Left 4 Dead: A review

December 23, 2:34 PMConsole Game ExaminerRussell Bradburn

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I don't really know what it is about them, but everyone loves a good zombie movie. We all know how it happens: some virus breaks out, or someone messes with a mystical amulet, or desecrates an indian burial ground, and suddenly waves of the hungry dead rise up to devour their unsuspecting descendants. This situation forces a small group of desperate survivors to hole up in some remote location, slowly going mad from cabin fever and increasing group tension while the population of the entire tri-county area stands right outside, meaningfully rubbing their bellies and pressing themselves against windows and doors that begin, slowly but surely, to crack under their vast weight. It's a great story, and seems to be getting more popular lately, as the success of movies like 28 Days Later and books like World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide will attest. Why, there's even a zombie survival board game! Makes sense that the gaming industry would want in on this, doesn't it? Enter Left 4 Dead, a new multiplayer first person shooter game from Valve, the makers of the hugely popular and critically acclaimed Half-Life series.

Left 4 Dead casts you as one of 4 classical zombie movie archetypes; the grizzled Vietnam vet, the regular guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, the tough guy who will inevitably snap and kill someone around the middle of the film, and the obligatory nubile college student. The object of the game is to guide your intrepid little group from a barricaded "safe room" on one side of each map to another on the other side, with the eventual goal of reaching an evacuation point and escaping. The action in the game is intense, with tens and sometimes hundreds of fast moving zombies coming at you from all sides. This can be quite intimidating, and in the thick of things it is sometimes impossible to tell the difference between the filthy, grey-tinged hordes and your filthy, grey-tinged teammates. This will lead to friendly fire incidents, which can be quite irritating when you're playing online with other people. Which brings me to my next point, this is a game to play with friends. Teamwork is an absolute necessity, and if your going to wander off on your own or ignore the injuries of teammmates, you may as well coat your body in worcestershire sauce and shove an apple into your mouth. Multiplayer games can be a mixed bag quality wise, and the people you play with can mean the difference between having an absolute blast and being left to bleed out onto the cold, hard pavement by a gibbering gaggle of thick-witted twelve year olds whose entire concept of a multiplayer game is to run around screaming incoherent racial slurs and shooting each other in the back. So, join random games at your own risk. Make sure you play with buddies.But Russell, you're asking me, what if I don't have Xbox Live? Well, the game gives you the option of playing the multiplayer maps offline with friends in a split-screen mode, which may actually be your best bet sometimes, given my previous remarks about random online games. One last thing I wanted to talk about is that the game has no single player story campaign. Your only option as a single player is to go through the multiplayer maps with "Bots" (teammates controlled by the computer), which is not half as fun as playing with other people, (unruly tweens notwithstanding) especially as there are only 4 or 5 maps to choose from. I assume there'll be a few more released over the Internet, though.