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Review

Left 4 Dead 2

9.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer Valve Software

Publisher Valve Software

Genre Action, Survival Horror

17-Nov-2009 The South will rise again. And again. And again...

8 Comments

If we'd noticed the rumble sooner, we might have made it. We were sheltering in a mostly-intact bungalow, the only building with working lights on that particular stretch of rain-lashed, slowly flooding street.

One of the occasional storm flurries had hit, the rain so heavy that we couldn't see more then a few feet ahead, and so noisy we couldn't hear the shrieks of the fallen.

We'd taken shelter to wait it out. Then somebody said, "Hey, my pad's rumbling." And then a massive, Hulk-style Tank zombie smashed through the wall, its crashing approach and signature music having been completely obscured by the storm. And then we died.

This is one of many, many moments where Left 4 Dead 2 goes that bit further than the original, adding a new and often fatal twist to the four humans vs. infinite undead setup of the first game.

While the structure remains unchanged - you and three other survivors, played by friends or bots, carve through hundreds of sprinting undead between a series of safe-room checkpoints, ending in a dramatic and drawn-out set-piece battle - and the world is recognisably the same, it's a much more dynamic, interactive, and suicidally dangerous place.

There are more weapons, more zombies, more variety in the tasks, more distractions and crucially, a massive new range of panicked, almost-heroic disasters.

Each campaign has a unique series of events, locations and types of zombie that demand a slightly different style of play. Dead Center starts crawling along an open hotel balcony, hoping you aren't going to get punched out into the void, before descending into a smoke-filled inferno, out into abandoned streets before a finale spent hunting down fuel cans in a shopping mall atrium.

Dark Rain, scene of the previously mentioned Tank, goes from small village to abandoned factory to claustrophobic cornfield, then all the way back again while the level fills with movement-slowing rainwater.

If the first game felt like a single movie, this feels like a particularly full-on TV series: a sort of 24 Hours Later. There are still places where you stand your ground and fight, but they're outnumbered by those that force you to keep moving, because the zombie hordes won't let up until you complete that challenge.

You're running back with a case of cola for a gun shop owner, following a rollercoaster from start to finish, grabbing fuel cans to top up your escape vehicle... there's never a moment to stop and ponder, you've just got to keep fighting on.

But as ever, do it together. The first game funnelled you down cosy, hemmed-in paths that made it fairly straightforward to work out where the next brain-hungry mob was going to come from.

The sequel opens things up, leading you into mazes of fairground stalls or crypts (some of which the Director has the limited ability to rearrange), or leaving you to strike out across an open swamp or pitch-dark sewer. It's harder to work out where you're supposed to be going, and easier to find an unexpected zombie chewing on your shoulderblades because they've got more angles of attack. Stay together out there, people.

Go Jerry
But not too close, because the rarer, more powerful Special Infected are extremely good at splitting you up. The old guard all return: the Hunter leaps and pins you down, the Tank throws you at cars and vice versa, the Smoker drags you off with its tongue, and the Boomer sprays you with vision-obscuring, zombie-attracting bile - although the latter is also now available in female 'Boomette' form, which looks like a bloated, green-tinted Jerry Springer guest.

Thinking about it, there's more than a touch of the chat show audience about all of the newcomers, too: the Spitter, who gobs health-sapping goo; the dungaree-clad Charger, who grabs one luckless survivor and runs as far as it can with them; and the runty, vest-wearing Jockey, who leaps on your back and steers you away.

As with the existing Specials, they only serve a very specific function and are quickly dealt with. The Charger, particularly, is surprisingly weak for his size: it only takes a few blasts to finish him off, and the others aren't particularly tough either. But working together, their different attacks become absolutely lethal.

You can't hole up and defend for a while, because you'll get spat on or charged; you can't charge steadily onwards because the person at the back is going to get steered, charged or dragged away. It's bad enough when it's just the Director in charge; when human players take the reigns in Versus Mode, they enable some of the most sadistic takedowns Xbox Live has to offer.

Simply gobbing in a doorway can have a catastrophic effect on the Survivors' progress, line up a bull-running Charger correctly (which is very hard to do, 'cos he'll run some distance and you can't steer once he's moving) and you can set one of them back fifty yards, possibly permanently.

The Survivors do get a slight edge in the more open maps because it's harder for the Infected to find a hidden place to spawn, but any advantage is lost if they go ahead to destroy cover before you arrive.

Versus mode is joined by new arrival: Scavenger, a riff on the new finale events. You've got to collect scattered fuel cans to top up a generator, while the opposing Infected team try to stop you. Because it forces you to move around harvesting the cans, it opens you up for attack, and because you're collecting highly flammable material it opens you up for disaster.

Spitter goo degrades cans and makes them catch fire, so it's a tough choice between building a stockpile or going for the safer, but less efficient one-by-one approach. Have your discussion, and make your choice; you'll be dead in minutes either way, but hopefully you'll have racked up more cans than the other team. Picking a strategy, and working together to follow it, remains the single most important skill on either side of the dead/undead line.

Survival of the fittest
The co-op only Survival Mode, introduced in the Survival Pack DLC, also returns, with ten challenges you've got to survive for as long as possible. Fun though these modes are, we're betting the connoisseur's choice will actually be a riff on standard co-op: Realism.

We're looking forward to it because it'll instantly cull the morons who don't grasp the whole teamwork notion and think they can run on ahead.

It does this not by messing with the difficulty settings - you can play Realism on any difficulty - but by making a few crucial, horrible changes to the game: it doesn't highlight pickups, so you have to hunt for weapons. Witches kill you instantly. And, most importantly: there are no auras, so once someone's out of sight they are almost untraceable and almost certainly doomed.

Once, we paused to heal, didn't tell the rest of the team, and finished to discover we'd been left lost and alone in a knee-deep swamp. It was only the distant blood cloud of a Boomer exploding that revealed where the others were.

In campaigns like this, the Jockey becomes even more dangerous: once you've been steered a few yards away you'll probably never be found.

It's a really simple change, but it completely transforms the way you play: you might have thought you were a close-knit group before, but Realism demands teamwork that makes ants look free-spirited. The only crumb of comfort is that death isn't always the end, thanks to the new defibrillator.

Available in all modes (subject to the whim of the Director, of course) it sits in your health pack slot and gives you a single-use resurrection of a dead team-mate. Finding one after someone's dead brings yet another critical decision: go back and get another helper, or fight on unaided?

You talk purdy
There's even more of a story, just, although it's still a self-assembly affair. The end of each campaign sets up the next, but there's no explicit narration and you have to work out what's happening from the graffiti and the snippets of conversation and the like that open and close each mission.

This means a lot of listening to Ellis. By far the most talkative person of the four survivors, he's the sort of redneck who would regard a house cat as good eatin', and has an endless supply of daft stories and inane observations - we can't decide if he's going to be the most popular character, or the most irritating.

The others are less notable but still crack wise throughout, meaning that the very rare quiet moments bring a new and unexpected interjection.

And that's L4D2 all over: in every game, the world ends a slightly different way. You'll find a different route to take, you'll hear another dud story from Ellis, you'll try a different weapon combination, or a different tactic in the finale.

It should even make single-player more bearable, although we still aren't going to recommend it. L4D2's genius lies in the multiplayer, and to play it solo is to miss the reason why it's so good.

It does leave you wanting more, and wondering why tricks in some campaigns aren't used in others. The weather effects and the Director's ability to rearrange certain levels are the most obvious candidates; they're the sort of thing you wish was present in every campaign, and we suspect that the only reason they're not is because they'll pop up as DLC.

But that's a small complaint; in all other respects this is a bigger, deeper, endlessly thrilling exercise in survival. The first Left 4 Dead proved a handful of campaigns could provide months of replay value; the extra variety this brings should last years. It's up there with MW2 as a must-buy multiplayer game for Xbox Live.

Jon Hicks

Overview

Verdict

An absolutely superb multiplayer experience

Uppers

Excellent set-pieces

Genuine variety

Endlessly replayable

Ellis is great, probably

Downers

Still want more campaigns

Screens

Interactive

Read all 8 comments

Screens

1 / 6 Screenshots

Reviews:

Left 4 Dead 2

Previews:

Left 4 Dead 2: The Passing

Left 4 Dead 2

News:

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