Left 4 Dead 2 Blog

    

    

Left 4 Dead 2 is a co-op zombie horde shooter created by Valve Software released on November 17th, 2009 for Xbox 360 and Steam. The premise of the game is very straightforward, if you are playing as a survivor, left click when zombies are behind your reticle, and never let go of the W key. If you are playing as a zombie, kill the survivors and don't get shot. Obviously that is a very dumbed down explanation of the game as it has many deep systems and mechanics; L4D2 is a classic example of "Easy to learn, hard to master."

As the four survivors, you will have to travel through semi-linear levels, called “Chapters”, to reach the safehouse which serves as a checkpoint and ends the chapter. Campaigns are made up of multiple chapters, with the final chapter usually ending with the survivors escaping and making it to temporary safety. Throughout the levels, players will be able to find various guns, melee weapons, bombs, and healing items to aid them in their fight against the infected. The vast majority of the infected the players will encounter aren’t really much of a bother as they are just mindless husks that swing their arms at the survivors dealing very little damage. However the “Special Infected” are rarer zombies that have increased health, speed, damage, and special abilities which cause a lot more problems for the survivors. These special infected can also be controlled by players, giving the zombies an even greater advantage, because the AI controlled infected are pretty dumb. 

First and foremost, L4D2 is a co-op game. If your team doesn’t work well together, you will lose, this applies to both the survivor team and the infected team. Each team is made up of four players. Many of the special infected zombie’s abilities will pin individual survivors, preventing them from shooting and moving, all the while slowly eating away at their health. If a survivor gets pinned, another survivor will have to save them by killing or shoving the special infected off. Since there can be up to four special infected at any given time, that means if the zombies coordinate and attack quick enough, all the survivors can be pinned at once and they won’t be able to save each other, ending the round. The survivors need to stick together and watch each other's backs, while the zombies need to coordinate, attack together, and capitalize on each other’s special infected abilities.

     L4D2 isn’t very stylized as Valve was going for a more realistic look, however it does have that creepy, eerie, lonely, Source Engine feel. The game is set in 2009 in the American South, two weeks after “The Green Flu” infected patient zero. One campaign will have the players fight their way through an abandoned mall in Savannah, Georgia, in another they’ll have to navigate through an old sugar mill during a hurricane. There is a lot of variety in the atmospheres provided by each campaign. One thing to mention is that when you purchase L4D2 through steam, you get the entire first game as well, no separate download either, adding even more variety to the campaigns.