Network now...MAGAZINE
Review: Left 4 Dead
By Edge Staff
November 20, 2008
See also:
Related Articles:
"Normally, the giggling distraction of co-op promptly shatters whatever atmosphere developers had intended, but somehow Valve inveigles four players into the horror of its setting."
They’re coming again, screaming down the hallways towards us, clambering through windows, leaping over barricades – a frenzied, wailing wall of savage zombie death.
Discretion is the better part of valour, we decide, and stagger backwards into a waiting elevator, firing our last few rounds into the closest zombies as the doors slide shut. Survival, for the moment, seems sure. Then we notice the displaced ceiling tile above.
Tense seconds pass as the lift grinds upward, all of us still wordlessly staring at this dark gap, awaiting whatever might burst through. Even when nothing happens – especially when nothing happens – Left 4 Dead is an intense experience, cultivating the panic and stress of a survival-horror shooter in multiplayer.
Normally, the giggling distraction of co-op promptly shatters whatever atmosphere developers had intended, but somehow Valve inveigles four players into the horror of its setting. It’s a pretty nerve-jangling scrimmage; rare is the game in which, shrill with panic, you find yourself shouting into the microphone: “Oh, Christ! It’s a Witch! It’s a Witch!”
Valve has achieved this through its usual understated storytelling genius – taking something unscripted and dynamic, and seeding it with the right amount of narrative flavour, pacing and spectacle to make it feel like you are participating in an orchestrated horror set-piece. The director – the AI that determines the flow and placement of zombies – makes every run an unpredictable but cogently dramatic terror. The lulls between swarms seem perfectly timed to unnerve; the swarms between lulls lasting just long enough to reduce your resources and health to almost nothing.
There are, on release, only four scenarios to play through, and though their varied settings make for different arenas of combat, each follows a similar beat. On normal difficulty, should you survive, a scenario lasts a little over an hour, broken into five segments which see the survivors fight their way between safe-houses before a climactic showdown and, ultimately, rescue.
It is difficult to ignore the fact that this is a slight offering, even when you consider the degree to which it lends itself to replay. Nonetheless, what there is has been excellently crafted. Movement is tight and responsive, the feel of weapon fire suitably shocking and cruel, and the result of each blast more than satisfies the grindhouse remit for splatter.
Environments have clearly been pored over – every one a creepy homage to horror films past, from the urban nightmare that precedes the ascent of Mercy Hospital, to the cold, rural desolation of the Blood Harvest chapter. Visually, the Source engine performs a crisp and economical job, but it’s upstaged by the inspired audio design. The creak of gantries, the rattle of water through piping, the sigh of wind or the rustle of corn – Valve has managed to imbue all these things with a powerful foreboding.
Most of the time, Valve’s level design does a fine job of convincing the player that the near-linear route you take is a natural choice among many possible paths, but occasionally the illusion of a much larger environment proves disorienting. This can easily mean death, as lingering will invite further waves of zombies, and ammunition and health are sparsely distributed, necessitating speedy progress. Fortunately, Valve has lavished a good deal of automatic dialogue upon the survivors – alerting you and your teammates to the presence of ammunition, or pointing out the correct route to take, as well as simply adding character.
@ spitfire:
"But let's consider it's mainly/only about team work:
- You can't pass equipment from one player to the other,
- You can't develop strategies such as "ok, this guy's going to pack all the medkit" or "this one's going to get all the explosive and will cover us" as you can only carry one of each,
- You don't get different styles by choosing different characters..."
I certainly understand your concern about those issues, but (and perhaps this is more a byproduct of the limited nature of the demo) I think if you go a few rounds with the full game you'll see that approaching the "team" concept like that (Team Fortress / WoW / R2 / "roles") with Left 4 Dead is an unsustainable proposition.
Assuming you do have a character that is designated the "helaer", and therefore carries all of the health: traditional "team" strategy require them to now assume a "rear guard" position in the team's formation, to hang back a bit and support the brawlers with timely medical aid while (presumably) your frontline characters would be blazing the primary path. Although the game path is definitely linear, there is no "frontline" or "hanging back" in L4D. regardless of how throughly you cleared an area, zombies can always swarm from any direction . . . and now all of the team's health packs are buried beneath a zombie scrum. You used the example of having the Explosive-laden character "provide cover" for the others, which implies (again) a fore-and-aft battleground structure. L4Ds "team" isn't an amalgam of unique skills coming together to make a super-combat entity. Instead, it suprisingly fits into the narrative of the game: 4 survivors, moving together for the mutual support, not because they're each "weakened" in some respect that requires the team for survival. If the other three players die, that sucks and you'll probably be joining them soon, but you have all the basic abilities to fight toward that next safehouse (or teammate-spawning closet)
We instinctively tried a set-up like you are looking for our first few playthrus. Our team Sniper, who fills that role in every game my team has played over the last several years, took position with the hunting rifle and pipe bomb; me and the other fighter took point with shotguns and Molotovs, and our swing support man (lady) bridged the formation, ready to race in with the M-16 and the unused medkit and pain pills, or give our sniper a helping hand if some zombies got through.
I can hear the giggling of the L4D players over the InterTubes . . . and the only thing that lessens the sting of their mockery is knowing that the only reason they're laughing is because they tried the exact same thing and learned the same short, brutal, horribly painful lesson.
All well and good until we get down to the derailed subway trains. A tank comes storming down the train isle, and we bring all guns to bear for what promises to be a very dead(er) Tank in about 5 seconds. Except that of course the !&#*% A.I. Director had a Boomer approach the side of the train from the shadows. Man, I didn't think he could shoot the vomit through the windows . . . but apparently he can. Our Support lady gets blinded, but we can't turn around because we're dumping hot lead into the still-approaching Tank. Besides, Frontlines are already killing anything coming forward, and Sniper can cover the vomit-enraptured Grunts who are going to start pouring in from the rear, so nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about until, as the sniper is pushing the Grunt Wave charging up the rear back with pistols and pipebomb, a smoker about 75 yards away in the shadows lands a tongue on him . . . and with a "$HIIIIIIIIITTTTTTttttt t t t . . . . . . !" our rear guard was gone, support was still blinded and now firing blindly as the wave hit her. I turned away from the Tank to clear the wave off her and go after Sniper, so when that Hunter came flying down the isle at me I managed to get a perfect view of his face before getting pinned. And Mauled. The other Soldier suddenly discovered that a narrow, confining isle is actually a really bad place to be alone against a Tank, and as we each met our maker the recriminations and blame started flying. "You were supposed to cover the door!" "I'm working on the Tank -- why wern't you avoiding the window?" "Sorry I didn't see the hidden smoker . . . I was kind of distracted saving all your a$$es!" and so forth.
I certainly respect your concerns, and if the game played any differently I'd agree 100%. Consider at least a rental to get more of the experience (feel free to jump in with us if you're looking for non-jackhole players -- gamertag busboy33). I didn't think I could say this about a game after the last decade of ever-deepening complexity in shooter design, but it's so unbelievably simple that its stunningly complex . . . if that even makes sense.
Left 4 Dead is like an Arcade-style action-packed game where up to 4 of your friends can play with you, and the focus of the game is on having FUN!...Everything about the game is AWESOME because it is FUN!
@spiffre
I think your points are very well considered, and should be looked at by the Valve team next go-round. If you read Gabe Newell's piece in this Edge, you'll see that he's very interested in making games that focus more on how people play than throwing more monsters at you.
Your point about strategies and characters being too similar are exactly what I thought when playing through the demo. I'm not a great FPS player, so I'd probably rather grab two medkits. Or, another strategy might make me the teams healer, so I could stay in the back (or center, on some levels) of the team, and heal around as people took damage.
It might be cool to give each character a strength and weakness as well. Maybe Louis would have AI-assisted targeting, as he's a better shot, but might not be able to see through walls to other players, as he's new to the group and unfamiliar with their styles. Or Bill could have some sort of mini map, since he's older and wiser, and might have better knowledge of the city, but maybe he moves more slowly, as a result of an old injury. All character-driven traits and attributes that might lend themselves to the procedural narrative that Newell talks about in his article.
I think that these kinds of critiques are necessary for the improvement of the field. A game can be tons of fun and still have things that would improve it.
Personally, I was profoundly deceived by L4D. The game is way too arcade-oriented for my taste:
Too much ammo (if the survival rate of characters in zombie flicks is less than 15%, it's because they DON'T find shotgun shells by the hundred), no gameplay variation, doom 3's flashlight syndrome all over again (one pipe bomb OR one molotov cocktail, only one medpack, ...).
Of course maybe I could change my mind by playing some more, but Valve decided it would be a good idea to limit the demo's playtime to a ridiculous few days.
you complain about too much ammo, but then complain about only one explosive? make up your mind!
I understand your reaction, but I think there's the same lack of coherence on the developer side: tons of bullets but only one piece of explosive equipment? It's too much of a 'mathematical' decision: "We're going to compel the player to make a choice" is probably what they told themselves. But then again it's also what they thought they'd do at id when deciding "Ok, it's flashlight OR weapon" and I know a lot of people weren't down with this.
It's a conscious gameplay decision, but with a complete disregard to credibility. Then you know you're in a game, with a game designer above your head making decisions for you and this somewhat hurts immersion.
I am pretty sure the thinking is "these explosive weapons are too powerful, so only allow one at a time." And as for ammo, "ammo may as well be plentiful since it's useless on your own -- the emphasis is teamwork in combat situations, not individual ammunition management."
In any case, I thinkyou're missing the point of the game, m8 -- it's all about teamwork.
Even if that was the thinking, it's still un-natural; if you want the player to have less of this powerful weapon, you just spawn less of them!
But let's consider it's mainly/only about team work:
- You can't pass equipment from one player to the other,
- You can't develop strategies such as "ok, this guy's going to pack all the medkit" or "this one's going to get all the explosive and will cover us" as you can only carry one of each,
- You don't get different styles by choosing different characters...
Well anyway. I don't doubt there are people out there who enjoy it; I just think the gameplay (even if you're down with the action-oriented direction they chose) could have used some more depth.
It's true that character themselves are simplified, but this is *in favor* of teamwork depth rather than individual depth.
By the way, you can pass on equipment -- medkits and painkillers can be given to players who don't already have it.
Anywho, back to the point -- it's not how you play your individual character but how you play in cohesion with other players. For example, running too far ahead or staying too far behind will result in someone being quickly exterminated. Going through the campaign at too slow a pace will result in your team exhausting thier supplies, and going too fast will result in being overwhelmed, and in either case you need the team thinking alike to make things work. What's more, when you reach bottlenecks or the end of a campaign when confrontations are forced, you have to arrange a game plan in which everyone must cooperate or all will likely fail (and more often than not, games end with someone not making it to the escape vehicle, because people are too self-centered when playing or the plan simply isn' ttight enough to maintain all four members).
The net result is that individual ability is downplayed (which is why each character doesn't have some unique feature relative to the rest) so that all the emphasis is placed directly on teamwork and coordination. This factor is equally enforced in Versus mode, as to truly take down a team of survivors, the infected must coordinate their attacks so that they can split the team apart and reduce them all to a incapacitated position in order to win. Trying to go solo will always result in your demise, no matter how indvidually skillful you are.
In other words, it's an obvious design decision to keep individual performance as streamlined as possible in order to bring to light the focal point of the design -- teamwork!
It's only a process you can truly admire after playing through an entire campaign, and then upping the difficult. The demo hardly suffices, as teamwork is a project, something that requires time, whereas individual gameplay is more like Halo -- you 'get it' in a few minutes of playing.
Valve's understated approach to design has always been as such. It was true of Half-Life ten years ago, and it's been true of every product with their name attached ever since. They could've buried it with the features you propose, but the true beauty of the title would've been lost in the ambition. Maybe for a sequel, but for now, it would've distracted us from the point.
Well, I usually rely heavily on demos to make up my mind, but you are right to say this type of gameplay can't be bottled up in a demo. As I haven't tried the full game, I'll have to bow to your arguments; I don't doubt that there's 'more' after several hours playing it.
In any case, it's still a good initiative from Valve; coop has a lot of unexplored potential and comes in several flavors; may everyone find a good fit.