Left 4 Dead for Xbox 360 and PC.
It's raining, it's dark, and your fellow uninfected are fighting off the infected like Paris Hilton amid a pack of paparazzi. Suddenly you lurch backwards as a vile tongue whips out and pulls you back, dragging you away from your companions. Will they notice? If they notice, will they care? If they care, will they be able to reach you in time? Probably not.
At least you've learned a valuable lesson, and the same lesson you should have learned the last hundred times: stick together.
The Valve brand has a heavy burden; great expectations. As fans from Half Life through to Portal and Team Fortress 2, we've learned to expect something special from each evolution, so much so that if Left 4 Dead wasn't amazing it would be an absolute disappointment. What's more, it can't just deliver it for the first few hours gameplay. Every Valve game has had huge longevity, a desire to return to it, and an online experience that draws people for years.
The name of the game is surviving the trip from one safety room to another, avoiding and/or shooting anything that gets in your way. OK, mostly shooting. There are two 'campaigns', one in an urban setting ending up on the roof of the local hospital, and the other going through train tracks and countryside to a final farmhouse shoot-out.
Each has their share of set-pieces around activating machinery or sending a distress call, producing huge waves of zombies to overrun the survivors. There are four of you, and to those familiar with the stock zombie film the protagonists will need no introduction.
Left4Dead is not about a rich story line or a complex plot. The zombies are as you expect, although purists may argue that they shouldn't run at you quite as fast and effectively as they do. Our view is that purists can take a running jump. Coincidentally, that is the main attack of one of several zombie variants that try and thwart the plans of the survivors.
The hunter is fast, and can leap on top of you and start tearing chunks, and if he does then you are stuck. Only one of your fellow survivors can free you by shooting the hunter, or by knocking it off with the butt of the weapon.
Another is the smoker, with a huge tongue that can whip out thirty feet and drag you off your feet. You have a moment to turn and kill them, but otherwise you are again incapacitated.
Finally, the boomer is a big, slow, fat, ugly zombie (not too different from me) that pukes gunk onto you (ok, maybe not that pat), or explodes when you shoot it spraying gunk on anyone nearby (definatley not that, although I never have been shot...).
The gunk does two things. Firstly it inhibits your view in a way that generates a great deal of confusion. Secondly, it sends any normal zombies in the vicinity into a total craze, during which they madly attack anyone splattered with green gunge.
To face all these, the survivors have cliched pistols with unlimited ammo, and then one of the usual array of weapons (SMG's, Rifles, Snipers etc.). They also get one-use med-kits (that can be used on other players - a nice touch), Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs.
If a survivor's health reaches zero, they end up incapacitated on the floor - only able to fire a pistol at a low rate and accuracy, while waiting for a buddy to come along and take a few precious undefended seconds to revive them.
Survivors can still be attacked while down, and have a second health bar that means death for that round if it reaches zero. Once revived, they had better find medical help quickly. Quite convincingly, a low-health survivor will find themselves nightmarishly limping to catch up with anyone else, now dramatically slower than the zombies chasing them.
The single person version is OK for about two hours, and then starts to get dull. The online version where you play online with three other players against the computer-controlled zombies is OK for a few more hours, but again starts to bore. However, the real deal is the 4v4 'versus' mode.
Versus mode is what this game was designed for, and what will give it that precious longevity. The simple principles are for the survivors to stay together and work together, while the zombies need to attack together and split up their prey. That's it. Yet to leave it at that would be to describe chess as 'all about getting the opponents King'; from those principles come a world of strategy and tactics.
This new level of reliance on teammates makes for some interesting and occasionally disturbing online dynamics. Anyone who has played a team-based online game against an organised clan on the other side knows how effective real cooperation can be. However, in L4D it really truly does not matter how good each player is unless they work together.
Each player-controlled zombie is nothing more than an annoyance if it attacks a tight group of survivors on its own. Each survivor must move and work with the rest otherwise they will get picked off or, worse still, watch from afar while their team all die in a combined assault.
This makes for a fantastic, but highly-strung, gaming environment. When you play through a campaign with good teams on both sides it is extremely satisfying; preparing ambushes, or spotting them and fighting your way out.
A good survivor team moves fast, sticks together, and is hard to trap... yet it is so easy to spread out of get trapped. There is a world of tactics to be developed amid endless variations of how each round works out. Together this will undoubtedly make for another high-longevity game from Valve.
The final thing to add is the capacity for expansion. Valve has focussed on getting the core experience of this game right, exactly as it should. There is plenty of room for new weapons, zombies, vehicles, campaigns and experiences. L4D as it stands is a new platform, and a new mark in co-operative play. Also, it's just good old-fashioned, clean, honest fun blowing away hordes of zombies. What more could one ask for?
It's raining, it's dark, and your fellow uninfected are fighting off the infected like Paris Hilton amid a pack of paparazzi. Suddenly you lurch backwards as a vile tongue whips out and pulls you back, dragging you away from your companions. Will they notice? If they notice, will they care? If they care, will they be able to reach you in time? Probably not.
At least you've learned a valuable lesson, and the same lesson you should have learned the last hundred times: stick together.
The Valve brand has a heavy burden; great expectations. As fans from Half Life through to Portal and Team Fortress 2, we've learned to expect something special from each evolution, so much so that if Left 4 Dead wasn't amazing it would be an absolute disappointment. What's more, it can't just deliver it for the first few hours gameplay. Every Valve game has had huge longevity, a desire to return to it, and an online experience that draws people for years.
The name of the game is surviving the trip from one safety room to another, avoiding and/or shooting anything that gets in your way. OK, mostly shooting. There are two 'campaigns', one in an urban setting ending up on the roof of the local hospital, and the other going through train tracks and countryside to a final farmhouse shoot-out.
Each has their share of set-pieces around activating machinery or sending a distress call, producing huge waves of zombies to overrun the survivors. There are four of you, and to those familiar with the stock zombie film the protagonists will need no introduction.
Left4Dead is not about a rich story line or a complex plot. The zombies are as you expect, although purists may argue that they shouldn't run at you quite as fast and effectively as they do. Our view is that purists can take a running jump. Coincidentally, that is the main attack of one of several zombie variants that try and thwart the plans of the survivors.
The hunter is fast, and can leap on top of you and start tearing chunks, and if he does then you are stuck. Only one of your fellow survivors can free you by shooting the hunter, or by knocking it off with the butt of the weapon.
Another is the smoker, with a huge tongue that can whip out thirty feet and drag you off your feet. You have a moment to turn and kill them, but otherwise you are again incapacitated.
Finally, the boomer is a big, slow, fat, ugly zombie (not too different from me) that pukes gunk onto you (ok, maybe not that pat), or explodes when you shoot it spraying gunk on anyone nearby (definatley not that, although I never have been shot...).
The gunk does two things. Firstly it inhibits your view in a way that generates a great deal of confusion. Secondly, it sends any normal zombies in the vicinity into a total craze, during which they madly attack anyone splattered with green gunge.
To face all these, the survivors have cliched pistols with unlimited ammo, and then one of the usual array of weapons (SMG's, Rifles, Snipers etc.). They also get one-use med-kits (that can be used on other players - a nice touch), Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs.
If a survivor's health reaches zero, they end up incapacitated on the floor - only able to fire a pistol at a low rate and accuracy, while waiting for a buddy to come along and take a few precious undefended seconds to revive them.
Survivors can still be attacked while down, and have a second health bar that means death for that round if it reaches zero. Once revived, they had better find medical help quickly. Quite convincingly, a low-health survivor will find themselves nightmarishly limping to catch up with anyone else, now dramatically slower than the zombies chasing them.
The single person version is OK for about two hours, and then starts to get dull. The online version where you play online with three other players against the computer-controlled zombies is OK for a few more hours, but again starts to bore. However, the real deal is the 4v4 'versus' mode.
Versus mode is what this game was designed for, and what will give it that precious longevity. The simple principles are for the survivors to stay together and work together, while the zombies need to attack together and split up their prey. That's it. Yet to leave it at that would be to describe chess as 'all about getting the opponents King'; from those principles come a world of strategy and tactics.
This new level of reliance on teammates makes for some interesting and occasionally disturbing online dynamics. Anyone who has played a team-based online game against an organised clan on the other side knows how effective real cooperation can be. However, in L4D it really truly does not matter how good each player is unless they work together.
Each player-controlled zombie is nothing more than an annoyance if it attacks a tight group of survivors on its own. Each survivor must move and work with the rest otherwise they will get picked off or, worse still, watch from afar while their team all die in a combined assault.
This makes for a fantastic, but highly-strung, gaming environment. When you play through a campaign with good teams on both sides it is extremely satisfying; preparing ambushes, or spotting them and fighting your way out.
A good survivor team moves fast, sticks together, and is hard to trap... yet it is so easy to spread out of get trapped. There is a world of tactics to be developed amid endless variations of how each round works out. Together this will undoubtedly make for another high-longevity game from Valve.
The final thing to add is the capacity for expansion. Valve has focussed on getting the core experience of this game right, exactly as it should. There is plenty of room for new weapons, zombies, vehicles, campaigns and experiences. L4D as it stands is a new platform, and a new mark in co-operative play. Also, it's just good old-fashioned, clean, honest fun blowing away hordes of zombies. What more could one ask for?
