In the weeks after the teaser trailer was revealed, several thousand Left 4 Dead players joined an online boycott of the sequel. This small but significant segment felt a sequel would split the multiplayer community between the old and new titles and that the original game – released in November 2008 – would not get the continued support it deserved from its developer, Valve.
Valve responded to the hostility with assurances that Left 4 Dead 2 was far from a glorified expansion pack sold as a full-sized game. This new material warrants a game of its own, said Valve, just wait and see.
But can the game itself bear out that claim? We got our hands on the Left 4 Dead 2 at E3 and, more recently, in an extended demo to assess the situation.
Four new Survivors replace the heroes of the first game: Nick, a besuited conman; Coach, a school football coach; Ellis, a young mechanic; and Rochelle, a cable news reporter.
Though there’s plenty of fan affection for the Survivors and classic zombie movie feel of the original game, the full change of cast and location is Valve’s effort to expand on the world of Left 4 Dead, to flesh out its apocalyptic vision in a new location.
If Left 4 Dead 2 delivers more of the absorbing, light-touch storytelling that graced the first game – and the early signs are good – then it’s hard to argue with the change of scenery. That scenery comes complete with new weather effects. Valve forecasts storms and though these have not yet been demoed, we have high hopes for nightmarish swampland lashed by rain.
Each of the five campaigns will be playable in the time challenge Survival mode and competitive Versus mode from the outset. Valve has said Left 4 Dead 2 will also introduce a new game mode, to be revealed closer to the release.
The ParishIn the demo, we played through much of the New Orleans campaign, called The Parish and taglined “This Time It All Goes South”.
The concept, unsurprisingly, is exactly the same as that of the original. For Left 4 Dead newcomers: a team of four Survivors (preferably human-controlled, though AI will step in if you don’t have four players) fight their way from saferoom to saferoom through a campaign, battling hordes of Common Infected (regular zombies) and freakish Special Infected (powerful zombies with extra abilities), towards a dramatic set piece finale.
As we emerge from a saferoom into a sunlit courtyard, picking off Common Infected and making our way through to a balcony-lined street, one of the team comes face to face with the Wandering Witch. Not the best start to a chapter.
The ever-terrifying Witch of the first game has been mobilised; she now wanders around in a daze until she stumbles upon you (or vice versa). She is harder to avoid now and it’s a necessary modification, since the daylight levels would rule out the possibility of startling her with an accidental torch wave.
Having survived the Witch, we move into back alleys, then indoors again, then across rooftops. The environments look markedly different to those of Left 4 Dead, here resembling an authentic New Orleans residential district.
To make it from the last rooftop across the street into a half-constructed house, a Mardi Gras float below needs to be towed to form a makeshift bridge. Setting the vehicle in motion, of course, triggers a swarm of Infected. They come rushing across rooftops and pouring out of the half-built house into the street below. Among them is a Charger.
New Infected The Charger is one of the new Special Infected joining those of the original game – the only kind that has been seen so far in the wild. He’s a cousin to the Tank, huge and fast, with an oversized arm for knocking seven bells out of you.
We encountered plenty of these Chargers through the level, though their prevalence was surely due to the absence of the other, yet-to-be-revealed, Special Infected.
Valve also promises other new kinds of Infected, besides the common-or-garden zombie, with special abilities or gear. In our game we saw a hazmat-suit-wearing zombie, who is fireproof and so resistant to Molotovs and incendiary ammo – a limited stack of ammunition for any weapon that ignites whatever it hits and can be picked up along the way in the new game.
As we nip through a kitchen, one Survivor grabs a hefty frying pan from a stovetop. The frying pan (which makes a glorious, ringing “fwapang!” sound) is one of Left 4 Dead 2’s all-new melee weapons, which also include the axe, the cricket bat and, star of the E3 trailer, the chainsaw. These are powerful but temporary weapons that are automatically dropped, in our case, when the player gets lassoed by a Smoker’s tongue.
More gore The animations of the sprinting Infected have been improved, making them more eerily real than ever. The gore system has been likewise upgraded – zombies now take damage more accurately and to the extreme. At one point a pipe bomb blast sheared off the head and upper right body of a Common Infected, blasting it into a heap at our feet, ribs exposed.
We find an incendiary ammo stack on a shelf here, a regular ammo stash in an alley there. Health items seem plentiful; we are told that more of these are added to the environment than in the previous game, especially in Versus mode, to create points for Infected-controlling players to focus attacks on
Gauntlet moments Some of the tweaks to level design in Left 4 Dead 2 are intended encourage a new style of play.
We came up against one of thse - a gauntlet finale - in the final chapter of The Parish campaign. These replace the more static, defensive scenarios of the original game – where the Survivors would hole up in a church, for example, and defend themselves in a certain location for a set period.
At E3, writer and project lead Chet Faliszek explained that such tweaks were meant to improve the previous game, where the most effective way to play was not always the most exciting.
The bridge The last chapter of the campaign takes place on a partially-destroyed bridge, with large chunks missing, collapsed or tilting crazily. It’s fun watching hordes of zombies fall down holes in the bridge as they charge for you, but there’s not much time to smirk.
Players are forced to keep moving, keep pushing ahead to make progress towards the rescue vehicle on the other side, being corralled through narrow channels between abandoned vehicles, hopping onto cars and lorries for a better view ahead.
Jet fighters, as seen in the teaser trailer, zoom overhead as we battle our way across the bridge, occasional respites are thrown up by ammo stashes and first aid in the back of lorries, plus a heavy machine gun mounted in the back of a flatbed truck.
It’s a gruelling, grinding experience to come at the end of a campaign, one that’s brought to a bitter end as the last Survivor standing reaches the end of the bridge only to be demolished by a Tank.
There’s no time for another try, joypads must be surrendered, so we have to count our attempt as a failure. (It’s not clear what difficulty level the demos were set to, but we couldn’t spot another group at the preview event completing the bridge finale.)
On what we’ve seen so far, we predict Left 4 Dead 2 – with more variety, new weapons and Infected, plus all-new campaigns – will win over all but the most die-hard of boycotters. Given the continued quality of Valve’s offering, which is clearly in evidence, it’s impossible to qualify more Left 4 Dead as anything other than a very good thing.
Left 4 Dead is out on PC and Xbox 360 on November 17.
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