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Left 4 Dead 2 Review

Left4Dead 2 Review

Left4Dead 2 is the sequel to Left4Dead, it is created by Valve. It consists of 4 players fighting in a zombie apocalypse and you have to fight for survival and cooperate together to succeed. The game takes place in the Deep South of the USA. Although this is only the demo that is being played seen as the full game hasn't been released yet, I still had a nice experience of killing zombies.

The demo starts with the players just getting off a steam boat that is going down the river, and it's daylight for once, then you have to get from A to B throughout the city area of The Deep South, your team's 4 players are Coach - the School Coach that likes Chocolate, Rochelle – The News Reporter, Nick – The Con-man and gambler, and Ellis – The hill-billy. All of the team player's personalities are unique and well voiced, which is what you expect for Valve. However the AI of the bots that you play with when you don't have enough players tends to just be 5 steps ahead of you which is quite annoying, but it's only a little problem, so it's still a good game.

The Graphics in the game are essentially the same as the the first game, but they are still excellent and as I mentioned, it's daylight, so you can see what you are doing, but the fear of the dark is still there because the buildings are unlit and dark, which keeps you on your toes. The game has a brand new gore system unless you live in Australia or Germany, when you shoot the stomach of a zombie, the guts will fly out with other internal parts and there will be a hole in the body and the body with the bone of the zombie showing. This is quite well done and completely changes every time you shoot at them. The weapon models are nice as they're new models and there's more of them (Unless you live in Germany where you have the Counter Strike Weapons).

The game now has melee weapons which is quite useful and a much better replacement to the Pistol. A frying pan smashes the brains out of a zombie, the Machete cuts the zombies into millions of pieces and is great for fighting in hordes of zombies. There is also a Night Stick and an Electric Guitar, which plays very badly as you decapitate zombies with it. The melee weapons take up the spot of the pistol. Throw-able weapons in the game now consist of Molotov Cocktails, Pipe-bombs, and Boomer Bile Bombs, which once thrown at a location or zombies, the other zombies will attack anyone or thing at that location, which is quite a tactical device.

The Game also has Zappy Paddles, which brings a fallen survivor back to life, they take up the spot of the Medkit, but it is very useful for when your stupid team mates fail. There is also an Adrenaline shot that makes you do stuff faster for a limited time. The Pills are still in the game and work exactly the same.

There are now much more Special Infected in the game, there is the Spitter, which spits toxic acid at patches of floor and leaves the same size of patch in the area when killed. The Charger which grabs a survivor and makes a run for it with the survivor attached, the survivor will take a lot of damage from this, so your team needs to watch out. The other one is the Jockey, which will jump on the player backs and stops them from controlling where they are going, the other team has to kill the Jockey to save the player. The Witch which previously just sat there in the corner crying and got extremely mad when you got near it now wanders aimlessly around the map which makes it much more of a challenge that it previously did.

The Game also has Uncommon Common Infected, which are like normal zombies but will have some special type of special power, for the campaign available in the demo, there are Riot Cop Zombies which cannot be killed when you shoot at them from the front, so you have to knock them with your gun to make them fall over and then you shoot them in the back which easily solves the problem, but is a hard thing to concentrate on when you have one thousand other zombies clawing at you.

The level design in the game is up to the usual great standard that you expect from Valve, so that's another good thing about the game. However, in the first map, there is a Jukebox in a Bar/Café that plays some music, and one of the songs it plays aside from all the usual Deep South Blues Jazz music, is “Re: Your Brains” by Jonathon Coulton, who is also the person that did Still Alive in Portal (another Valve game) and when the track gets to the words “And here's an FYI: You're all gonna die screaming”, a massive humongous horde of Zombies come after you and your team in the Bar/Café, which is quite a nice little thing to have in the game. The Next track that played on the Jukebox after you fought a million zombies and now have no ammo whatsoever for the Spas-12 shotgun you have and what you had in supplies has been deminished to nothing and you have absolutely no health until you get to the next safe house which makes the game quite a challenge on Expert Mode, is Still Alive, which is quite nice and fitting after you just fought a million zombies.

The game will be released on the PC and the 360, and perhaps later on the PS3 if Valve let EA do another crappy port to it. If you pre-order it, you get a special base-ball bat to use in game and you also get early access to the demo if you can't wait. The Game is brilliant from just playing the demo, so BUY IT.

94/100