There I was, in the middle of a dead city, crouched behind a rotting wooden door, with a few hundred wandering corpses in shouting distance. I was fresh out of ammo, just the handle of a frying pan clutched in my palm.
But the guy next to me was still packing his shotgun, and that skinny girl we picked up was hefting a pipe bomb while running her thumb down the edge of a machete. A little ways away, creeping along the shadow of a rusting car toward a pile of loose bullets near the riot barricade was the shifty-looking fella in the wrinkled suit.
He didn’t make it to the shells before ten sets of eyes were on him. The horde picked up his scent, started baying to alert their lifeless brothers: It was feeding time.
Romero acolytes, eat your hearts out. Those classic zombie flick tropes are alive in Valve’s land of Left 4 Dead 2, due for general release Nov. 17. But those of us who fronted the $45 for the pre-release have been gifted early access to the demo (which is sharp as a knife and, sadly, just as short). After three days with the demo, I’m thinking the video game sequel is Day of the Dead to the original Dawn of the Dead.
The day-lit streets of New Orleans, which at first I thought made the game feel too cartoonish, soon grew creepy as the undead swarmed me in the half dusk. I couldn’t help but dredge up our old voodoo associations the city harbors, or the not-so-faded memories of the devastation there in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Still, there’s no denying the run-of-the-mill staple zombies aren’t as terrifying this time around, so it’s good we have new mutant ghouls to ramp up the fear factor. I jumped and squeaked the first time a “Charger” surprised me from an alley by knocking me into a brick wall with his rhino-sized fist. The best of the new breed, though, are the riot-gear-clad plague victims who keep getting back up through several clips.
To ward off the infected, there is the good ol’ cache of molotovs, pipe bombs, pistols, rifles, semi-automatics, sniper rifles, medkits — plus machetes, nightsticks, grenade launchers, and even electric guitars. The new melee weapons all (mysteriously) seem to do the same amount of damage, but I’m reserving judgment until next month when I get my hands on the axe and chainsaw. At that point, the full game will also unlock a baseball bat, incendiary and explosive ammo, and a few other promised goodies.
A bizarre skipping problem ruined my first attempts to run the demo with friends (even with my Nvidia 9800 GT) but tinkering with the video settings eventually ironed out the issue without too much noticeable rendering sacrifice. Not so long later, novel level design won me back when I realized Valve developers were throwing some fun challenges my way. For instance, simple bottlenecking — a cheap trick — isn’t a frequent option anymore. The urban gamescape gives zombies many routes to reach and harry my team of players as we try to escape, making me think harder to avoid them.
Ammo is also scarcer this time, so managing resources well becomes crucial. Levels are larger and not so very linear, meaning you have to constantly watch your back. From one play-through to the next, obstacles can change (as well as the places where zombies spawn or rush, but that’s nothing new). And regular ol’ infected are harder to kill, since they often keep coming after losing one or two limbs, but that just makes ‘sploding them even more fun.
With just two short levels to experience in the demo, I have to give Left 4 Dead 2 a cool four severed fingers up. With more gore than before though, I wouldn’t recommend it for kids. If you’re old enough for 28 Days Later, you can probably handle it.
~ JASON, the oldest surviving MYSS listener
P.S., Jakob and Mandy, the reason we like zombies so much is because they are an excuse to exorcise our darkest violent desires on people who aren’t really people. There is a liberation to unloading a few hundred rounds into a shell of a person that we’ve labeled as “evil.” It dissolves our guilt and sates our fear of the unknown.
