Like having a beer in the backyard, but with a mouse in your hand
When I think FPS, I normally think 15-20 weapon types, at least half of them with an alternate firing mode, 15-20 minutes of mowing down the same enemy with a different hat, pants, or skin color over and over until you reach a room on the other side of the map with a guy in a wifebeater who can take 50-60 solid shots to the chest and head before he finally either dies or jumps in a chopper laughing and disappears until you fight him a second time in a later level, and then he has a rocket launcher.
Left 4 Dead leaves all of the stereotypical ideas of what an FPS should be at the door and offers you something pretty unique. Whether or not you're looking for something unique will probably determine your attraction to the game, but it definitely offers up an experience that most gamers have never enjoyed or endured, depending on your own personal tastes.
Left 4 Dead uses a modified version of the Source engine, Valve's own cash cow of coding brilliance, offering a highly modifiable, though slightly dated experience when it comes to environmental effects and texture design. That's not to say that Left 4 Dead looks bad, no, it definitely doesn't, in fact, hiking up the graphics options to max at a resolution of 1280x1024 or more, the game look pretty amazing. But Source is starting to show the wrinkles that come with age, so here's hoping Left 4 Dead 2 will be running on Source 2.0 or whatever Valve comes up with next.
The game pits you as one of four individuals, Zoey, the college girl with a gun, Lewis, the white collar dude, Francis, the biker with a heart, and Bill, the hardened, chain smoking, ex-military grandfather figure still dressed for service. As you start one of the four campaigns the game offers (5 maps of varying sizes per campaign), you are offered a health pack, ammo, and a few weapon choices, nothing too exciting, stuff that you'd find in your uncles gun cabinet. You pick up your stuff and head out. As soon as you leave the invisible barrier of the safe zone at the beginning of the campaign, that's when the fun starts.
The game's weapon arsenal never really gets very complicated, there are a couple of types of shotguns, machine guns, a sniper rifle, a homemade pipebomb and some moltov cocktails. I've heard a lot of people complain about the lack of weapons in the game, but I think given the situation and in an effort to maintain a sense of realism (ok, as much realism as fighting your way through a zombie apocalypse can offer up), the choice to minimize the types of firepower you have access to was a smart move.
I have no doubt that with the advent of the SDK, you'll see vids of Zoey rocket jumping and Bill sporting a 'nade launcher, but for now, the simplicity of the game is a big part of the appeal it has. Yes, there are only 4 campaigns, and depending on the level of difficulty you choose at the outset, those campaigns can go from a short 40-50 minute timespan to around 90 minutes or even 2 hours.
The difficulty threshold between Normal and Advanced is fairly enormous, and going from Advanced to Expert is even moreso. The game offers a lot of playtime for those who play it properly, and playing it over and over with a same people on Advanced is definitely NOT getting everything out of it that you can. The real fun of this game is finding a group of complete strangers dropped into a lobby, ramping up to Expert, and watching what is usually a complete slaughter. And that matters, because winning this game beyond the first couple of times isn't really as fun as witnessing the various, stupid crazy ways that a group of 4 people can die, ranging from friendly fire incidents to boomer/smoker/hunter combos to an ungodly tough tank on Expert that is nigh impossible to bring down if no one on your team has a moltov.
So yeah, in the end, one of the best ways to enjoy Left4Dead is to treat it like the Peggle of FPS games, a casual foray into gaming, where people will act stupid, run ahead, fall behind, get smoked in a location no one can reach them at, and just laugh at the insanity of the situation as you're trying to knock a hunter off of someone while you're covered in Boomer goo and a horde is incoming.
Left4Dead is the gaming equivalent of sitting in the backyard with 3 friends, drinking beer and watching some kids on an old trampoline. The scenery doesn't change much, and the beer is usually Bud, but every now and then a kid will fall off and start crying. And that's when it's really fun.
