PC Game Fun Time

I’ve been playing around with the Left 4 Dead demo this past week, and I’ve finally reached a conclusion on it: I think I’ll be passing on buying the game. Grokmoo feels much the same way, and we’re pretty much in agreement as to why:

First of all, I feel kind of misled by Left 4 Dead. I went into it expecting a zombie game (which admittedly might just have been me not paying careful attention), but what I got was an infection game. Thus, instead of slow-moving, hard-to-kill cannibalistic reanimated corpses to tango with, you get “infected” people running at you abnormally quickly who go down if you so much as glance them with a round. Maybe that last part is a result of the difficulty level scaling, which seems to cut back on enemy health as well as enemy numbers. But my final take on this matter is that zombies should not run because it goes against all of their history.

Ignoring what I expected the game to be, and just examining the actual game as is, I’m still left unimpressed. I did have a bit of fun playing online, but that was mostly because I teamed up with a Scotsman I met in Team Fortress 2 (thank you, Steam Community feature) who is absolutely hysterical. The weapons aren’t particularly exciting, and ammo is so plentiful that it completely does away with the need for ammo conservation, which is definitely one of the strongest mechanics that games in the survival horror genre have going for them. Not only do the pistols have infinite ammo, but the primary weapons come with such large numbers of rounds (500 for the SMG, 128 for the shotgun) that you rarely even need to worry about swapping down to pistols to save on ammo.

And the weapons are so powerful that it doesn’t feel particularly satisfying killing enemies. You can get headshots, but there isn’t really a reason to bother. Now if we were dealing with the undead in this game, where if you shot off a limb they’d simply keep on coming (albeit a bit more slowly), that’d be a lot more fun, and it would make headshots worthwhile. But as it is you can fire a shotgun blast and pretty much every normal enemy in the cone of fire instantly drops dead, even if they are really far away. The only times enemies pose a threat is when a large number of them come from all sides, or when dealing with one of the game’s several types of special enemies.

Another problem with the game, and this one is really hard to articulate, is that fast-paced combat just sort of feels stuttery, glitchy, and finnicky. I don’t know if the network code isn’t up to par, or I was just frequently connected to lagging servers, or what, but shots didn’t always seem to hit where they should have, enemies were kind of “jumpy” in all the wrong ways, and that oh-so-important FPS “feel” was just imperceptibly off.

The teamwork mechanics are good, especially how everyone can only carry one health pack, so you frequently find groups allocating them on the basis of need. I found myself using health packs on others more often than I did on myself. The one level in the demo is okay, but it gets boring after a couple of play-throughs (granted, this is just a limitation of the demo).

But ultimately, I just wasn’t that impressed with the game, and I didn’t have any interest in purchasing the full game to be able to play more of it. It actually has me longing to go back and play Zombie Panic: Source a bit more, which has the added bonus of being a free mod. Zombie Panic differs from Left 4 Dead in a number of ways, and I find myself preferring Zombie Panic’s take on each one. It has bona fide slow-moving zombies, each of which takes a lot more damage before going down, a really good ammunition conservation system that encourages teamwork, more human players, a slower pace, weapons feel and hit a lot more solidly (with realistic reload times), oh, and the zombies are played by humans as well, and when you die as a human you switch to the zombie team. Awesome.

So I’m regrettably passing on Left 4 Dead, though I’d welcome someone coming along and explaining where I’m wrong.

And I can’t be too unhappy that Left 4 Dead is finally out, because that frees a lot of the team to go back and finish up what they originally working on: new patches for Team Fortress 2. Woohoo!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 7:28 pm by Cyde Weys and is filed under Reviews. Keywords: Tags: demo, FPS, Left 4 Dead, review, Valve. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.