Left 4 Dead 2: Le Révision

Left 4 Dead 2 takes what was already a solid but short game and improves upon every single aspect of gameplay, thus making it one of the strongest games of the year. However, some things could have used some more tweaking.

Just like in L4D there are 4 survivors and you use them to kill a seemingly endless numbers of zombies in an effort to get rescued from the infected city. The core game of L4D hasn’t changed at all. You still must stay with your group and work you way through hoards of regular and special infected, helping each other along the way. It’s still a huge co-op experience that bring laughs, scares and controller launching frustration. Luckily Valve knew that they created a great core for a deep game. They just failed to provide the “deep”, the first time around.

Some of the new features in L4D2 (wow, that abbreviation looks like R2D2’s cousin) add to the ferocity of the campaigns and other features simply make it harder, but absolutely everything has been tweaked in some way. Their are 2 new modes, 4 new survivors, 3 new special infected zombies, new uncommon infected, and last but certainly not least, melee weapons. All of these, I will get to in a moment.

L4D2 is set in south specifically Georgia and Louisiana and the set design makes it very clear where you are. Everything from the bayou, to the cemeteries full of mausoleums, to the balconies in the french quarter, Valve did their research and decided to make the areas of the game as much of a character as the characters themselves. Why is it set in the south? Who knows. It’s nice, but a little confusing.

The four new characters add to the feel of the game, or at least two of them do. Of the four, (Ellis, Nate, Rochelle, and Coach) the obvious personalities are Ellis and Coach. The voice acting and casting put into these two characters is wonderful and brings the characters to life. Ellis, a good ole’ boy that many would call a redneck, is especially chatty and exceptionally funny. The character usually isn’t trying too hard to be funny, but rather his character is inherently funny. When standing in safe rooms between chapters, Ellis will get to chatting and well…let me just say that living my entire life in the south, I have met many people exactly like Ellis and its nice to see this character get his time to look ridiculous.

The three new Special Infected Zombies add more of what you’d expect from the special zombies. The Jockey leaps onto a survivors head and steers them away from the group and potentially into danger. The Charger has a giant arm that he uses pummel survivors. The charger can bowl through all four players if they are positioned properly and chooses one of them to simply stop and wail upon. The Spitter does just that, spit. She spits toxic green acid that eats away at the player’s energy surprisingly quick. These three are added to the existing four specials to round out a really strong zombie cast. The uncommon infected are worth mentioning, but not worth dwelling upon. They each have a very small special ability that may make them harder to kill, but they still are pretty easy to lay waste to.

The biggest and most game changing addition is Melee weapons. A gaggle of items can be picked up and swung at the thousands of Zombies hoarding you. Chainsaws, baseball bats, frying pans and crow bars (a la Dr. Freeman) are just a few of the items that can be used to bludgeon the undead. This is fun but also adds some balancing issues to the gameplay. Rather than laying waste to zombie nearby with a shotgun, now it’s easier and faster to just run through the hoard with a melee weapon swinging away. It felt a bit like Bioshock, when I realized that I only needed to pull my gun out when facing a special infected. This doesn’t take away the fun factor, it just unbalances the game.

As the for the game itself, Left 4 Dead 2 is significantly harder than it’s predecessor. Its partially due to the sheer amount of zombies coming your way and the frequency of the special infected, but is more due to the tasks you must complete while fighting the hoard. One particularly hard area has the survivors collecting gas cans to fill up a stock car that which they drive to safety. The catch is that the cans are located on three different stories of a mall. I found on the normal difficulty, that this stage takes a level of cooperation in which the human race is not prepared.

Also adding to the difficulty, is the spitter. The other new special infected zombies are clever and deadly, yet still reasonable. The spitter’s spit has the capability to not only incapacitate a survivor in 3-5 seconds, but also drains their life, leaving you pretty much useless after being revived. The spitter is especially deadly if you are being hoarded by 10-15 regular infected. Since you can’t move until the normals are killed, the spitter has free reign to take you out almost instantly. This gets annoying really quickly.

Visually, many things have been upgraded since L4D last year. The zombie’s fall apart much more realistically and the textures all look more detailed, but the biggest change is the addition of smoke, fog and rain. The campaign “Hard Rain” is the best example of this. During “Hard Rain” the survivors have to work their way through a torrential downpour (probably a Katrina reference, since the area gets terribly flooded during the rain) that captures the actual feeling of a vicious southern thunderstorm. This is easily the scariest part of L4D2, definitely the most realistic and possibly the most impressive.

The previous game’s modes are all present in L4D2, single player, online campaign, survival, and versus. Very little has changed in these areas, but two distinct modes have been added, Realism and Scavenge. Scavenge is a mode that tasks the survivors with collecting gas cans to power a central generator, with each can adding seconds to a clock ticking to zero. During this time, a second team of four players plays as the special infected to prevent them from gathering the cans. After each round the players swap spot and play again, with the goal being to scavenge the most cans. This mode plays much like versus mode, but can be completed much quicker and is more objective based. L4D needed a mode that is a quick pick up and play option, and this mode feeds the need.

Realism can be applied to any other game mode, and what it does is make the violence and recovery abilities a bit more realistic. In Realism mode, dead survivors can’t be revived with a defibrillator and don’t show back up halfway through the campaign. I’m sure there are some L4D players that were starving for a more difficult experience, but I am not one of them and I will not be playing in realism mode any more.

L4D2 is the logical next step for the franchise, that is argueably more like 4-5 steps farther than the original went. Anyone boycotting the sequel on the basis that the original was not supported adequately, and that L4D2 could have just been DLC, is not doing the new game justice and doesn’t realize just what they are missing. If you can look past the few balancing and difficulty issues, you will find that L4D2 is a more robust game than last year’s edition, and that this time $60 isn’t unreasonable.

Ok Valve, now get to work on Half Life: Episode 3.

Verdict: Prepare to die…alot!