Left 4 Dead. I’ve been following it for over a year, and I can tell you it is going to be good. Great, even. Something about zombies and Valve generally speaks favorably in my mind. It’s a pairing as epic as Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet and Ophelia. There’s really nothing to complain about here–except for the delays.

Instead of talking about that, though, let’s talk about the game. The brains behind it, the blood it promises, and the Molotov cocktails it’s going to bring this November.

Let’s talk about why you should be talking about it now.

L4D started with a dream, as great things are prone to do, many years ago. A modder’s dream, anyway. Any FPS player probably knows about “zombie mods.” I started seeing them years ago when Counter-strike 1.6 was introduced, 1.5 thrown to the wolves, and it became impossible to find a public server without the mod running. It was popular, to say the least–thankfully I had a clan with a private server for scrims. Fun, but annoying, the basic premise of mod were to bring a Resident Evil (or, perhaps more apt, House of the Living Dead due to its first person nature) take on Half-life, Team Fortress, and most often, Counter-strike. Instead of killing terrorists on maps like de_dust and de_office, the mod made it a zombie invasion. Many were add-ons to Garry’s, some came stag and brought numerous bugs, others had creative and planned out titles such as Zombie Mod. In ZM, “zombies” could only use knives to infect the playerbase, turning it into a full-out war against the dead and living. Sometimes zombies were introduced en masse (~20-30 zombies) as bots with a quest for brains–your brains, to be specific.

Sound lame? Like maybe there wasn’t much different from a zombie and just a shanker? That’s right, and exactly what it was. You can’t really expect much from a mod of a mod in the first place (CS). Poorly envisioned and mostly insufferable, they weren’t ground-breaking in design or gameplay. They weren’t graphically intense or creepy. While Zombie Mod was the sole exception and was much smoother than its companions, it still wasn’t exactly reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead.

But it was ground-breaking in concept. What these so-called zombie mods did was let people know there was a demand. A void to be filled. Somewhere, somehow, people wanted to dive into Raccoon City FPS-style. They wanted to play 28 Days Later or see a more expanded, first-person Dead Rising. They didn’t want a rail-shooter, like Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, either, or visit the ill-fated Resident Evil Online. Players wanted the skill and temperance of Counter-strike with the addition of truly blood-thirsty creatures.

So after many years of bad mods and single player zombie games, Left 4 Dead is that long waited addition. It mixed the two together in one definitive stroke. Of course, the zombies aren’t exactly zombies—they’re living people infected with a type of virus, akin to 28 Days Later’s rage virus—but no one’s complaining. They’re just as fierce and scary.

L4D brings to the table four eclectic survivors including a rich teenage girl and a Vietnam veteran. It pitches them in various settings; from a subway to a cornfield, it’s in the game. The premise is that people have become blood-thirsty, crazed beings and these survivors must reach checkpoints in one piece to be safe to be saved. The idea is for it to be a multiplayer game, with people controlling both the zombies and survivors as two separate factions, but the artificial intelligence is apt enough that one can play it solo without feeling much of a difference. Additionally, if one or two players disconnected or didn’t show up, AI can fill the spot with little to no difference.

As well as being bodies and enemies, AI also controls the game as the director. The directing feature allows the game to read the pace of the surviving team and throw in twists if they’re mowing through zombies, or give them a break if things are tense. This keeps each replay of every map unpredictable, as well as catering to real life. Left 4 Dead would be terribly boring if you could read a walkthrough and know that a Witch is always on the stairwell to the left in the city map. What the director does is effectively randomize the game and introduce extra challenges if it is going to smoothly such as an extra Boomer or Witch just as the game is getting quieter.

Wait, Boomer? Witch? Did I lose you? You see, throughout the level, there are boss infected spawned that the Z team members play, taking the form of one of four abominations: the Boomer, Hunter, Tank, and the Smoker. Another boss-type character can appear that’s known as the Witch, but they are not playable by other characters and are extraordinarily deadly unless you manage to sneak past them. Each special infected has abilities and a certain style that takes skill on a player’s part; for example, while the Boomer is more in your face (and just nasty), the Smoker is a stealthier boss that uses its long tongue to pull its prey in. If other teammates do not pry its victim free in time, they will die as its health is sucked away by its poisoned tongue. When the Smoker dies, a smoke cloud appears and causes reduced visibility for several seconds making it a further danger if it dies amidst a zombie rush. Positioning and timing in a Smoker’s death, then, becomes vital if other enemies are incoming.

This brings an entirely new strategy to FPS games. In the past, Counter-strike, the engine L4D is based after, it was simply knowing the weapons, the maps, and aim. If you were good with the AWP and knew de_aztec well, you could headshot the entire map from a door jamb. You wouldn’t wait for a certain moment to kill someone; if the moment rose in CS, the strategy was simply to kill them. Immediately.

But L4D doesn’t do that. It doesn’t pay homage to simply powerful weapons and powerful creatures–although it certainly has both. Every element of the game has depth and the differing enemies as well as maps help add to it. To use the Smoker as an example again, the strategy would be to free yourself from the tongue immediately and communicate the problem to your team efficiently as mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, for the person playing the Smoker, it’s important to take the most vulnerable player out and at the most chaotic time. It’s not enough to simply rush in when you see an opportunity; you should wait for a concurrent zombie rush, and a player with lower health who is lagging behind. When the Smoker uses their tongue move, not only does it become on cool down, it makes them unable to move or fight back until the deed is done

An overeager Smoker is likely to end up dead within seconds while a stalking, cautious Smoker could take out half a team and deal a severe blow to the survivors.

This is why I love the game. Pacing. Variety. Skill. It’s a zombie game with skill written all over it. It’s Counter-strike with a twist. It’s almost as if Resident Evil and Half-life fell madly in love and produced this deformed baby. Anyone can beat Resident Evil on easy, but they couldn’t do it with randomly spawned Tyrants and harder enemies. At least not the first five times, without dying. It’s not hard to play Dead Rising and mow down zombies, either. But it’s hard when you take a FPS used world-wide in gaming competitions and tourneys, turning it into something more strategic but still as equally involved. The strategy doesn’t convolute the game or make it lose its path. It stays steadily as a FPS, never becoming a pure Survival Horror member; it doesn’t become non-stop gore and mindless plowing through a crowd of zombies either. It somehow mixes the genres, perhaps bringing to life video gaming history’s first Survival Horror FPS.

And it works. Left 4 Dead fucking works.

The only flaw is the game’s delays. There have been a lot. Valve bought the game rights from Turtle Studios months ago, and if we know Valve, aside from its world class games, it brings delays. Think Half-life and cringe. If you do think about HL, however, aside from the delays you know it is the definition of quality. While bad games are forever, delayed games are only temporary.

Let’s just hope November 2008 is the last delay in the game’s history. I really wouldn’t mind fragging zombies and avoiding friendly fire by the time I turn twenty-two on November 19th. A great birthday present indeed.

Oh, and if you hate PC games? It’s also being ported to the Xbox 360 as well. It’s actually the recent source of this delay–they want to release both versions at the same time, instead of a quarter apart. So whether on Steam or XBL, you can get in on the killing. And the running. And the Cornfields. Yeah, who hasn’t wanted to kill a zombie in a cornfield before? It’s just so cool.

And who knows. If Capcom somehow beats L4D to release, given both company’s infamous delay track, at least we’ll have co-op zombie bashing to do until then in Resident Evil 5. Braiiiins.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 3:37 am and is filed under Previews, Survival Horror, FPS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.