Thoughts About Left 4 Dead 2

It’s hard for me to fully appreciate Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2). The game was clearly built for a four player cooperative experience across Xbox Live, and I usually prefer to be as anti-social as possible by playing through games strictly in the single player mode, so I know that I missed out on much the game has to offer. However, even taking on the zombie hoards of the Apocalypse by myself, I really enjoyed the game.

L4D2, by many accounts, is a super simple game concept. The concept, plainly stated, is this: take four people, place them in the middle of the zombie Apocalypse, have them get from point A to point B alive. That’s it. What makes the game so fun is the environment that these actions take place. No body wants to fend off the un-dead running through a parking-lot, or an open field, but place me in the middle of a shopping mall, corn field, carnival, or high rise bridge… now this is classic zombie culture fodder.

The game itself looks great, the controls are tight, and even when replaying certainly levels it doesn’t lose any of it’s unique appeal. My only complaint with the game would have to be with the difficulty. I wanted to play on the “normal” difficulty, but my computer controlled teammates seemed to only want to attack with the ferocity of stuffed kittens, making “normal” too difficult. When I changed the difficulty to easy, the game became way to easy. Literally to the point when some zombies seems to be just standing there, waiting for their turn to be shot. I can’t completely hold this unbalance against L4D2, — this is clearly meant to be a multi-player game — but it would be nice if there was a “single player” difficulty setting. I think I would have enjoyed it more.

L4D2 even takes steps to make a good game ever better by giving away Avatar awards when you accomplish certain feats. My avatar got a cool zombie T-shirt. This type of service is geeky-crack to a gamer like me.

It took me about 14 hours to play through all L4D2 had to offer, and this included playing through multiple level multiple times, and I really enjoyed it. My final score will be a solid 8.5/10.

Teamwork would have been key