I GOT LEFT 4 DEAD!!

ANDY REVIEWS LEFT 4 DEAD: VALVE'S CO-OP ZOMBIE THRILLER

Amidst the horror of exams (science exam today... yay...), the wait for Left 4 Dead has bean unbarable. Yesterday afternoon I joined in the countdown with 3 hours left til its release... and then at 4:00, after much half-distracted history study, I looked up from my worksheets to find... Left 4 Dead was no longer unreleased!! "100% - Ready," it said in my Steam games list! I pressed launch game, and it took half an hour for Steam to decrupt the files, and then another 5 minutes to update, but 35 minutes of launch I was playing Left 4 Dead, and having the time of my life. Well, maybe not the time of my life, but given the current circumstances (exams) it certainly was an oasis of pleasure and fun... and zombies!

I'll get my thoughts out of the way quickly so I can get to some real news. Well, first of all... IT'S FANTASTIC. Utterly BRILLIANT. It's FANTASTILLIANT. (I made a new word by sticking 2 words together... hehehe). The single player is a low, but it's fun to play just to show off the new tech (the AI Director, new lighting and vignetting effects etc.) The most fun would have to be any of the 4 player co-op modes. I first played through the rest of the demo campaign... which was awesome. I beat it too! Took me 52 minutes, but I beat the first campaign (to put things into retrospective, there are 4 campaigns, designed to be played over and over again in multiplayer, each campaign 5 levels each. So it took me 52 minutes, but without zombies in the way it could have easily been 15.) 

Then I played some Blood Harvest (which is a great campaign set completely outdoors in the woods), and I was having fun until the server dropped me for some odd reason. Anyway, I'm glad it did, because I came back at 9:00, and for a whole hour I played the fantastic VERSUS mode, in which you get to play as... the ZOMBIES THEMSELVES. I'll explain it briefly, and ask that you play it yourself to find how great it is. It takes 1 campaign (in this case, No Mercy), and puts 4 players as survivors... and 4 players as the boss zombies (there are 4 boss zombies to control, the Hunter, the Smoker, the Boomer, and the Tank). Team 1 (as the survivors) need to make it through the level, as usual. Team 2 (as the boss zombies, along with the AI controlled horde) need to cause as much grief as possible. So, this includes RIPPING PEOPLES FLESH OFF AS A HUNTER, or VOMITING ON THEM TO ATTRACT THE HORDE AS BOOMER, or DRAWING THEM IN WITH A LARGE TONGUE THEN AXPHYXIATING THEM AS SMOKER, or BEATING THE CRAP OUT OF THEM AS TANK. But that's not all, little kiddies! The most fun when playing the zombie side is working together. In one instance we played, I pinned down one survivor as a Hunter, then my teammate drew in the survivor attempting to rescue him as a Smoker, and then the last teammate came in as Hunter and killed the 3rd survivor, and then pounced on the 4th. The 4th escaped and killed all of us and the survivors got away with only one dead, but that was fun. 

Unfortunately, the fun often dissolves into fear. Because after 1 level as a zombie, you play through the same level as survivors, the team switched. And every single last person on their team is now aching for revenge, and totally pissed at what you did... and now they're zombies; and it starts again. I give Left 4 Dead my seal of approval, and would rate it 11/10, if only I could learnt to divide by zero. In the meantime, 10/10 will have to do. Go, Metascore! 

Graphics: 10 

Gameplay: 10

Replayability: 11

Zombies on-screen at once: 1000s

Total: 1031 Wow, what a great game to get a score of 1031! Buy it now.