Left 4 dead demo first impressions
Posted on 2008-11-06 20:20 by Martin
The Left 4 Dead demo has left me with mixed feelings. It picks up at the end of the trailer, with the 4 survivors on the rooftop. The first thing I did was having a look over the edge of the building to see only a few zombies. Judging from that, the horde that was in the trailer seemed to have left the area looking for some easier to reach meat it seems. Maybe they took the bus to Burgerking, hell I don’t know.
Anyway this is where I stop the storytelling. I don’t want to spoil the game for anyone. Even if the AI Director gives you a different gameplay experience each time you play, based on your survivability. And it does a good job at that I must say, the zombie hordes and boss locations are different each time, this certainly promises a lot of replay value.
On the one hand, what we have here is probably the best zombie FPS ever created in my opinion. But on the other hand we have 4 humans who are seemingly related to John James Rambo, when playing on advanced mode.
The Left 4 Dead points I didn’t like:
Ammo:
Well let’s just say they must’ve cut a good deal with the guys from Ammu-Nation, because it comes in truckloads! Infinite ammo for the pistol is fine, but the other weapons, meh. Well the game does promote a movie-like guns blazing effect, but a bit more realism in max ammo would’ve been nicer.
Melee:
The melee bash is very handy if you have lots of infected coming for you, just bash away and they will get knocked off balance for you or your teammates to shoot. This is not really needed for ammo conservation; remember the Ammonation deal they seem to have? But I do get concerned if it is more effective then a shotgun blast to the face due to the lack of reloading. And I get even more concerned if it is more effective then the zombie’s melee attack.
Survivors:
I am not at all surprised why these four people have survived for this long. They have endurance levels that could rival those of Rambo, and that man can probably stop a tank shell with his chest muscles!
The special infected:
The only one that actually was dangerous was the big brute that starts throwing stuff at you. The others were more of a look at me being annoying kind of monster that could be killed with a few good shots (or one even).
Spoiler:
The AI Director thought a Witch was needed in the last area, however since we could just leave her alone and we didn’t need flashlights we could simply ignore her. After killing the hordes of zombies that came for us when we pushed the button to open the door. We were left alone in the room with the Witch and couldn’t resist shooting her.
The Witch, supposedly the badest monster ingame, was quite easy to take down with 4 guns blazing into her, keep in mind though that this area was heavily favored towards us as it was quite an open area. Melee doesn’t do very well under these kind of circumstances.
Conclusion:
This game is definatly a good survival game and even for a demo it feels very solid, well it is Valve so it should feel solid given their development track record. Heck I might even go as far as this:
It even gave me some nostalgic feelings from Doom nightmare mode with all the enemies onscreen. – something that hasn’t happened in a long time...
But I sure could’ve used more zombies onscreen at times we couldn’t do much else then flee. The thing is, I never felt like we weren’t in full control. Now this might be chalked up to the “intro” level design, giving players a first learning experience. Especially with all the areas being setup in such a way that melee enemies do not really stand a chance. But the fact does remain...
And with only 2 levels in this demo, I cannot really judge the game in this area. All in all it is a good game demo, but there are a few “buts” that leave me in a state of concern. Let’s hope the full game is what it promises to be with all the potential the demo has.
Technotes:
The Source engine performance is quite amazing with all these zombies on screen, I am using an Ati HD4850 and it does not dip below 30fps with most things on high. I know the Source engine, even at medium settings, is pretty shiny and performs well. This is based on my experience with TF2 and my old Ati X850XT. So zombie hordes should not pose any huge problems for most people.
The lobby system, well what can I say. It works, but it does not give me the control I am used to with the Source ingame serverbrowser that all other Source based games have on the PC. But for a 4 player coop game (or is it 8 with 4 possible player controled zombies), it isn’t that much of a problem. It reminds me of Mercenraries 2, which uses an even less interactive system.
- The server browser available for PC. See, Valve is simply awesome!
Another thing is the borderless window mode! I usually play games in a window and now that I have a dual monitor setup I really wanted to keep my other monitor active. Only way to achieve this is running a game in window mode.
With this borderless window mode I can have my second monitor in an interactive state, while my primary monitor looks like it is in full screen mode (when running at 1680x1050-borderless window mode).
An awesome addition there Valve, can I please have this on TF2 as well!