Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead

For every director of a zombie game/film/book/musical there is a crucial decision to be made early in the creative process. Do you make your undead terrifyingly slow, sluggish lolloping creatures, who raise their arms like sleepwalkers and plod purposefully before collapsing into their prey, a cold, flurry of arms and biting. Or, alternatively, do you make them terrifyingly quick, running from place to place sniffing out fresh meat, screeching towards their prey before tearing their gizzards out in a cold flurry of arms and biting.

Left 4 Dead, the new zombie game from Valve, creators of the Half-Life series, takes the second approach placing a horde of speedy undead monsters between you and your destination and basically letting you get on with it. The game, a first person shooter, lets you choose to play as one of four zombie apocalypse survivors before blasting your way through grim and desolate streets and subways in search of rescue. Alternatively you can play as one of the undead themselves (known in the game as the ‘Infected’) ambushing the survivors and turning them to your ranks.

There are four campaigns to play through, each one consisting of five different levels. In each campaign the first four stages lead you from safehouse to safehouse while the final level ends in a standoff as you desperately wait for the rescue vehicle to arrive. Each campaign takes about an hour to complete on the default normal difficulty (there are two additional difficulties above this and one below) which means that it won't take you long to get acquainted with each set of maps.

The emphasis is on replay, something that’s encouraged by the co-operative multiplayer game, the core of the experience. Whether you’re playing online or off, you’ll always be joined by three other survivors (those characters you didn’t opt to play as). Offline they are handled by the slightly dodgy AI while online you join three other players in your bid for survival. The AI is good at dispatching the undead, rescuing you from their clutches and reviving you when you’re down but it lacks the nuance and strategy that comes from a human comrade. The game really does shine most when you’re playing with friends, balancing weapons, racing to find those secret ammo stashes off the beaten path and working together to take down the different types of zombie that litter these streets.

In versus mode you work against each other with two teams of up to four players competing for points: one side as the survivors and the other as the infected, another area of the game that provides a great deal of fun. On the one hand the game’s rather limited selection of maps is disappointing, but then, when you’re fighting in the thick of it, their familiarity becomes a positive. Indeed, by working hard on Left 4 Dead’s depth and not worrying too much about its breadth, Valve has created a tight and enjoyable shooter that will keep players playing for many months to come.

4 out of 5