Vital Stats

Genre: FPS
Players: 1-4 Cooperative/4-8 Competitive
Online: Multiplayer

Developer: Valve
Publisher: Electronic Arts/Valve
ESRB Rating: M
Release Date: 11/17/09

Platforms

• Xbox 360
• PC

Left 4 Dead 2 does the sequel thing right. It takes the pseudo-random design that made the first game so replayable, expands it, and does so without sacrificing the original game’s feel. Add that to the franchise’s multiplayer excellence and a new narrative emphasis, and the only thing deeper than the smart FPS gameplay is the pool of zombie gore.

When the first Left 4 Dead came out, there was such a media blitz about its replayability that the game looked more unpredictable than it actually turned out to be. That the game emerged from the shadow of its own hype to be a critical darling and a retail success was nothing short of amazing. Today, a scant year after the first game’s release, Left 4 Dead veterans know what to expect: tactical replayability and an endless flood of zombies. Left 4 Dead 2 has some awfully big graves to fill.

I Come to Bury L4D, Not to Praise It
If you missed the Left 4 Dead phenomenon the first time around, the premise is simple. Up to four players cooperatively shoot their way through a zombie apocalypse. The trick is that the apocalypse has been framed as a movie. There are AI understudies who fill in when a player drops out of the game, crescendo events that help pace the action like a movie, and even an AI director behind the scenes who tweaks the movie a bit each time you play through it. Left 4 Dead was definitely more game than movie, but the frame made a lot of brilliant and novel multiplayer ideas instantly accessible.

Left 4 Dead 2 doesn’t stray far from the cooperative design principles that made the first game great. It still supports seamless player entry and exit from an ongoing game, and players who die don’t stay dead for long. The AI still does a pretty passable job of picking up an absent player’s slack until another can be found. It really is the most playable cooperative FPS out there.

Everybody Wants to Direct

Come the apocalypse
you should hope to be so well-dressed

The banner feature of the Left 4 Dead series is the AI director, a framing conceit that conceals a clever randomization system for certain gameplay elements. The director controls when zombies attack, the quality and locations of items you find, and even the music that plays during a movie. These and other director tricks let the game keep you teetering on the edge of disaster without outright shoving you off. It makes for an intense and tactically varied gameplay experience that few games can offer without relying on competitive multiplayer.

The director is limited in scope, however. It can only place items at predetermined hotspots, and it has no control over the game’s art assets. So although it can change the way the game plays, it can’t change the way the game looks.

At least, it couldn’t. The director has been upgraded for the sequel, expanding its dominion and improving its control over old game elements. It still doesn’t have the macro-level control to change an area’s fundamental design, but it can add gates and other structures to guide you along different routes through the same play area. It can also control the weather in some movies, intensifying storms to cut down on visibility when zombies attack.

Weather and path layout can’t change the fact that the game’s five movies are broadly the same each time you play them. However they certainly make director 2.0 more sensational than its ancestor. These and other director improvements make the game a bit less predictable that the first Left 4 Dead, which will stretch its replay lifespan that much longer.

New Gameplay Modes
Along with five new movies to play through in cooperative or versus, Left 4 Dead 2 offers a new Realism mode and a Scavenge mode.

Realism mode plays to the hardcore crowd. It removes many of the features that facilitate multiplayer play, but also remind you that you’re playing a video game. Realism mode abolishes survivor and item halos (those glowing outlines that let you see friends and items through walls), so the infected can more easily separate and wipe out your party. It also disables survivor closets (the rooms that let you rejoin the game after you’ve died) in favor of resurrection between chapters. Other tweaks are smaller, like the Witch infected type instantly killing players instead of incapacitating them, but they all converge on a single goal: make the gameplay as gritty and realistic as a plague of the walking dead can be.

The upside to this is a more intense experience. Removing halos from the game forces you to really pay attention. You’ll find yourself scouring the environment for the equipment you desperately need and poking your nose into corners you’d never previously considered. Playing Realism after the standard campaign is like discovering the half of Left 4 Dead 2 that you apparently missed when the game was holding your hand.

The downside is that all that handholding makes the game much more playable, and its absence makes for a lot of sandwich gaming. If your luck goes south and you trip over a witch at the beginning of a chapter, you can be stuck waiting as much as ten or fifteen minutes for your allies to wrap up their life or death struggle. Granted, being out an ally tends to skew them toward the quicker death outcome, but cheering from the sidelines isn’t exactly quality gameplay no matter how long it lasts.

Scavenge mode, by contrast, errs on the faster and lighter side. During the course of the normal campaign, there’s a setpiece where the players must fight off zombies as they fill a car’s tank from the dregs of fuel canisters scattered around a mall. Scavenge mode takes this conceit and makes it competitive. Two player teams alternate roles as humans and infected, and whichever team collects more canisters will win.

The end result is that Scavenge takes the core gameplay of the hour-long movies and pares it down to a more schedule-friendly ten minutes. It loses some of the richness that grows out of prolonged teamwork and ends up feeling a bit more like Team Fortress 2 than Left 4 Dead. However, if you wanted to add a new flavor to the Left 4 Dead formula, there are worse ones to pick.

A Gaggle of Ghouls
What’s a sequel without a few new faces to blow off? Left 4 Dead 2 features three new special infected, including the Spitter, an area denial zombie, the Charger, who plows through the surviving humans to carry one away, and the Jockey, who can steer a survivor away from his friends and into harm’s way. These three change gameplay from the orginal game’s formula in two significant ways.

First, the new special infected fill in strategy gaps left by the first game. Spitters make it much riskier to hole up in a tight room because they can fill it with damaging acid. Chargers make narrow hallways a more dangerous place to be, and Jockeys can outright walk you into another zombie’s grasp. In conjunction with the infected from the first game, these new infected help keep the gameplay lively by preventing players from settling into one optimal strategy.

The second change is subtler. Because special infected tend to show up in groups of three, the combinatorics of increasing the roster from the three to six make it impossible to predict which trio will come for you next. Different teams of special infected work together in tactically different ways, so the new blood mixes up the gameplay and keeps it fresh.

Valve has also added a new “uncommon” class of common infected that are thematically tied to each movie’s location. These zombies have special abilities like immunity to fire or the leadership to rally the common infected to hit you as a group. They usually don’t have a particularly significant impact on gameplay, but you’ll notice them as they attack and they lend atmosphere to a game with already rich environments.

Good, Bad, I’m the Guy With the Guns
Along with the new zombies have come an array of new items. Every firearm in the first game’s catalog now has variants. The new weapons increase play depth by introducing a system of tradeoffs in terms of clip size, stopping power, and other firearm stats. However, the gameplay impact of these new weapons will prove subtle to all but FPS connoisseurs.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to whichever
Valve employee suggested using a theremin to enhance
the B-grade camp.

Much more noticeable is the introduction of several melee weapons. These weapons not only let you finally take a chainsaw to a group of zombies as Romero intended, they also introduce an easy-accuracy to short-range tradeoff. So if you happen to find a finely crafted katana, you may have to pause to think if you really want it more than the pistols that complement your shotgun so nicely.

Actually, tradeoffs are really the theme that unites all the new items, because the sequel adds alternatives for all your inventory slots as well. So now you’ll have to consider whether you’d rather heal the living with a medkit or raise the dead with a defibrillator, or a host of other choices.

All these equipment tradeoffs make Left 4 Dead 2 a highly customizable game. They substantially improve the depth and richness of otherwise simple zombie killing. However, this complexity is not without cost. When you have several possible alternatives competing for one item node, odds are that the one you want won’t pop up. That is, there’s never a defibrillator around when you need one. It hardly beaks the game, but when you’re playing Realism and you’re looking at a five minute stretch on the sidelines, it’s a lot harder to appreciate the explosive ammunition item that competes for the defibrillator slot.

Most Things May Not Happen: This One Will
Left 4 Dead 2 isn’t a textbook sequel, it writes the textbook for other sequels. It manages to significantly expand on its predecessor without losing the core that made the first game remarkable. It’s hard to imagine what Left 4 Dead 2 could have done to better serve casual gamers without outright switching genres, so it should surprise no one that the sequel’s improvements favor the hardcore and genre fan crowds. That said, casual gamers who aren’t looking to scale mount FPS should look elsewhere for more accessible entertainment.

What It Costs: $60

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $60 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $60 (buy)
•To The Casual: $20 (skip)