Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is from Valve, the huge PC developer that create the Half-Life Series, Counterstrike, Portal, and Team Fortress. Valve doesn't put out a whole lot of games, but the ones they do put out are always quality games, and Left 4 Dead is another. It is available for the PC, through Steam or retail, and the Xbox 360. Now, of course, since it's Valve, the PC version is far superior, that is if you have a gaming PC to play it on.

Left 4 Dead is a game set in a zombie apocalypse. Unlike most games it does not have a long linear campaign, but rather 4 smaller campaigns. The campaigns are vaired and all fun in a different way, one will have you working your way towards a hospital, another will have you working towards an airport, another that will have you fighting your way to an escape boat. You will play these campaigns with three other people online, or of course, you can play with bots, but that isn't very fun.

Each of these 4 campaigns has 5 chapters. In these 5 chapters you will fight a ridiculous amount of undead zombies that will try to maul you and take you out. There are your average mobs, just big groups of zombies that will attack you, but there are also "special" zombies you will encounter occasionally. There is the Hunter, which can jump on you from many yards away and do some pretty massive damage. The Smoker, which will hide in bushes, trees, and try to be as far away from your crew as possible will be able to grab you with his tongue and pull you towards him. The Boomer, which is a big fat disgusting zombie that can vomit and puke on you, and if you shoot it it will explode all over on you and team mates, and the bile on you will attract other zombies. The Tank, which is a huge zombie that will take all 4 of you to take down, he will pick objects up and chuck them at you and your team. And the final and probably most dangerous infected is the Witch, which is a zombie that is passive, it will not attack you unless you disturb her with your gun or flashlight, and if you do so she will get mad and attack the person that disturbed her, knocking them down and doing tons of damage. Each chapter will end when everyone gets into the safe room and some one locks the door.

The "director", which is an AI that will change the campaigns every single time you play them, will ensure that you never experience the same thing twice. It will spawn different zombies at different times based on how good or how bad you are playing. For example, if you have no health packs and no medical pills with you, you are low on health and ammo, the "director" will make the game easier for you, spawning less zombies. On the flip side, if everyone is full on health, everyone has a first aid kit, everyone has plenty of ammo, the game is probably gonna send a tank after you.

Now, aside from just fighting your way through a bunch of zombies and getting to the safe room you will come across crescendo events. Now, these crescendo events are pretty fun. Basically, you'll have to do them to proceed, but you will attract tons of zombies in the process. There is a crescendo event at the end of every campaign, but there are some in the middle of them too. For example, one of the crescendo events has you calling a radio for a boat to come. Now, you will have to defend yourself for 5 minutes before the boat arrives. Waves of zombies will come after you and you will need to survive until the boat gets to your location. There are also some pretty hilarious "hidden" crescendo events. For example, if you shoot a car, it's alarm will go off, and you'll attract a bunch of people, and if you do so, everyone will probably be swearing at you. And another one is a metal detector in an airport, if you walk through it, it'll go off and you get mobbed.

Now, since the game is based on multiplayer co-op you're obviously gonna have to work together to succeed. When another person is on the ground or has been knocked down by the zombies they cannot get themselves up by themselves. Some one else has to help them get up. Also, you can give your team mates medicine pills, and you can bandage them up if they are low on health. If they are on the ropes and have been grabbed by a smoke, if you do not take the smoker out they will die. If you are down, or being attacked by a special zombie you are pretty much helpless and will need your team mates if you want to survive. But also, friendly-fire is always on, so you'll have to be careful to not plug some bullets into your friends.

The game isn't all co-op, though. There is a versus mode too. The versus mode is just like co-op pretty much, you and three other people are just playing through the campaign, like normal, but instead in versus you have 4 people playing as zombies try to kill you. This is very fun, especially as the zombies. Playing as a tank and terrorizing all 4 of the Survivors is funner than hell.

Now, I'll talk about the guns. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of guns. Everyone has a pistol with infinite ammo, and you will be able to come across a second pistol in the campaign and you will be able to use both of them. Along the way during the campaigns you will find ammo and first aid kits. The amo are just in big piles and will replenish your ammo for any guns. You can only carry two weapons, your pistol(s), and a bigger gun. There's a submachine gun, an assault rifle, a combat shotgun, and an automatic shotgun. The normal shotgun and the submachine gun are always spanwed at there designated places, but the assault rifle and automatic shotgun only spawn at certain times. Along with the 2 guns you can carry, you can also carry one thrown weapon. There are only two, as I said, there isn't much variety in the weapons. These two are the pipe bomb and the Molotov. You have to be careful with the Molotovs though, you can set your whole team on fire unintentionally. The pipe bomb will make a ton of noise and attract the zombies, then will explode and kill them all.

The game looks pretty damn good. No, it isn't Crysis. It won't crash your computer or blow your mind away. It runs on the Source engine, w hich is a few years old at this point.

The sound in this game is just pure win. Unlike most games you're not gonna here the same 5 or 6 one liners a million times. Valve has a game engine that changes the dialogue with the game. The players will have conversations with each other, and you'll never here the same thing twice. After you've been playing for 20+ hours you can still here something you've never heard before. The music is also randomly generated. All of this, combined with the randomly generated zombies makes a game perfect for replayablitiy.

The also features achievement for the PC version. Some are easy, like complete a campaign, others are harder, like beat all 4 campaigns on expert, and others that are just a huge grind, like, kill 53,000 zombies.

Final Decision
Left 4 Dead is pure fun, and it's the best online multiplayer game of 2008. It's not your average Call of Duty shooter, and it gives people that play tons of war shooters a break from them. It's a game that you really, really, don't care about being competitive in. You can die in a campaign 5 times, but since the game changes every time, you'll experience something different each time, you'll hear different music, and you'll fight different zombies, and it's just more fun. You won't care about dying. Now, go get a LAN together.