Left 4 Dead 2 - campaign mode review

Zombies, eh? Swarming hordes of them wherever you look. Zombie videogames, that is. In just over a year I've bought new releases Left 4 Dead and its  sequel; Resident Evil 5; The Last Guy;  Burn Zombie Burn and the turd sandwich that was House of the Dead Overkill.  And this morning I bought Ghosts n' Zombies for iPhone.    A brief bit of research (not really - just flicking through a magazine found on the floor of my bathroom) also came up with Wolfenstein and Plants vs Zombies to add to that decaying list. Zombies are flavour of the month for videogame bad guys, though I imagine it would be a mouldy, musty, budget-supermarket-ham type of flavour.

There didn't use to be this many zombie games. You'd get regular(ish) updates of established franchises like Resident Evil (and Capcom have certainly cranked those out over the years) and House of the Dead but after those venerable series' the graveyard was pretty much empty. I've done some research. No, just kidding again - I just read through my game collection on Playfire - and this zombie fixation seems a relatively recent phenomenem. I remember 'Carrier' on Dreamcast but I mainly remember it because it wasn't very good. Stubbs the Zombie had some fans on Xbox. And there was Boktai on GBA but they were space vampires (or something).

For a developer, zombies  are a safe-choice of onscreen bad guy, like an English villain in a Hollywood blockbuster. As gamers (well, some. Maybe) would baulk at shooting down wave after wave of Jeremy Irons looky-likies (and publishers might baulk at that, as the UK is a large games market), the English aren't really going to work. A couple of years ago, there were bucketloads of World War II games, as no-one objects to shooting a Nazi in the face. Gamers seem to have wearied of Nazis (or maybe just the crap forties-era weaponry) - witness The Saboteur's poor games sales -  and there's nothing that draws the attention of those bankrolling the games than falling returns. Zombies are this (and last) year's Nazi. Or, with Wolfenstein, both.



I've often thought that Hollywood goes with English bad guys in order not to offend any one of a number of racial groupings that the sterotyping that goes hand in hand with the shallow characterisation present in many mainstream films. The English don't really count, either due to their not being a clearly-defined racial group, or (and this seems more likely to me), we just don't like making a fuss. Give a character a voice like they are talking with a mouthful of marbles and a fondness for tea and you are away.

The same can be said for zombies and videogames. There isn't a zombie protection league, no meeja talking head is going to decry negative portrayals of zombies and  there isn't going to be a charity record for their benefit recorded by in-need-of-publicity pop stars.  No-one cares about offending the Z-man.  A developer would have to strive really hard to fuck up the guilt-free villain status of a zombie (hats off, then,  to dunderheads at Capcom and the opinions voiced after the first footage of Resi 5 was released). Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) treads safer ground, the game being set, as was its predecessor, in a post-zombie apocalypse America. In direct comparison with Capcom, Valve handled a possibly sensitive situation - the game is set in New Orleans and its surroundings, no strangers to disaster, albeit natural rather than undead - very well and what idiot-commentary there was (a column in a Houston newspaper) criticising the setting was brief and confined to the US.

The basic premise of L4D2 is the same as in the first game - you play as one of four survivors (your companions being either human or CPU controlled) immune to the zombie virus, fighting your way as a team through the zombie hordes (and, my, do they horde) to an evac zone. Each of the 5 campaigns (with one more to come - featuring both L4D and L4D2 characters - via DLC in the spring) is split into either 4 or 5 chapters, each ending with a safe house (or evac, for the last chapter of each campaign). There are also a few mid-level set pieces, generally requiring the player to pull a lever or press a button in order to  clear the way ahead but at the same time making a noise loud enough to attract the zombie horde. This review concentrates on the Campaign mode for the game.  There are other game modes - Realism, Scavenge, Survival, Versus - but I have not played them sufficiently to cover them in a review.


I've already posted my first opinions http://tiny.cc/tSYju which I won't repeat here as continued playing has, to some extent,  reinforced those opinions. There are plenty of differences between the two games - more special infected, more weapons, melée weapons, daytime, more involved gameplay, more zombies - all of which improve on the original.  I certainly think  there's enough new content here to justify this being a new game, rather than DLC.


Unlike last time out, the 5 campaigns are in a linked narrative - the start of each succeeding campaign continues from the end of the last.  This is a welcome evolution from the first game, where the campaigns - other than the 'Crash Course' DLC, released nearly a year after the game came out - had no narrative connection.  Albeit gamers have added their own  internal narrative to games since 'Space Invaders' (or maybe that's just me), having an overriding story arc running through the campaigns adds an extra layer of involvement for players.  That is, other than the  'so you've evac-d me from one zombie-invested hellhole to put me at the start of another?  Gee, thanks' feeling between at least two of the campaigns. 


As in the last game, the characters speak to each other independently of the player,  saying where there's ammo/health, when they have to heal, when they've thrown a molotov or pipe bomb (though how any human player can resist shouting 'Fire in the Hole!' to make their fellows aware of this, I don't know) or retelling redneck anecdotes (Ellis) .  The voice acting is good, particularly Coach (my character of choice) an aging, overweight football coach voiced by Chad Coleman,  'Cutty' from  'The Wire'. Yes -  zombie apocalypse/The Wire cross-over! 


Although my opinion of the difficulty level has softened since I wrote my first impressions - on replaying campaigns, we've been taking about half the time that we took when playing them for the first time - it is still a fair bit tougher than the first game.  That difficulty is, at times, frustrating but when you do complete a campaign, particularly for the first time, the feeling of achievement is palpable. I finished the final campaign, The Parish, for the first time at gone 1am in the morning, with my character, Coach, having very little of either life or ammo left, limping towards the open hold of the evac helicopter. Zombies were continually grabbing at my back (none in front of me, thankfully), meaning I had to turn around every so often to lop a few heads off with my machete to gain some time, while my, already onboard, co-op buddy laid down some fire to tamp down my pursuers (the two CPU characters had bought the farm some time before).  The last few yards, staggering across the tarmac, were extremely tense (we'd been trying to beat this campaign for a number of hours, spread over two nights).


When I finally got onboard and the tail flap lifted up and the 'Achievement' beep went , I literally shouted with excitement, nearly waking my sofa-bound sleeping wife. I also, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, fist-pumped. 


The level of elation at finishing that campaign was in direct relation to the level of difficulty of that chapter. I love it when games push you like that (the final boss God of War II on PS2 springs to mind) - hitting the sweet spot between being too difficult to be fun and being too easy to present a challenge.


As it is, essentially, a multiplayer-only game, there is also the very real sense of shared experience - that you and your real-life companions have bested the game as a result of teamwork (and without teamwork, you won't get far).  You can play the game as a single player but such is the  emphasis on the group experience - even more than with the first game - that I cannot recommend purchasing it if it is your intention only to play it on your own.  As well as group playing of this type of game being a more enjoyable experience, the CPU-controlled party members just aren't smart enough to do what needs to be done, particularly with evac and the occasional mid-level set pieces. 

As well as the usual Achievements to boost your gamer score, the game offers avatar awards, that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago http://tiny.cc/zNg0o. 


L4D2 is a great game in its own right and a worthy successor to the first game and one that I would recommend to anyone seeking multiplayer zombie carnage (and who isn't?).