My Review on: Left 4 Dead 2.

[DarkBlade325]

Ye-hea! Starting my own series of reviews now. I think I did a couple quite a while back on the old forums, but hey, I'm in the mood to give my opinion about this game. Long read ahead, strap yourself in.


Alright as the name suggests this is the long awaited sequel(not really since it came out so damn early) to the zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead. Originally, this sequel was going to be called Back 4 More, but I think that was scrapped because they don't use the old survivor group, Bill, Francis, Louis, and Zoey in this game. Instead, our new survivors are Coach, who used to teach health to a local high school after a knee injury ruined his career in collage, Ellis who is a mechanic, Nick who is a gambler and possibly a bigger criminal than that, and Rochelle, who was a new reporter before the events of the Infection.

It follows the same line as the first game. Get guns, shoot zombies. A simple yet fun concept. Something very interesting is that this sequel has a bigger impact on story than the first one. On the first campaign for the first couple of minutes they don't know each other. Once they get in a elevator, they introduce themselves, then move on. Through the first and second part of the first Campaign, they constantly call the Special Infected by unofficial names, simply because they don't know what to call them. They might call them 'Crazy Legs' 'Big Arm' 'Tongue' and 'Spitting Dude'. Later on they come to get their official names right, finally calling them the Hunter, Smoker, Boomer, Charger, Jockey, ect ect.

A bigger impact on story is that if you follow the Campaign in order, you'll see how they arrive at each one. On the second Campaign, Dark Carnival, you see that they had to abandon their escape car they got from the first campaign because the highway was blocked off by other abandon'd cars.

There are alot of new weapons that there's no way I'm going through them all. Upgrades are also in this game. Sometimes you will find laser sights that improve your accuracy with your main gun. There's even different types of ammo. There's incendiary ammo and explosive ammo that can be used to light the Infected on fire, or use explosive ammo to make Special Infected stumble, making them vulnerable. There's also a new grenade type called the Bile Bomb, a tube full of Boomer extract. When thrown, Infected swarm where ever it was thrown at. You can even throw it on a Tank and the infected will attack it. They also threw melee weapons into the mix. Machetes, katanas, cricket bats, crowbars, and yes, chainsaws.

The graphics aren't Crysis, but they're definitely incredible. Besides that, the gore is also amazing. No- beyond amazing, I havn't seen such a gore-game like this in a long time. You can use a shotgun to blow a hole right through an infected, sometimes even the guts will trail along if they somehow survive a hole through their body. Oh yeah and you can also quite literally blow their balls off. You can use melee weapons to leave a huge gash in their body, and there are so many ways to get a good old blood bath on screen. My only gripe is that the Aussies and Germans got !@#$ed over on this because of their rating system on video games.

The new Infected also improve and fill in most of the holes that the Special Infected needed in Versus in Left 4 Dead. Before hand, there was no brute strength Special Infected besides the Tank, which was rare. So that means Infected players on Versus had to rely on distractions, and often the only thing to give distractions were Boomers and Tanks. So it was quite a pain in the ass to play. Now there's the Charger, who can deal alot of damage to the survivors without the need of distractions. Another problem was corner camping, where Survivors would just gather in a corner possibly with all auto shotguns and all they would do is spam shove and no one would get hurt. VALVe somewhat solved this by adding a fatigue meter to Versus in the first game, but that only helped a bit. In this sequel, there's the Spitter, who spits acid on the ground. The longer survivors stand in it, the more damage they take which forces them out of their camping spot. There was also the issue of separating survivors. Sure the Smoker could do it, but he didn't have much control as to what he wanted to do. And yeah there was the Tank, but once again, the Tank is rare. So now there's the Jockey, who leaps onto survivors and can steer them into trouble, such as other Special Infected like Chargers, Hunters, into Spitter acid, and even into Witches and off cliffs. Definitely my favorite Infected. On top of that, there are also 'Uncommon Common' infected. These are basically normal zombies, but with slight twists. There are Hazmat zombies, who are immune to fire, Clown zombies, who's squeaky shoes attract more zombies, Riot zombies, who are bullet proof from the front, and Engineer zombies, who ignore pipebombs and are immune to headshots.

The Finales are changes drastically from the old 'push button, wait for rescue' scenario from the first game. I don't want to spoil too much, but some of them definitely are different, most notably the first campaign.

But, as you would expect, there are some bad parts of the game. I'm getting tired of writing this, so I'll keep it short. The bots are still pretty piss poor to be honest. They either steal items or fail to navigate to you when you're pinned/strangled. It doesn't happen alot, but when it does happen it's frustrating. Another thing is that there's still some of that 'Left 4 Dead Syndrome' where the replayability factor dwindles down the more you play.

Overall, very good game. However, if you LIKED L4D, played mostly the Campaign and stayed away from the Versus, I don't think I could recommend this new sequel to you. If you LOVED L4D on the other hand, playing the Versus alot, this is your cup of Jo, no doubt.

Even if you didn't like L4D Versus, gather a group of 8 friends and give it a whirl with the new infected in this game if you have the 50$ to spare. I quite enjoyed it. Now if you'll excuse me I have the game paused and I am being controlled by a Jockey at the moment.