TAG Game Nights
No current events.
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Written by Larry Marcum
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Sunday, December 07 2008 23:54 |
 You know, I think people may be overplaying this “zombie apocalypse” thing. I’ve had so much fun with it over the years, I no longer fear it. And if things ever get out of hand, there’s always the power button. So really, why is everyone getting so worked up about our impending doom?
If you’ve ever played a game featuring zombies, you know how loving the undead can be. OK, maybe “loving” is going a bit overboard. Still, you get my point. Killing zombies, the activity which typically takes place in a video game, can be loads of fun. And frankly, the folks at Valve are not ones to break that tradition.
Enter Left 4 Dead, Valve’s latest masterpiece. Really, did you expect anything less? In fact, Valve’s reputation has to be reaching critical mass at this point, creating astronomic expectations for their games that simply cannot be met. Luckily, those “disappointing” games have yet to reach our store shelves. Left 4 Dead is, in fact, a fantastic game, and it simply furthers the evidence that Valve deserves its heightened reputation.
That whimpering you hear is the Witch. Turn off your flashlights, or she might jump at you. Get it?
Let’s start off with the teensy weensy story of Left 4 Dead. Basically, you play as one of four uninfected survivors in a zombie-infested metropolis. As you can most likely infer from the game’s title, you have been, quite literally, left for dead. The city has been abandoned, and you’re left to fend for yourselves.
The campaign itself is set up a bit differently than your typical narrative-driven game. Rather than delivering a multi-stage campaign that drives home a central story, Left 4 Dead is split into four separate scenarios, each in a different environment. There is no central narrative, aside from the attempted survival of four characters.
Generally speaking, each campaign is similar to its relatives in its form. The larger experience is broken down into smaller chapters. Each chapter begins and ends with a safe room, a place where the scary zombies can’t get to you, and you can refill on ammo and health packs. Trust me when I say that, sometimes, that big red door is your best friend in this entire world. Between each safe room, you’ll defend yourself against the zombie horde, desperately trying to stay alive until you reach your “happy place.” At the end of each campaign, you must wait for extraction. It turns out you weren’t entirely abandoned after all. You call for help, then bunker down and start your own zombie massacre until your exit strategy comes to fruition.
You can play through each of the campaigns in three different ways. First, if you don’t have any friends, or if your dog chewed up your Ethernet cable, you can play by yourself. In this case, your three survivor allies will be controlled by the computer. Surprisingly, these AI teammates are actually fairly capable. They’ll always stay together, so you’ll never have to deal with the lone wolf who thinks he can handle the apocalypse by himself. Also, they’ll never hesitate to use their own health packs and pain pills to heal you up, so you can always mooch off your buddies if you need to. Best of all, they are very accurate with their weapons, meaning you can hide in a corner and let them deal with the baddies, should you prefer. And their mastery of the trigger means they’ll never “accidentally” shoot you in the back when you’re not looking (ahem, Jay).
Or, if you would like to have a scapegoat for our team’s failure, you can always play with your friends online. Now, the other three survivors will be controlled by living, breathing, zombie-killing piles of flesh and bone. The game plays exactly the same as if you were by yourself. The only differences will lie with the teamwork and unselfishness of your pals.
The third option is a bit different. Here, rather than four teammates playing through a campaign, up to eight players can hop online together. In this case, the players will be split into two teams, and these teams will take turns playing through a campaign, chapter by chapter. Best of all, while one team is playing as the survivors, the other team will play as the infected. They will randomly spawn as one of four “boss” infected characters: the Smoker, which uses its long tongue to snag and strangle the survivors, the Hunter, which pounces on the survivors and pins them to the ground before slashing at their chest, the Boomer, which can shoot bile onto the survivors, thereby triggering an attack by all the other zombies, and the Tank, which can rip up pieces of the ground and throw them at the survivors, along with knocking them to the ground and pounding away at them. The goal in this mode, called Versus, is to outscore the other team. Points are awarded based on how far your team progresses, the players’ levels of health at the end of the chapter, and how many players are able to make it into the safe room. After playing through an entire campaign, a winner is crowned.
The Versus mode in Left 4 Dead is an intriguing departure from standard competitive multiplayer game modes. Indeed, playing as the infected definitely takes some getting used to, as the frequency of death is a drastic change from life as a survivor. But once players get the feel for attacking the uninfected and begin working as a team, the Versus mode quickly turns from quirky adaptation to disturbing addiction. I must say, it’s very satisfying to be rewarded for vomiting on an opponent.
Left 4 Dead is, at its very core, a first-person shooter set in a zombie-infested world. But to simply view this game as an everyday shooter would be an enormous disservice to the title. The developers and publishers of the world love to throw around the phrase “never the same experience twice.” Heck, even writers are guilty of giving in to this cliché on occasion. Unfortunately, there’s really no other way to describe the experience of Left 4 Dead.
The key here is the Director, a system of dynamic AI. In Left 4 Dead, the game will adjust the difficulty as you play. Sure, there are four difficulty settings for the campaigns, but they simply toggle the overall strength of the survivors and the infected. During gameplay, the difficulty is constantly changing. The game is always evaluating your play, determining whether the game is too easy or challenging at any given time. If it feels the difficulty is not tuned correctly for your ability level, it will adjust it accordingly.
The result is, quite literally, an experience that is never the same twice. Sure, the levels will be laid out identically, but your enemies will not. On one play-through, you may encounter a group of 40 zombies at a gas station. The next time you play, you may only run into 6 or 7. During one session, you may be forced to fight off a witch in a subway system. The next time you play that same scenario, the witch may not appear until 30 minutes later in the campaign, or she may not even appear at all. You simply cannot memorize the enemy patterns of these levels, because they are constantly changing. You may be able to play through an entire campaign without using a single health pack or bottle of pain pills, but that doesn’t mean you’ll survive the next time you throw the game into your disc drive.
As always, Valve has gone to great lengths to produce a visual masterpiece. Even on the Xbox 360 hardware, Left 4 Dead managers to run extremely smoothly, no matter the number of zombies on screen. To be honest, that’s a little bit surprising. It’s not unreasonable to expect a little bit of slow-down when there are literally 60 or 70 enemies on screen at once, but that simply never happens. On top of that, the zombie animations are very impressive. It really feels like you’re being swarmed by enemies whose only motivation is… well… braaaaaains. Even the environments look fantastic, with everything from alarm clocks to soda bottles scattered around each area. There’s a real sense of “home” in this abandoned game world. I suppose that’s likely the goal here, making the scenarios believable and, in turn, that much more disturbing.
All multiplayer games, whether competitive or cooperative, are run on dedicated servers, so performance hiccups are exceedingly rare. In fact, the only “what the hell” moment I ever encountered occurred while exiting an elevator, when my character glitched into the floor for a split second before returning to the action.
The biggest drawback to Left 4 Dead seems to be its brevity. I’d be lying if I said that four campaigns felt like enough. But in this case, my greed does not exist because I feel unsatisfied by the campaigns included in the game. Rather, the game is simply so much fun that I want more. Sure, four campaigns, each clocking in at around one hour of gameplay, doesn’t seem like much. But if you’re only going to play through each mission once, then you’re sorely missing out on what Left 4 Dead has to offer. The real joy comes from playing online with your friends, experiencing the rush of fighting off the zombie horde as you wait for your chopper to arrive.
I should mention that, unlike most console shooters, Left 4 Dead moves at an extremely fast pace. If you’ve familiarized yourself with shooters on the PC, you’ll be more than comfortable here. But if you’ve become accustomed to the worlds of Halo and Gears of War, then Left 4 Dead will require some adjustments on our part. It may seem like a strange choice for Valve to maintain the PC-esque pace in a console shooter, especially given the inadequacies of a controller, but I’m here to tell you it was the right choice. After all, if you’re being swarmed by zombies, don’t you want it to feel like you’re literally being swarmed? If the game slowed down, the zombies would slow down. And if the zombies slowed down, this game simply wouldn’t be as entertaining and exciting.
I’ve said this before in private, but now I’m ready to say it publicly: Valve’s mastery of the Director is going to revolutionize the way the industry thinks about AI. It’s not just going to be about pathfinding and random spawning anymore. No, in the future, this concept will be pushed even further. Eventually, games won’t even have difficulty options for us to choose. Everything will be chosen automatically. Sorry, achievement junkies. You won’t be able to blast through a game on Easy just to raise your gamerscore a bit.
Yet again, Valve has managed to produce a game that will likely permanently reside in the disc drives of millions of gamers. A constantly changing experience, coupled with an addicting Versus mode and incredibly immersive environments, has provided plenty of reason for players to spend countless hours in front of their TVs this holiday season. And if Valve’s track record is worth anything, we can expect a plethora of downloadable content for Left 4 Dead in the future. If you like shooters, you need to play this game. If you like zombies, you can’t pass this one up. Heck, if you own an Xbox 360, go buy this game. It’s an experience that isn’t likely to come around again for some time.
Final Score: A
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