Sometimes it feels like the world may be heading towards a zombie uprising. There are an awful lot of braindead individuals out there, that's for sure. What would it take for them to work together for the greater good? Co-operation, for starters, and an intelligent leader to push and pull everything in the right direction.
Co-operating can be hard for some, however, so we should probably get some practice in playing first-person survival horror shooter Left 4 Dead, where a handful of citizens have to rely on each other to wade through the onslaught that lay between them and their survival.
Can you wade through an onslaught, or do you wade through the blood and guts that come out of that onslaught? I'm not sure. Let's find out.
Fun Times
A short film that just keeps on going gives us to the premise of Left 4 Dead. A small group of citizens are in a desperate bid for survival at the hands of hundreds upon hundreds of dreadful zombies. You are one of those few who have been left for dead, but you're not about to roll over and die just yet.
A helicopter flies overhead, someone on a megaphone sending out one last hope to anyone alive and listening. Get to the hospital, he says. Time to grab a weapon, a bunch of ammo, and get moving through the night.
Through an apartment block, we learn some of the core ideas of Left 4 Dead, the primary one being sticking together and watching each other's backs. You can go off on your own, of course, but you won't get far without stumbling into a problem with the undead.
They're speedy once they spot you, but can be downed without too much effort, but Left 4 Dead is designed to give you just a few too many threats at once. Your machine gun will make swift work of whatever you see, but it'll need to be reloaded, and the horde will still be coming for you - and they won't always be coming from in front of you.
I'm playing this game as a solo player, three AIs fleshing out the rest of the party, and already they've saved my bacon after I rushed into a room with the intention of sweeping and clearing, only to find I did neither and wasn't ever prepared to do either in the first place.
It's not that Left 4 Dead is hard or overwhelming, though I'm sure later difficulties are. It's just that it is a tailored, semi-authored experience that reacts to what you're doing and how you're playing to ensure you're kept on your toes, but get that ebb and flow of peace and quiet before absolute carnage.
An example of that is a warning message of an incoming attack flashing up on my HUD, alongside the shouts of the other survivors. What kind of attack? Where from? I finish off the few zombies I see before moving into the next room, turning around, and seeing this.
You can't deal with that when you only have three bullets. Well, you might be able to once, after scrambling for a reload animation between hopeless melee attacks, but if you're down on health or supplies and separated from your group, you're toast.
Sticking together for when, out of nowhere, thirty or forty zombies are tearing down everything in their path to get to you is sound advice, but as the self-appointed leader of this group, we need to get a move on.
The glow of an exit light - and a pile of bodies I wasn't responsible for - beckons us to street level. Are the streets any safer than the apartments?
Not really, no, but we do get to try out the Molotov cocktails we picked up somewhere on our trip here. You've got one primary weapon, a backup pistol, a throwable of some description and various health supplies. You can find other weapons dotted around the place, but you've no space in your pockets to save them for later, so you'll have to make the decision of what to wield on the spot, and when to finally use that explosive rather than hold on to it indefinitely.
You'll see groups that you might want to use them on, but when Left 4 Dead spots that you're on top of things, it's time for another horde to rush around the corner to catch you by surprise. Do you use your explosives now, at close quarters, risking the health of your buddies? Friendly fire of all kinds is on, remember...
Deciding to not waltz down the open street, I head indoors, where I'm rewarded with dark interiors, a few pills for a health boost and an open window or two for the inevitable. There are things to find off the beaten path, but can you convince your team to follow you? Is it safe to do so? Is there time to explore at all?
These are decisions you'll no doubt be discussing with/shouting at your teammates when playing with fellow humans, but for me, this was all just a case of doing what felt right. Going where it seemed I should go, dealing with threats as they arose. And they sure do arise...
The streets exploded into violence, zombies descending upon me from all directions, faster than I could deal with. Luckily, the rest of the party were there, swatting threats aside as best they could, but the chaos continued.
Out of ammo, you only have your pistol(s) to fend off whatever you face. Their ammo is infinite, but again, reloading and rate of fire are really rather limited, especially compared to the submachine gun you desperately want to return to.
The location of a safe house is nearby. Ammo, health, and locked doors. It is here, in the safe room, that you and your group can finally take a breather and assess the current situation, and it is here where I learn that I'm a killing machine.
No, we can't think like that. We're a survivor, damnit. Switching over to the shotgun, it's time to head through the underground rail network towards the hospital. What horrors await?
An easy kill, I think to myself, before I learn first hand what "Boomer" in this context means.
Designed NOT to be shot on sight, the Boomer spits zombie-attracting gloop over whoever is clumsy enough to get close to it. It's not just a possibility of you now being a target for zombies, another batch of the undead will emerge from multiple locations to swarm over you until the wave has been wiped out.
Once again, teamwork is essential. I suppose you could run away and attract a load of zombies when you're blinded by Boomer bile, but hunkering down and providing firepower to support the rest of the party that are trying to save you is perhaps the more useful response.
Text and icon prompts generally do enough, and being able to see your allies through walls makes life much easier, but there are still zombies between them and you, usually. Will you get there before they take too much damage? Do you even have a med-pack to help them out?
More rooms, more zombies, more close calls before we emerge at street level once more and someone shouts "Tank!". What tank? Where's this tank?
Francis is floored, a dumpster flies past me, and my screen turns black as the tank, an absolute beast of a zombie comes from behind us down the alley. To kill one requires the party to work together, both in terms of helping each other up from the floor, and dumping round after round into whatever side of the tank we're looking at.
That black screen was my demise. Back to the last safe house we go, ready to try again.
Final Word
I avoided Left 4 Dead for many notable reasons. I didn't have anything to play it on nor friends to play it with to really let it shine. I'm also not the greatest of zombie fans, survival fans, horror fans. You get the idea, it didn't appeal.
But under the hood, something quite special makes this game tick. The core gameplay of four basically identical players working together to overcome the odds is one thing, but that the game reacts to your actions and experience to keep it engaging and challenging is something else.
It is so simple an idea that the story isn't worth worrying about, nor are the characters. They're just here to get you moving through the levels. What happens in those levels is an awful lot of zombies of one form or another, and that's the same for everyone, but how they'll approach you is going to be different and depend on how you approach them.
I don't know the details, but a repeat playthrough should make it obvious, as would playing with humans. But am I interested enough in the game itself to do that? The answer is probably not.
It's a solid game, well worth playing. I might play it once more. My problem with it isn't in the controls or the difficulty, and it's not even in the plot or the characters - everyone seems to know that's not what's important here. The hundreds of zombies and how they want to kill you is the focus of Left 4 Dead, and it does that quite well indeed. My problem is simply that I'm not all that interested in zombies.
If you are, or you're a fan of first-person shooters, Left 4 Dead is a fantastic game to try out. The Source engine is instantly familiar to Half-Life players, as is the goal: stay alive. The co-operation you'll need to do so is something so few other games have that even that is a reason to play it.
There's quite a lot going for it, basically. I liked it more than I thought I might, but not enough to stick around for the long-haul, nor to try it 'properly' with fellow humans. But I know it's not one to ignore.
Fun Facts
If four players together aren't enough, you can get eight players together to face off against each other, half a group of survivors, the other half respawning zombies. How well can you cope against braindead monsters who actually do have a brain?
Left 4 Dead, developed by Valve South, first released in 2008.
Version played: PC, 2008.