Valve’s latest hit since the contents of last year’s Orange Box is an online shooter for the PC and Xbox 360 that puts players in teams of four as they try to escape from frighteningly large hordes of zombies in various stock horror film scenarios.
Not only does Left 4 Dead stylishly ape everything about zombie movies, but it uses innovative design to keep its horror dynamic and captures a certain human sensibility that most multiplayer experiences lack.
Valve Offers a uniquely Cooperative Experience
Most cooperative games are about two or more people jointly destroying their obstacles in a way resembling a buddy action flick. Left 4 Dead, true to the genre it pays tribute to, is a game about four people – shockingly vulnerable alone, who huddle together in the hope of survival against totally unpredictable dangers.
Most action games shock and enthrall players with scripted set pieces and monster closets – things that can be memorized and thus become less exciting as players repeat games. Valve sidesteps that trap entirely with what they call the AI director that paces when and in what numbers enemies appear in Left 4 Dead according to a team’s performance. It works wonderfully.
No two games on the same level of Left 4 Dead are the same. Most of the time players will slog through modest numbers of zombies, but much of the time just when a team begins to gain hope that they might make it, Left 4 Dead opens the floodgates in a way that’s just astonishing. Players are already joking that the AI director isn’t a program but a real person at Valve sadistically ruining their games.
When this happens, teams must be especially coordinative because among Left 4 Dead’s throngs of zombies are special enemies that can pounce on, capture, or draw hordes of zombies to isolated players who are then helpless until a friend comes to the rescue. This constant need for assistance keeps teams close together and ever-watchful.
In versus mode where a second team of four plays as the special zombies, the focus changes to coordinating efforts to isolate the other team’s players.
This level of cohesion between players and the tone of the circumstance that brings them together is what makes Left 4 Dead the unique cooperative experience it is. That tone – true to an element of the film genre that Left 4 Dead devotes itself to, is assisted by a presentation that further honors horror trope, and smartly so.
Valve’s Interactive Tribute to B-Movie Horror
From the narrative to the way sessions are presented to the very gameplay itself, Left 4 Dead emulates cheesy horror films at every level of its design.
Each of the game’s campaigns is actually presented as a b-movie, complete with a poster depicting a cheesy tagline and each player’s username listed as an actor. Even the “credits” are actually just player stats and memorandums for team members who died.
Each of Left 4 Dead’s campaigns is set in a series classic horror locations stopping just short of a mall (which someone is already working on as a third party modification for the PC version) and filled well-written narrative and dialogue that escapes the cheesiness that most game narrative suffers from.
Left 4 Dead’s only shortcoming is in its visuals. Despite its major improvements since last year’s Half-Life 2 Episode Two, Valve’s Source Engine which it has used since 2004’s Half-Life 2, no longer quite stacks up to the standards of other contemporary games.
Bottom Line
Offering a cooperative experience that is both unique and true to its themes, Left 4 Dead is a game that gets players to stick together like no other in an environment that’s never safe and never predictable.
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