Ladies and gentleman, after years and years of continually advancing technology and game development you’d think we were getting to the end of our potential as humans.  Then, every once in a blue moon, along comes something that either creates or redefines a genre.  Well, here it is.  Don’t believe me?  Ok, let’s talk about the zombie survival horror games.  What can we expect?

1. Zombies… generally speaking they’re slow, gross, less than intelligent, and insatiably hungry for braaaiiinns (yet they never seem to attack each other for this delicacy)
2. Horror… every new room or level gets creepier.   The game developers go out of their way to provide ever increasing surprises which invariably leads to the ultimate boss fight, which of course is the mother of all horrors and has more teeth than a school of great white sharks.
3. Survival… run run just as fast as you can.  Usually in this genre you are provided all sorts of fun new types of weaponry.  It’s you against a never ending onslaught of nasty ghouls highlighted with gory kills.

These 3 simple ingredients have been the recipe for many games from about as far back as gamers can remember.  What iteration of Resident Evil are we on now, 27642?  The zombie game has stayed the same, minus a few tweaks, for decades.  Then along comes Left4Dead, which i immediately dismissed as yet another clone.  Who cares, been there done that… zombie ate the shirt.  Then, pretty much on a dare, i figured I’d waste a few hours finding out how much i was bored with it and move on.

At first glance you know immediately the Left4Dead is a zombie game.  There’s a cinematic opening that causes instant pucker factor, and if you’re not a fan of zombies in generally will make you second guess whether or not you really want to play this game.  Assuming you decide to continue you are faced with a choice of four characters you can play as.  You hit the start button and are immediately hit with another twist you probably didn’t expect.  You’re playing a movie.  That’s right… this game isn’t split up in to levels of a campaign, it’s four different movies that you play though.  Each movie has scenes, which are basically checkpoints. Character is selected, movie is loaded, game starts.  This is where the similarities both begin and end.

Not surprisingly, there are zombies in Left4Dead.  And of course a zombie wouldn’t be a zombie if it weren’t gross and really wanted to eat your brains.  The difference is that these zombies are neither stupid nor slow.  Ok, so they aren’t necessarily MENSA candidates, but they are observant.  Generally they hang around moaning and throwing up, but once they notice you it’s ON.  The more light and or noise you create the more they take notice of you.  And then, just to throw a wrinkle in to it, they seem to know when you’re most vulnerable and will attach en mass and try to wipe you from the face of the earth (more on that later).   The enemy AI is so well tuned that the normal trigger points of a game are gone.  You know what I’m talking about.  When you reach point X enemy Y and Z will come around the corner looking for a fight.  That’s all gone.  If you get half way through a scene and die you’ll be returned to the beginning of the scene.  As you go through it a second time it’s totally different than the first play through.  Different number of enemies, different types, different strategy.  It’s one of the most complex enemy AI systems i recall playing against.  If the game thinks it can get you, it will attack.  Which leads to another difference.  These zombies attack at full speed.  Full speed RUN.

After playing for a bit you start to pick up on the next important difference.  Most zombie games get progressively more difficult, leading to a series of boss fights.  That’s not the way this game works.  There are zombies (the grunts of the L4D world), and then there are five types of “specials”.  Five different types of particularly difficult variants that attack at the most opportune moments to create the biggest impact, both in the story line and your heart rate.  So while there’s no true boss fight in any of the four movies, you’re continually fighting mini (and not so mini) bosses through out the entire movie.  And instead of leading to the ultimate boss fight at the end, you get to go through what’s affectionately referred to as “The Last Stand”.  Wave after wave after wave of zombies of every flavor while you try to defend a small patch of land and a rescue vehicle makes it’s way toward you.   I can tell you, it’s more intense than most boss battles that I’ve dealt with.

Finally, the biggest difference of the all.  Survival.  Most of these types of games pit you and maybe one AI sidekick against a swarm of zombies.  What’s a guy to do but whip out his gravity gun and start slinging blades into the crowd?  Well, this game is totally different.  Firstly, there are no special weapons.  Shotgun, SMG, Hunting (Sniper) Rifle, Assault Rifle… that’s it.  You will always have your trusty pistol(s) with their never ending ammo supply, but the big weapons are limited in their choice as well as ammo supply.  But the true difference, and the one that redefines this genre as well as possibly creating it’s own, is that you are not alone.  It’s you and three others wading through the corpses, trying to find safety.  More importantly, it’s not necessarily three NPC’s.  The truly compelling part of the game is when you have three real life, human, xbox360 connected friends to play with.  Now suddenly it’s not a phony character on the screen being stupid. It’s your brother across the country, or your friend from high school, being stupid.  Now you WANT to see them survive.  Now when they are in trouble you feel compelled to help them,  and not solely because you know you may need help later.  This is the part of the game that truly grabs you and brings you back for more.  You can play it alone (with friendly AI), but then it lacks something.  The true appeal of this game lies in the idea of going up against impossible odds with someone you are at least vaguely familiar with and surviving.

So, how does this game rate?  Left4Dead is a highly compelling and interesting game mostly due to the online cooperative play.  Make no mistake, this game was designed from square one to be played over XBoxLive with three friends.  There is a multiplayer (adversarial) option that is fairly cool and works very well when you have more than three friends online.  But no matter how you do it, this game is meant to be shared.   The graphics are great, though a bit disturbing at times, and the controls are tight.  The action is incredibly intense and high paced.  On the negative side of the ledger, there’s only 4 maps.  Each map can be gotten through in about an hour and a half on the normal difficulty level.   All told that is six hours of gaming, but when you add in the multiplayer, and major differnces in the difficulty levels, you suddenly don’t mind playing the same maps repeatadly.  Don’t get me wrong, i REALLY hope they bring out more maps soon, but the lack of maps hasn’t stopped me from playing the game over and over again.

If this sounds good to you:  Buy it now or Trade for it on Goozex

–David Hayes