Left 4 Dead

Survival horror games, like Resident Evil for example, have often relied on quirky controls or contrived limitations (such as five bullets for any given gun across an entire map, for example) to create the tension and atmosphere necessary to convey the suspense and horror the game is trying to achieve. A legitimate conceit, it's fair to argue, given that without this tense atmosphere the games are pretty straight forward.

However that sort of thing is not everyone's cup of tea. There's a wide audience who are interested in gunning down hordes of zombies without the frustration and cerebral complexity one might normally associate with a lumbering Resident Evil or even the more agile Dead Space. Enter Left 4 Dead.

Built on the Source engine (originally released by Valve with Half Life 2), which is great news for those of us with lower specced PCs, Left 4 Dead eschews the traditional slow pace and third person camera in favor of a first-person viewpoint and high speed gameplay.

Taking the role of one of four characters (all the bases are covered - there's a grumpy old guy, a woman, a black dude and your all-american youngish white guy), the player must attempt to get from the start of the level to the exit, dispatching numerous "infected" (read: zombies) along the way. The infected just sort of mill about most of the time, until they notice you - at which point (much like 28 Days Later or I Am Legend infected) they charge at you at full speed. This rapid and angry charge, typically accompanied by much wailing and nashing of teeth, can be seriously intimidating - especially when you consider that this often occurs en-masse, with dozens of them running for you at once!

The infected are pretty clever, too, able to clamber up on top of each other (etc) to reach you when you think you're safe (such as on top of a roof for example). Additionally, there's an AI "controller" observing the action at all times, spawning zombies in rooms based on your style / technique. If it thinks you're doing too well, it'll spawn a tough "boss" zombie or trigger a horde assault to mix things up.

There are a number of special creature types, in addition to the "horde", which have special techniques by which they attack you and by which you should attack them back. The Boomer, for example, explodes at the slightest touch, however the goop that bursts out of him will trigger an assault from a horde of zombies, all of which will come straight for whoever just got gooped over - they'll be hard pressed to fight off the horde themselves, as their vision is severely (and adversely) affected by that same goop. This is just one of the ways that the game strongly encourages teamwork, regularly reminding you that you must stay together to survive.

The game is purely multiplayer. Sure, there's a singleplayer mode but it's very clearly the multiplayer mode with bots in it. There's no real narrative (there's an intro and ending video sequence but that's it) and the entire thing occurs over just four levels (each broken out into several sub-stages). On my first play through it took just 28 minutes to play from beginning to end of the first level and just over two hours for the entire game.

Given it's a Valve game (Valve brought the developer in-house partly through development), it's reasonably safe to assume there's going to be more content coming - out of the box, however, it's probably the worst value for money game released in a very long time, which is extra surprising given the last game Valve released was the Orange Box, probably the best value game ever released. It really does feel like it would make more sense as part of another compilation, rather than as a stand-alone game. Portal took four times as long to play through, for example, and itself offers lots of replayability (although no multiplayer, of course).

All up it's fun, looks pretty good and runs incredibly well - even on a low end system. It's also ludicrously light on content, with no real single player to speak of and very little multiplayer content. Compared to something like Call of Duty, for example, it's super light weight and yet it's the same price. If you're a multiplayer fiend and like the thought of mowing down zombies with chainguns, this is definitely worth checking out. The thrill of obliterating hordes of screaming bad guys that just want to gobble up your brains really is quite unique and fun. Just don't expect to be getting very good value for money because there's really not very much inside the box.