Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is a very intense game.

Adam picked it up, and we played 2-player co-operative split-screen on my projector. It plays out like a standard zombie movie. The scenario we played was “No Mercy” – we had to get to Mercy Hospital, and get to the roof to be rescued by a helicopter.

It’s very much a team game, there are tons of zombies constantly coming from all sides, so you have to cover each other’s backs, and sides, and don’t forget to look up now and then too! It’s 4-player, so the other two characters were bots. They did a good job of keeping up and not being too stupid. Mostly.

The zombies in the game are not the slow, shambling kind, no, they are the running-straight-at-you-at-full-speed kind, like in “28 Days Later”. There are also a few special types: hunters, fast leaping zombies who pin you down; smokers, with a rope-like tongue that can grab you at a distance, called a smoker because when it’s killed, it leaves a noxious cloud of smoke; tanks, giant hulking zombies; boomers, bloated fat zombies who puke noxious goo on you that blinds you and attracts zombies, and if you shoot a boomer it explodes; and witches, strong zombies who just sit there crying until disturbed.

The scenario plays out with chapters, at the end of each chapter the group gets to a safe room and can rest for a bit and resupply. Overall, I think the scenario was about movie-length when we played it, around an hour and a half or two hours.

It ended a lot like a zombie movie, too – the helicopter came to pick us up, and the roof was swarming with zombies. Adam got to the helicopter first, then I got there. One of the bots went down, and the other bot went to help. Then out of nowhere, a smoker’s tongue whipped out and pulled Adam out of the helicopter and back onto the roof, into the horde of zombies. Then I guess the helicopter had been waiting long enough, because before I could free Adam from the smoker, and before the two bots made it back to the helicopter, it took off with only me on board.

Adam and the others were, as the title states “Left 4 Dead”. =)

The game is not so much creepy as it is intense. When zombies attack, they come from all sides, fast, in huge numbers. By the end of the scenario, we had killed around 2500 zombies.