REVIEW: Left 4 Dead

When you have the chance, play this game with your friends.

While I have the game installed on my PC, it’s more fun when you play this in the company of friends at the cyber cafe or online. And because it’s made by Valve (the same folks that brought you Half-Life and Counter-Strike) I speculate that there will be exciting mods for this game.

So what’s Left 4 Dead? Remember those “knife fights” with the bots in Counter-strike? It’s something like that but the setting is in a doomed environment filled with zombies, like what you’d normally see in shows like Resident Evil, 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead.

Left 4 Dead is a first person shooter and the player controls one of the 4 Survivors:

Francis the biker
Bill the old war veteran
Louis a bank manager
Zoey a college student

There’s no distinction in health and advantage when choosing any character, so you can afford to choose randomly.

The objective of the game is usually simple: the Survivors must work together to go through stages, and simply survive. When you reach the finale of a campaign, you have to hold out the incoming hordes of zombies before rescue arrives.

Playing through a stage alone is usually impossible because besides the common zombie type (which are dangerous in hordes) there are also variations like the Boomer, Witch, Hunter, Smoker, and Tank.

Some of the variations like the Witch and Hunter are capable of taking down the player, and the player often cannot retaliate until is saved by another teammate. So cooperation and teamwork really counts in this game.

Pity that the variety of weapons in this game are few (only a total of 5 primary weapons, 1 handgun type and 2 grenade types). It would be much cooler if more weapons were added.

Although the game experience can change (a little bit) every time you play the same stage – whereby different zombies or creatures would appear randomly at each check point or room – it can get dull quickly if you play alone (like what I’m doing at home right now, lol). 🙂 And for a game on blood, gore and violence, I think it’s lacking a little since one cannot play around with the corpse like rag dolls.

The game gets more amusing only when you play with other friends or online. As long as you know how to play any FPS games like Counter-Strike, mastering this game can be as fast as a few minutes since perpetually the principles, HUD, game play, etc. are the same.

Overall Rating: 6.5/10