Kry Reviews: Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead was released 11/18/08 to critical acclaim. It continues Valve’s benchmark for top notch quality FPS games, but it does have a few problems that need addressing.

Let me start with addressing all that is good with Left 4 Dead, which is a lot. I absolutely loved the art style within Left 4 Dead; the grainy horror movie look really works well for the game. I’ve heard some complaints that the story in L4D’s too simple. I disagree, the simple story is sufficient for the atmosphere they are trying to set.

The co-op play is a blast, especially with 3 buddies (although the friendly AI isn’t bad). It’s great fun mowing down hordes of zombies, and your group really has to keep their wits about them. Your group gets separated and it isn’t long before you get gibbed. Also, the expert difficulty is seriously hard, and a tough goal to work towards for more dedicated zombie hunters.

Versus Mode is also great fun, and probably is the reason most people continue playing L4D once they beat the campaigns. Playing as a zombie is neat, however if the survivors are organized playing infected really requires supreme coordination. It has a few problems though. Only 2 of 4 maps are available for it, so the locales get stale very quickly. Also, Versus Mode also had a serious luck factor with the timing on tank spawning, which I believe was normalized with the recent patch. Although I saw nothing in the notes about having your tank randomly die (It’s happened to me a lot). Very frustrating, but I haven’t been online to test it for an even more annoying reason.

The server selecting system is Left 4 Dead’s biggest flaw, and a serious turn off. When you start a game you have the option of selecting a third-party dedicated server or hosting it yourself. I don’t want to run it off my machine so I choose a dedicated server to host my games. Night after night I’ll get stuck with laggy, high-ping servers (once even in Germany, serious WTF there), bugged servers, or I’ll just get dropped by them midgame. This makes me irate and has on more than one night ended my gaming early. Valve needs to implement a way to select servers or get better hosts because these server problems are killing the game for me. I doubt I will play L4D much more until I see some news about this.

Left 4 Dead is a good game overall. The first few nights playing it for me were just awesome. The server problems are very noticeable, almost immediately depending on your luck. Bottom line about L4D is this: If you have the patience to keep remaking games when you land on bad servers, you’ll have fun if/when you get into a good game.