Let’s be honest from the start. I wasn’t a big fan of Left 4 Dead during the demo or the initial couple of hours with the full version. I could appreciate what Turtle Rock was trying to accomplish, but just wasn’t enjoying it. It wasn’t until I was playing with people I knew in a situation that went totally out of control that it really clicked. Left 4 Dead is by no means perfect, but it is easily one of the most enjoyable multiplayer experiences on the PC this year.

Left 4 Dead takes place in your typical zombie apocalypse scenario. The game is seldom upfront about the back story; you never hear about the cause of the outbreak or how the crew met, though the game does provide morsels of information regarding the transformation, and the fact that there are other survivors out there. Players take on the role of one of four survivors; Francis, a biker, Louis, an office worker, Zoey, a college student and Bill, a Vietnam veteran. One can establish that the group has been together for some time, due to their knowledge of firearms and their enemies.


Two different play modes are available in Left 4 Dead, the standard campaign mode where you control the survivors (either alone or with up to three friends) and the versus mode, where four players control the survivors, and another four can command control of the specialist zombies. There are four campaigns, each of which is set up like a movie. No Mercy has the survivors stranded in a major city, where they need to head to Mercy Hospital to be evacuated. Death Toll is set in a rural area, putting the survivors in a quest to find a boat for safe passage. Dead Air is set in an airport, with the survivors once again seeking aerial evacuation. The final chapter, Blood Harvest, is set out in the woodlands.

Each campaign is broken up into a series of five levels. Players start out in a safe room, which is filled with ammunition, weapons and health items, and need to make it to a safe room at the end of the level. While progression is linear, each level has a number of routes to the final objective to keep things fresher for longer. Getting to the end of each level is easier said than done. Between you and the exit stand many zombies. These aren’t your docile Dawn of the Dead-style zombies that stumble around for comic effect either; they’re more like the Infected from 28 Days Later – fast and agile with a pack mentality.

While you have the option to go it alone in Left 4 Dead, the game is at its best when you’ve got four people working together in harmony. The AI in the game just doesn’t provide the same experience as humans; the AI are generally pretty efficient, but sometimes don’t react when they should. Obviously the game can go pear-shaped when you’re playing with a selfish person who behaves erratically, but the game includes measures to vote out troublesome players. If you’re going to have a hope of cleaning up the hardest difficulty, you need people you can rely on.


Zombies can be dispatched rather easily, but they will overwhelm you with numbers. Players need to stick together to stay alive, and be careful about what they shoot at. Hitting a car can trigger an alarm, which will send a horde of infected your way. Venturing off on your own can have some bad consequences too, especially if you encounter one of the special infected. Often you’ll have to save teammates who’ve been caught by these tricky bastards.

The special infected come in a number of different varieties. The Smoker has a long tongue which can be used to constrict and drag a survivor away for a good slashing. The Hunter is super agile, moving at rapid speeds and able to climb objects and leap quickly – being caught by a Hunter can result in a lot of damage. The Boomers are fat zombies that can spew slime to obscure a survivor’s vision – keep your distance when you shoot them, as they explode in a bloody storm. The Witch (which can’t be played in Versus mode) is a female infected who will leave you alone if you leave her alone. If you attack the Witch, be prepared, she’s super strong, super fast and will rip the survivor who attacked her to shreds. The biggest and baddest of the infected is the Tank, a muscle-bound behemoth who charges through survivors at rapid speed, can punch you right across the level and throw cars and large blocks of cement at you. Tanks take a hell of a lot of damage, so the team of survivors needs to work together to bring the beast down.

Each player can carry a primary weapon, a secondary weapon (a pistol or two), a projective weapon, a medkit and a container of pills to assist in the zombie disposal operations. There are five different primary weapons; a sub machine gun, pump action shotgun, hunting rifle, M4 and a combat shotgun. The sub machine gun and pump action are always found at the start of a level, but the others are usually discovered laying around the level. A Molotov cocktail or pipe bomb can occupy your projectile slot – the former brings up a wall of flame that will protect you from zombies, while the latter emits a signal which draws zombies to it before it explodes. Equipment does seem a little limited compared to your standard first person shooter – hopefully we’ll see more as Valve adds extra content.


Playing through the same stages repeatedly would normally get pretty tiring, which is why Turtle Rock has developed a system which it has dubbed the AI Director. The AI Director determines which enemies appear in a level and where, along with the location and types of weapons and supplies. So while the levels and goals are static, the enemies are not, so each level will play out a different way. The AI director also serves as a means of adjusting difficulty on the fly, and he’s a really vengeful bastard, so if you and your team are tearing apart waves of zombies without a scratch, get ready to meet a Tank. Sometimes the director will go a little too far for the selected difficulty setting; at the end of Death Toll on normal, we had three consecutive Tank encounters despite not having performed particularly well up to that point.

Versus mode will require the survivors to be on their toes, as the element of player-controlled infected speeds up the pace of a game rapidly. As the infected you get all sorts of little advantages like being able to see survivors through walls and climb up different surfaces, but you’re also very weak, thus unable to take much punishment from weapons. Infected have unlimited lives, but a 20 second downtime between each, which can get really annoying if you’re taking on a talented team. Sneaky, well co-ordinated attacks are the secret to winning.

Left 4 Dead gives players a vital insight into how useful or useless their friends would be in the event of a zombie holocaust. Few games can match the level of teamwork required and intensity offered by Left 4 Dead’s cooperative mode. The AI Director is a great idea, and fortunately, it has been implemented well. The relative small number of weapons and maps is a little concerning, but if Valve can provide the same level of post-release support for Left 4 Dead as they have with their other games, then it will be an experience to be cherished for years to come.