Review | Left 4 Dead 2
//It’s a big wide world
Valve are renowned for their employment of little details, and Left 4 Dead 2 is full of great miniscule moments that help to build a convincing world – moments like opening a door in the burning apartment building only to be injured by a backdraft, or Ellis’ stories about his dumb friends back home that seem to be told at the most inopportune of times. Each step through the Southern United States, from Georgia to Louisiana, marks a noticeable progress from the original game, and with each level taking place in different areas as the team work their way to New Orleans, there’s a lot to experience.
Each of the five campaigns brings something different to the table. Dead Center sees the team fighting out of the suburbs; Dark Carnival is a trip through a rundown theme park on the edge of town; and Swamp Fever takes you through dense and claustrophobic back water towns. Hard Rain takes you through a sugar cane field, while The Parish allows the team into New Orleans. Every campaign feels different, and a lot of attention has been lavished on making you believe the world and your journey through it.
Of all the campaigns, Dark Carnival stands out as the best. Walking through the dilapidated theme park is as spooky as it sounds, but it’s also full of the dry humour we’ve come to expect from Valve. This level sees the uncommon infected assume the guise of clowns from the park’s circus, their squeaky shoes attracting the common infected to your location. In order to escape the park you’ll have to make your way through the Tunnel of Love, enjoy a carousel and even take a ride on a rollercoaster.
A new feature means you’ll have to open new areas by pressing a button that inevitably sets off an alarm or causes noise, making the zombies chase you down, and in order to stop the bloodthirsty hordes you must shut down the source of the sound. In Dark Carnival, you’ll find yourself traversing a rollercoaster track high above the park, with the coaster’s train flying round in front of you, zombies from all over charging you down, seeking out your brains. It’s a brilliantly entertaining sequence, one that creates panic like never experienced in Left 4 Dead before. The game is an edge-of-seat journey from start to finish.
//New and improved?
But while so much attention has been poured into the world, not all of it works as well as hoped. The introduction of uncommon infected is something I had looked forward to, but unfortunately, actually fighting against them is quite the anticlimax. The clown zombies don’t really seem to attract any more zombies than were there before; Hazmat Zeds can walk through fire, but still succumb to a shotgun blast; Mud Men crawl on all fours swiping at your legs but are easily dispatched; and while the workmen zombies can’t be taken down with a headshot due to their hardhats, an extra bullet to the guts and they’re on the ground. The only decent uncommon foes are the armoured police, as they require a specific tactic to dispatch, and shooting them will only waste bullets. It’s not quite enough to fully justify the concept.
The melee weapons disappoint, too. Though there’s a range to use – from cricket bats to ninja swords – and while they may all look different, each has the same desired effect. Indeed, once people have unlocked their achievements for melee weapons, I’d be surprised if anyone continued to use them. Why get up close to a zombie with a frying pan when you can stand back with an assault rifle? The only standout is the chainsaw, which chews through enemies, but it’s loud and attracts the undead, and soon runs out of fuel. Each weapon seems to have been added as a gimmick, and it’s one that soon grows tiresome.
More successful are the items and ranged weapons, each of which feel as if they should always have been there. Laser sights can be added to your guns for increased accuracy, ammo can be changed at various moments in the campaigns for explosive or incendiary rounds, and the new adrenaline shot is great if things get a bit too hectic and you need to move more quickly. There’s even a defibrillator to bring dead survivors back to life.
[Continues...]
Glad to see it’s an all round improvement over the original, but still slightly disappointed that it’s more of an evolution than a revolution. I am still not sure whether this really required a new, retail release, especially as Left 4 Dead was so woefully developed upon by Valve when it came to DLC. A series of 800/1200 point chapters would have been so much more appealing.
After all is said and done, very little actually measures up to the thrills and spills of a campaign co-op that is provided by Left 4 Dead and that alone is why I am still very intrigued by this sequel.
I loved the first L4D, but don’t really play it any more. I had scribbled L4D2 down on my Christmas wish-list, as I was keen to play it but not desperate – but now I really want it! I’m still not quite sure about paying full price for it (though I was never caught up in any sympathy for the angry boycott), but now I really want to play it. Maybe I will trade L4D, as it’s unlikely I’ll ever go back to it now…
I’m amazed Daniel found the melee weapons disapointing. I’ve been playing on the PC version admittedly so maybe they aren’t as good on the 360 but on PC they’re very useful and I’d pretty much always pick one of the good melee weapons over a single pistol. They’re by far the best weapons for fighting at close quarters and unless the 360 version is a very different beast then fighting at close quarters isn’t an optional activity since at times the AI director will send zombies at you faster than you can shoot them, that’s kind of the point of a zombie horde otherwise you’d never lose any health.
Please forgive the pedantry but I’d like to point out that CEDA stands for Civil Emergency and Defence Agency and it’s the L4D equivilent of the real world US government agency FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. CEDA also featured in L4D, all be it less prominantly. Also the smoker always had sores and boils. Admittedly they’ve grown larger since L4D but pointing them out as if they’re a new feature almost makes me wonder how recently Daniel played the original…
I’ve played the original every week since release, the smoker comment was based more in the fact that Valve have added detail and the character model has been changed. It may also be the fact that a lot of the game is played in daylight and it highlights the models more. In respect of the CEDA comment, thank you for pointing it out, I didn’t notice it in the first game, as you said it’s less prominent.
To address the melee weapons, I found them underwhelming. Yes as you say you can fend off hordes of zombies with them, but you can also still shove them back and if you’re working in a good team, you shouldn’t really need to do more than shove them and shoot. If the weapons had perhaps been used as part of moving through the environment or otherwise implemented better, I would have enjoyed them more.
They ultimately feel like a gimmick to me, anyway, the zombies shouldn’t be that close ;)
Many thanks for the reply. I guess the time I really felt the melee weapons were really useful was the Dark Carnival when you’re trying to get into the last saferoom. Although I’m sure a good team could handle that bottleneck in different ways. I have to admit I’m mediocure at best at L4D and I don’t really have many friends who play it so the teams I work in our generally pretty awful public groups so I guess we’re looking at the melee weapons from very different perspectives. As a fairly poor player typically in a fairly poor team I found myself shoving quite a lot in L4D and I really liked the fact that with the melee weapons I can basically do a shove like move where everything I shove dies. I guess as a good player who plays in good teams you find pistols are more the thing since you can hold a horde back away from you more easily. They ultimately feel like a useful alternative to me because whilist zombies shouldn’t be that close in my experience they all to often are.
Nice review, Dan. Seems like an improvement, but ultimately a formula I tired of out of never playing with friends, only random 13-year-old French kids :(.
Sheriff Denby should really organise a game night to address that concern.