are on and no matter what hand you’ve been dealt.

The graphics have been updated and the rough edges are smoothed out to make for more realistic characters. In addition, there are many distinct types of infected that make up a horde, which makes the enemies seem more like infected people than a faceless group like in the previous game. Each part of the infected, namely limbs, have been given their own damage physics so shooting off a pair of legs will result in a climbing infected just like taking off an arm will cause mild incapacitation.

Sound design was always strong in the original and while it has been changed to the new setting of the game, it still stays consistent with no real change.

In short, most everything but the sound has been completely redone: campaigns, level design, multiplayer modes, weapon and item structure and enemies. Couple that with an even more devilish AI director than the first game and you have an entirely new and better game.

Graphics: 8.5

Sound: 9.0

Campaign: 8.0

Multiplayer: 9.0

Replay Value: 9.0

Gameplay: 9.0



Overall: 8.75