Left 4 Dead: So Much Potential

Hello again, gentle reader. I feel that I should first fall to my knees and ask forgiveness for the lateness of this post. I have been detained for a number of reasons, but my excuses are none of your concern are they, gentle, merciful reader? No, you aren't here to listen to my excuses, you're hear to listen to my opinions! These, I hope are much more exciting.

I have played through much of Left 4 Dead and experienced, at first, a great joy in playing the game. There was a great deal done right here, environment and music were very creepy, the variety of zombie was refreshing, and the blood splatter from an exploding head was satisfying. Then I rounded out my first hour of gameplay and realized that I had seen everything the game had to offer. Indeed, after thirty minutes I had used all the different types of weapons, seen all five different types of special zombie, and experienced every challenge the game had to throw at me, it was now just a matter of what combinations of special and regular zombies the game would challenge me with.

I was, as you can imagine, disappointed.

Left 4 Dead does some very cool things; things worth trying just to get a feel for something other than your typical first-person shooter. Most of the enemies take very few shots to kill, and few single enemies cause much dread (the Tank or the Witch being the exceptions). Sheer numbers are usually the critical factor. A Smoker or Hunter can incapacitate a single player, but they don't get the chance to do much harm unless the other players are distracted by a hoard of zombies while their ally is being strangled by a Smoker tongue or mauled by a Hunter.

The mood is appropriately creepy, especially when the dreaded Witch is in play. This particular zombie possesses long, sharp claws that can, in a single hit, down a player in lower difficulties and kill them in higher ones. When a Witch is around, the player can hear her weeping. This serves the dual function of being really fucking creepy and giving the player some warning. The Witch doesn't find the player like other zombies do, she is content to sit, curled up and crying to herself pathetically. If the player shines a flashlight at her, shoots near her, or stares at her for too long, however, she will stand and fuck your shit up. She is also ridiculously hard to kill. The never-safe feeling of the game is intensified by the fact that zombies spawn regularly. The player must hurry to the safe-room because if he/she dawdles too long in one place, he/she is likely to get mobbed.

The fluid difficulty system is a really neat idea. Left 4 Dead implements a system in which the difficulty changes based on player ability. If a player is getting owned pretty badly, the game will ease up a bit, and if the player is cake-walking through the level, he or she is likely to find a mob of zombies of all kinds waiting near the entrance to the safe-house with a little whip-cream on top in the form of a Witch sitting in the door-way.

The co-op feel is really well done. No matter what difficulty setting a player is using, he or she will die very quickly by wandering off alone and only by acting as a team can anyone make it to the end of any given area. This makes gameplay with the right group of people a very rewarding experience. By working together, the players will end up saving each-other's asses so many times that Left 4 Dead should really be considered for an office group-building exercise.

That is what the game does well. Here is how it fucks all that good shit up: One cannot always play with three friends all the time and the A.I. needs some work. My lovely girlfriend and I managed to conveniently sneak past a Witch and were up a flight of stairs and three rooms away, when computer-controlled Bill fires a shot up his own ass (for lack of anything else to shoot at) right next to the Witch on his way up to us. Bill then led the damn thing to the rest of the group where she decided that Bill looked too old to be tasty and proceeded to maul my heavily-tattooed ass. Thanks Bill.

The fluid difficulty system isn't fluid enough. The player will note that there is no in-between. One minute the player walks through a few rooms where the zombies are conveniently looking at walls while bullets are projected towards their useless brains and the next minuets the player is sneaking past a Witch when a Tank runs up with a hoard of zombies in his wake.

The mood can be really destroyed by a group of players that are more interested in winning than playing. Since lurking in one place can get the players killed, there really isn't much reason not to run straight through a level so long as there are other human players that will keep up (because the A.I. is slower than a stoned turtle). Doing so, however makes the game feel more like a first-person racing game (and The Club already did that) than a survival/horror, and it ruins the creepy feel of the game (although I will grant that a Witch will slow down a group of racers pretty damn quick).

My biggest gripe, however, I already discussed: within three levels I had seen everything the game had to throw at me. I had used the starting weapons, and the assault rifle, deer rifle, and auto-shotgun. I had thrown both the pipe-bomb and the Molotov cocktail. I had used or given a temporary heal with pain-killers and a permanent heal with a first-aid kit. I had been mobbed by regular zombies, vomited on by a Boomer (the latter led to the former), caught by a Smoker's tongue, mauled by a Hunter, pummeled by a Tank, and attempted (and failed) to sneak past a Witch. The only reason left to play the game was only to see the different environments in which these challenges would be mixed together to stop me.

Strangely enough, I have no real gripe about the story. The fact that it is non-existent doesn't bother me at all because the game does not pretend to have much of one. The entire premise is such: you are part of group of survivors in a zombie-infested area after some sort of apocalypse. Together you must get to a place where other survivors can take you to safety. Now go from point A to point B. It would have been nice to see the events that led up to the zombie apocalypse or how these unique (and well-written) characters found each-other, but Cormac McCarthy never tells the reader how the apocalypse came about in The Road so I suppose that can be excused.

Left 4 Dead can be an extremely enjoyable game under the right circumstances. It is the last clause of the previous sentence that messes up the experience. By writing “under the right circumstances” I mean to say that there is a really great gaming experience there, but one has to have a certain number of people playing, and they must be the right type of player. This means that the great majority of the time, I don't really like playing Left 4 Dead so when I get some free time to play a game, I find that I'd rather be playing Gears of War 2 unless my girlfriend is able to play and even then, it has some heavy competition with Rock Band 2. I know that this is a lot to read into a single clause, but you'll just have to try to keep up, my clever reader.

The introductory cutscene almost redeems the whole game though. Seriously: it's fucking cool,
Zac