Review | Left 4 Dead 2
//What’s that coming over the hill?
The last of the new additions has to be the best: the new special infected. Back to play again are the original specials – Boomer, Hunter et al – but this time there are some changes and some new faces. And here to terrorise you are some fantastic additions to the undead. The Charger will run at you, splitting up your party and slamming whoever he catches into the floor repeatedly; the Jockey jumps on your head, scratching wildly while guiding you where he wants you to go; and the spitter – unsurprisingly – spits noxious acid at your team and causes you to scatter. All the special infected are troublesome on their own, but in combination they are devastating.
It’s even more apparent in the team-based Versus mode. As was the case in Left 4 Dead, team tactics are a must in Versus, and using combinations of specials is a sure way to take down the survivors. I’ve already experienced some great moments, like playing as a Spitter and launching an acid attack to then have a Jockey jump on the final survivor and drag them into the poison. But since the mode has barely changed from its original outing, other than adding new maps with new choke points and danger areas, it’s likely to be Scavenge mode that most people flock to.
Scavenge mode challenges the survivors to scour the map looking for petrol cans to keep a generator running in the base camp, while fighting off bunches of zombies and plenty of human-controlled specials, striving for that high score and seeing who can take the best of three. The genius behind this mode is how it shakes up the game, given you even more longevity. People found themselves constantly going back to the first game, playing the campaigns over and over and looking for better tactics to use online. With the addition of Scavenge mode, more campaigns to play through and Survival mode is still in there too, you’ll be coming back to Left 4 Dead 2 for months to come.
//Silencing the critics
Each new addition in Left 4 Dead 2 provides even more fun, although a small amount of it is short-lived. The new campaigns remain interesting, only let down slightly by Swamp Fever, which proves to be the least enjoyable thanks to some drab surroundings and a lack of the humour that excels elsewhere.
Not much has changed visually, but the ambience of each level is improved. Where the game has improved its looks is in the character models of the special infected, which have changed a great deal from the original. Boomers are often female, Hunters are more grotesquely deformed and Smokers have large boils and sores where the smoke is stored. The lack of a huge improvement in the engine is no real problem. Source still looks good, and nothing distracts from the focus on heady atmosphere.
It’s safe to say that Left 4 Dead 2 is a genuinely new game, and not a glorified expansion pack as some have expected. Silenced SMGs that allow you to sneak around, great bite-size levels that range from 40 to 70 minutes in length, and more zombies than even Simon Pegg could imagine all contribute to a highly enjoyable experience. And a new Realism mode sits neatly on top, which takes away character outlines along with any non-realistic items, and only allows survivors to respawn after being brought to back life with a defibrillator.
All this and I haven’t even mentioned the soundtrack, a bluegrass medley of tracks that, even in the most sinister of moments, brings a smile to your face. When forced to make a bridge from a Mardi Gras float, while the game plays When The Saints Go Marching In as you pound a zombie’s face with a nightstick, you realise that the arguments didn’t matter. Whatever Valve’s reasons for developing a follow-up so quickly, and even with a couple of minor missteps, the result remains the same: we’ve still ended up with a great shooter and a worthy sequel to play.
8/10
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.