Vital Stats

Genre: FPS
Players: 1-8
Online: 4 player co-op; 8 player vs.

Developer: Valve Software
Publisher: Electronic Arts/Valve Software
ESRB Rating: M
Release Date: 11/17/08

Platforms

• Xbox 360
• PC

Left 4 Dead is more exciting on paper than it is in practice, but the actual game is undiminished for it. It promises an endlessly replayable cooperative multiplayer experience with roguelike procedurally generated content and delivers a brief, intense, FPS game that stays intense even as you become familiar with it. Perhaps not exactly as advertised, but good stuff nonetheless.

The Dead Hate the Living
Zombies have almost universally been relegated to survival horror. With the possible exception of Doom 3, the walking dead haven’t been so much cursed with a mockery of life as saddled with games where the controls make everything unplayable. It’s no surprise either–sure the grim visage of your shambling rotten loved ones is a little unnerving at first, but the liberal application of the common shotgun makes their inexorable advance rather less inexorable. Heck, with the exception of a few master storytellers working with the player for at least 20 hours, most games don’t even have that initial psychological connection to exploit. So what choice do designers have to keep zombies a shambling menace instead of a shambling mince?

Fast zombies. The answer is fast zombies. Reminiscent of the rage zombies from 28 Days Later, the sprinting dead may lack the psychological horror of being eaten alive by people you knew, but they make up for it with limitless numbers and an uncanny knack for reaching you before you even have your trusty shotgun in hand. At that point, you can make use of standard FPS controls, and the zombies still represent enough of a threat to keep the game compelling.

So gameplay in Left 4 Dead consists of guiding four horror archetypes (Tough Guy, Spunky Girl, Black Guy, and Grizzled Veteran) as they cut their way through the uncharacteristically sprightly dead in a bid for escape. The gameplay is spread across four one-hour horror vignettes, each couched as a separate zombie film. It sounds a bit like survival horror, but the pacing and emphasis on frenetic action place it soundly in the FPS genre.

Night of the Living AI
The banner feature in Left 4 Dead has to be the AI director. The basic idea is that each movie has a director calling the shots for the moment-to-moment details. The AI picks the location of each zombie, when the horde will gang up on the party, when they find vital supplies, and some of the minor details about the world. When there’s a lull, the director adds zombies to keep things interesting, and when the players are on the verge of death, it eases back a bit. Everything is done in the service of keeping the players on the cusp of death without necessarily killing them right away, and for the most part it works.

There has been a lot of talk about how, despite the game’s relative brevity (four hours), the replayability granted by the director offers a roguelike appeal. In practice it does and it doesn’t. At the micro level, that is the moment to moment decisions you make to handle the latest emergency, it absolutely does. If you’re punted off a roof by knockback, having the AI director means you don’t really know what will be waiting for you when you land. Even simpler, there’s just no way to know what’s waiting around the next corner, so the unpredictability keeps you tense and vigilant even after you’ve played through a movie several times.

That said, this remixing does nothing to alter the game’s assets. You may not know exactly what lurks around the next corner, but it’s definitely the same corner you peered around last time. The director can place some minor environmental features (propane tanks are particularly relevant), but it’s a far cry from infinitely explorable roguelikes a la Nethack. There’s only six types of zombies too, so there’s really only so many permutations you can see before you’re presented with the same macro level tactical scenarios. The take home message is that the unpredictability in Left 4 Dead keeps the gameplay intense, but doesn’t do much to keep it fresh.

Loving the Ones You Hurt
The AI director is an interesting exercise in game design, but it’s much easier to recommend Left 4 Dead‘s multiplayer features. The short version is that the game does everything it can to keep you playing (with a few minor omissions).

Probably the biggest contributor is the character AI. Multiplayer veterans will know that holding four players for a playthrough is…not always feasible. Friends back out on plans, online players drop out randomly, and even when everything goes well, the network connection can flake out. In the best of cases, you’re just out a player, but less graceful multiplayer games will outright end your game.

That’s why Left 4 Dead‘s AI handling is such a revelation. Any time a player disconnects for any reason, an AI player is instantly assigned to pick up control of the corresponding character. If you’re playing a public game, the matchmaking system will plug in a new player (again, seamlessly) when one becomes available. The same thing happens if a player idles for a minute or so, though in that case they stay logged in and can pick the controller back up at any time. Left 4 Dead is pick-up-and-play like no other cooperative FPS because Valve has removed the barriers to access.

The AI players are good, too. In addition to simply being good at fighting off zombie hordes, they’re uncommonly adept at avoiding your line of fire and saving you when you find yourself in trouble. It could be argued that they’re preternaturally good, seeing zombies through impenetrable foliage and beating human players to the punch (making it that much harder to earn achievements), but when the horde is thick around you you’ll be glad of competent support.

All this work toward accessibility seems a little out of place, though. It doesn’t really matter how many barriers to entry you remove to make Left 4 Dead accessible to players with limited gaming time, the reality is that casual gamers will be driven off by the bitter difficulty curve and the overwhelmingly complex FPS controls.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with the control scheme; for console FPS controls, the 360 scheme is tight and precise. That said, casual gamers can expect the same initial investment in learning the controls as from any other FPS. The difficulty curve is a bit more remarkable as, even on the easiest setting, the later parts of a movie are a bloodbath. Health is scarce, the path is not always obvious, and zombies are plentiful and relentless. If you’re frustrated by being rent limb from limb, this might not be the game for you.

That said, Left 4 Dead takes much of the sting from death by leaning on the zombie movie metaphor. Instead of immediately killing a player who runs out of health, the player is incapacitated. Incapacitated players can continue shooting from the place they fell and can even be revived so long as it happens before they bleed out. However, you’re only granted a handful of incapacitations before guaranteed death, and the zombies who brought you down in the first place will happily hasten the bleeding process, so your good health still matters.

Even if the zombies do manage to bring you down, it’s not Game Over. So long as one other human is up and fighting, they’ll find your character locked in a closet some ways down the road. As soon as they unlock the door for you, you’re back in action and mowing down the hordes.

These aren’t the only gameplay features that keep the game moving—survivor halos, the game’s unobtrusive tutorial, and subtler design incentives like increased accuracy while crouching merit more discussion than can be accommodated here. However all the features combine together into a focused and elegant effort to keep everyone engaged in the multiplayer outing, making the play intensely engaging for the game’s short duration. There’s still not enough to bait casual players into flirting with the FPS genre, but the polished design and implementation should be attractive to the hardcore and genre fans. That said, the multiplayer features are the game’s strongest offering and should be focal in determining whether you’d like to play it.

This philosophy falters a bit in the online competitive play, where one team plays as normal through each chapter and the other team plays as powerful zombies in the horde to wipe the humans out. Playing the zombie side means taking control of the relatively fragile zombies and chipping away at the humans before expiring and respawning. There’s a relatively long lull between respawns, though, and survival is mercilessly brief, so there’s a lot more waiting around done when playing for the other side. It’s a relatively minor quibble, but it’s thrown into sharp relief after spending any significant time playing as the human survivors

Grainy 35 mm
Gameplay isn’t everything, though, and Left 4 Dead should please fans of classic zombie films. The playable roster alone (mostly young, white, and male, but just enough diversity to pose) just screams B-grade horror.

The whole game comes off as deliciously camp. The zombies are obviously disease-spawned, from the necrotic flesh to their proclivity for randomly vomiting. Until they notice you, they lurch around in classic Romero fashion, and afterwards they behave like typical Rage Zombies.

The atmosphere is spot on as well. As you flee from graveyard to church to cornfield, all the intact structures look mostly fine, if a bit darker and grubbier from disuse. Of course, everything else has been destroyed as vehicles crashed, fires broke out, and desperate survivors jury-rigged anything they could to protect themselves. The environment and grafitti tells a story all by itself, and it’s all the more poignant because the characters take it as a matter of course.

Scenic vistas and scripted lulls in the violence are usually accompanied by some character commentary, which represents the lion’s share of the narrative. Not much can be delivered in these 15 second discussions, but saying there’s no plot beyond “survive the zombie holocaust” does a disservice to the game’s excellent storytelling. The brief clips add an action/horror accent to the real story (your moment-to-moment survival), and they stick to tropes that make the narrative feel right. It’s not perfect—the voices are sometimes too faint, and Louis in particular vacillates between humorous send-up and annoying African American stereotype, but the balance is good in the end.

The music, dynamically generated from clips and bridges to match the AI director’s decisions, is full of the overzealous piano and keening feminine vibrado you’d expect from a B-horror budget. It’s shrill, annoying, and pretty much spot on. Better still, the musical cues are faithful to the conventions of cinema and give advance warning of impending zombie activity.

Pretty much all of the art direction works harmoniously, although it is occasionally marred by clipping glitches. Regardless, the story, music, and art in the game all serve the gameplay goal of maximizing immersion inside the boundaries of fast gameplay pacing.

Postmortem
Left 4 Dead is more interesting as an exercise in armchair design than it is as a playable game, but the exercise does ultimately improve the gameplay. The unpredictable events that change with each playthrough grant a perennial intensity to the game, but the game is more notable for its incredible multiplayer friendliness. Unfortunately, most of the improvements the game offers over workaday gaming amount to incremental polish. So the game is best recommended to genre fans and the hardcore.

What It Costs: $50

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $50 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $50 (buy)
•To The Casual: $0 (skip)