The Haunted Hoard: Left 4 Dead (PC)
While many people fantasize about zombie apocalypse survival strategies, one element always seems to come into play: being with other humans is your best bet for survival and also your greatest liability. Having other people there with you helps lighten the load in fighting back against the undead, but when they’re under attack, you might need to jeopardize your own safety to help them out. In Left 4 Dead, if you see another player downed and surrounded by a swarm of infected, you might want to go in there and save their life so they can cover you if you end up on the other side… but when a helicopter’s about to take off with you on it and they’re falling far behind fighting the horde, maybe you will take that moment and prioritize the victory over saving your ally’s life.
The first-person shooter Left 4 Dead is a four player co-op experience, although bots can fill in the slots in the team if you don’t find other players to join you. A terrible disease has spread at a horrifying pace throughout the world, turning people into crazed mindless monsters who often just stand around aimlessly until they spot a still living human, running at them to tear them apart with their bare hands. You are one of the lucky people immune to the disease though. You can play as the old war veteran Bill, the capable college student Zoey, the optimistic IT worker Louis, and the gruff biker Francis, and while your choice might influence their banter during quieter moments, there’s no major difference between them save that it might be easier to mistake some of them for an infected than the others and accidentally indulge in some weak but still damaging friendly fire. With the simple goal of trying to find somewhere safe away from cities full of killer undead, the four set out and find their efforts routinely spoiled. They’ll find that helicopter or a boat to briefly get away from danger, but fuel and resources necessitate them to head back into peril as they search for a more permanent place to rest. Along the way though, there is a good bit of amusing graffiti to read, people writing on walls in safehouses as they pass through to share thoughts and tips only to find helpful hints are just as common as comedic bickering as people succumb to the stress of the situation. Taking a stop to read the messages while safe can be a treat, the main path through danger at least much clearer so your party doesn’t split up too often trying to find little secrets.
Instead, the group will want to focus most of all on clearing out the undead, and while the six campaigns can range from taking 30 minutes to even an hour and a half, you can expect to often kill around 1000 zombies while trying to get to safety. Most of these manifest as the fairly mindless regular zombies, their numbers and speed often what makes them dangerous. If a zombie does get in close and start attacking, you actually can’t just back off and fire, your character slowing down until they’re clear of the enemy. This is one reason a horde can be so dangerous, a huge group rushing to surround you hard to get away from if you don’t manage the numbers well. A solo player could easily get overwhelmed, but that’s why there are four survivors who are meant to work together to help thin the crowd and prevent those zombie dogpiles. If you do take too much damage you’ll go down to the ground, but with your infinite ammo pistol you can try to fend off the undead until another player comes over and revives you. It can still be tense if there are too many zombies to interrupt the effort, but should you perish before being saved, you can sometimes reappear later in the level, locked in a closet for your partners to bring back into the action so you aren’t out of the game entirely.
Health kits and the temporary extra life provided by pills are balanced to make recovering from injury a precious thing though, and the action gets more complicated by the existence of special infected. As introduced excellently in an opening cutscene set two weeks after the initial infection, there are a few types of special infected you need to watch out for as they can lead to dire situations if not addressed properly. The Boomer is a bloated and surprisingly stealthy sort, the big guy living up to his name and detonating once he’s shot. Should he vomit bile upon you or you stand too close during the burst, you’ll get covered in his goo that helps a horde of regular zombies locate you while you can barely see the danger coming. Hunters try to pounce on you and slash away while you’re pinned to the ground, others needing to bail you out quickly or you’ll lose health in a hurry. Smokers are deadly stalkers, snagging you with a long tongue and pulling you away from the group to either punish you for breaking away too much or isolate you as they reel you into an often devious perch away from the others. Tanks are a boss monster of sort, a big powerful zombie who can smash you through the air if they get in close or even hurl rubble at you if you do keep your distance, although the game usually only whips out tanks at set points to serve as a shift towards a strong singular foe rather than dozens of regular zombies. The Witch, however, might be more fearsome, for if she can get her claws into you, it will knock you down no matter how much health you have.
The Witch, however, is balanced well by a feature all the infected have. Musical stings or other audio cues will indicate when a special infected is nearby, the burbling of a Boomer, the coughing of a smoker, or that distinct mournful crying of a Witch helping you be on guard and watchful so you aren’t caught too off guard if you’re paying attention. The Witch also won’t strike unless you disturb her first, and while she is sometimes pretty close to the main path forward, Left 4 Dead levels can often give you a good deal of open walking space and optional paths to get around her. Hit her with a flashlight beam, fire upon her, or otherwise catch her attention though, and you’ll learn your lesson for being careless. There are other times you might trigger a huge horde of regular foes with things like tripping car alarms or even activating mechanisms necessary for progress, Left 4 Dead spacing out exploration lead by the players with points where you might need to stand your ground for a bit to force a more difficult encounter. The game does have an “AI Director”, a system that is supposedly watching the performance of the players and trying to space out the appearance of special infected to make the experience different each time while better players will experience rising pressure to challenge them. It can sometimes feel a little heavy-handed, throwing all of the weaker special infected at you all in a row, but those more obvious moments stand out a bit because otherwise the game can often pace out progression well with both the guaranteed major moments of required action and the surprise appearance of tougher foes or hordes.
As you explore city streets, climb to the top of a hospital, stand your ground in a church graveyard, and push through the wilderness, you’ll find your weapon options aren’t as expansive as you might like. Every player will always have a pistol with infinite ammo that does need to reload but can be doubled up if you find another pistol, but besides that you only get to carry one other firearm at a time. Usually at the start you’ll be allowed to pick between a pump shotgun and a submachine gun as your second gun, and they fill different niches quite clearly. The shotgun is better for quick kills on special infected or clearing a hall of undead quickly, but its slow firing rate and difficulty with spread out crowds can really come back to bite you. The submachine gun is more straightforward, quick firing but taking more time to down its targets. Thankfully, no weapon in Left 4 Dead is truly weak, even a pistol able to fend off many standard enemies well enough, which works in your favor when you find the second tier of weapons that really give you some specialized stopping power. The assault rifle is like the upgrade to the submachine gun in terms of power and function, but the auto shotgun removes much of the pump shotgun’s limitations save for a fairly slow reload time. A hunting rifle sounds like a poor bet, its sniping option not given as many opportunities to use as you might like, but it fires remarkably fast and can take out special infected from a distance quickly. This does mean you’ve essentially only got six guns though all things considered, the pistols non-negotiable and two of the guns replaced by more powerful versions, but at least all of the higher strength firearms do have valid value and have the pistol to fall back on when their hindrances do arise, meaning a group of four that splits the guns wisely can be an effective zombie killing force without anyone feeling like they’re dragging the team down.
Even the explosives can feel like a well-considered part of the experience despite their own limits. A Molotov will ignite an area, making for a spread of fire that wears down most anything that runs through it, and the pipe bomb’s beeping lures all regular zombies towards it before taking them out in one big blast. These are naturally not too common but often a reward alongside the healing items for poking around areas more, the game’s difficulty doing a good job at making finds of most any resource welcome while not starving you too much since the load can be split between teammates. You can use your health kits on each other, notify each other about finds, and clear the hordes more cleanly with teamwork, although every campaign does terminate in a moment where everyone has to stand their ground during an onslaught as they await rescue. When a vehicle shows up, everyone needs to get on board, but if they get taken down before they reach it, you might clear the campaign a character short. This doesn’t have any long term ramifications, a stats screen presented like movie credits calling people out perhaps the only real impact other than what achievements are earned, but it does feel like the moment that may test your appreciation for your teammates. Sure, safehouses serve as checkpoints and the game spaces them well enough, but some final stands are difficult and that temptation to just take the win can make you leave your allies for dead if it looks like the better option.
However, there are modes outside of the campaign levels that move away from that search for rescue. Versus repurposes the campaign maps into competitions between two teams. One side features the survivors playing the level like normal, but the other team now get a chance to be the special infected. The human team will only encounter regular zombies for the most part here outside of the human controlled special infected, players able to try their hands at being Boomers, Hunters, Smokers, and even in some situations Tanks. Trying to get into the mindset to effectively ambush players can be thrilling… or underwhelming when you get blasted easily, but both teams get turns on each side of the conflict. Points are earned to determine who did best across the two roles, although playing as the infected can sometimes be rough when against competent survivors since you can struggle to really make a mark. The Survival mode though is a bit more straightforward, a slice of a campaign level where you need to stand your ground turned into an effort to last as long as you can as undead keep funneling in. There are bronze, silver, and gold medals to earn if you can stick it out for long enough, death inevitable but a good team able to hold in there to earn their rewards. For a slice of the well-balanced zombie shooting action it’s easy to return to and a bit strategic as well, a nice way to keep the action going compared to Versus that can be strained a bit by the power dynamics and the need to go through full campaigns essentially twice over to determine a victor.
THE VERDICT: Left 4 Dead pushes four player teams to become tight knit groups that deal with danger carefully without having to lean into frustrating design to get there. Item distribution and the special infected types can devastate sloppy players, but when you’re working in concert, you can cover your bases and better handle the challenging hordes and hectic last stands. Playing as a special zombie in Versus isn’t as exciting as it sounds and the weapon variety could be broadened, but Left 4 Dead’s campaigns provide powerful weapons and yet make it easy for fortunes to shift if you can’t keep up, the intense action making survival something you have to really fight to earn.
And so, I give Left 4 Dead for PC…
A GREAT rating. By the time you reach the end of the game’s sixth campaign, you’ll have likely found your groove, especially if your teammates are similarly experienced. At the same time, that doesn’t mean a win’s guaranteed, because while you might have your ears pricked for special infected cues and know to not stray from your allies, you can still get slammed away from the group by a Tank, floored by a Witch, or overwhelmed after a Boomer who has drawn tens of zombies into a crowd around you. While the range of special infected and weapons is limited, it’s also tightly designed, meaning you can count on certain elements like all of the weapons being reliable and that your allies will be quick to act appropriately when a tougher enemy is around. The areas you explore can bring some new variety to the experience, a trainyard for example giving you the top of train cars to fire down from but each train is also essentially a wall for zombies to hide around in droves. A dark apartment building can see you in cramped corners, but then some last stands like the airport are so open you have to worry the undead can come at you from any angle. Figuring out how to hold your ground or knowing to keep moving so zombie hordes can’t have time to manifest provide different types of pressure and Left 4 Dead isn’t interested in making healing too easy, your lingering injuries sometimes an ominous element hanging over your head as you press on and fear what might happen if a Smoker snags you while you’re distracted. Even if the AI Director is supposedly pulling a good amount of the strings, Left 4 Dead still feels purposeful because its systems are flexible and its campaigns can provide areas that host different action well, and if modes like Versus could better figure out the balance, then Left 4 Dead would have been a game worth returning to more often than just having a blast with friends in thrilling and sometimes difficult tests of your cooperation.
Left 4 Dead 2 would come along after Left 4 Dead though and expand it in many meaningful ways, weapon options and special infected types being the obvious areas of improvement, but they had the solid and well-honed fundamentals of this zombie shooter to build from. In fact, you can see the lingering influence of Left 4 Dead in other future cooperative shooters like Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, an emphasis on foes who can impact the team dynamics certainly one of the easier elements to pick up from Left 4 Dead’s action design. The game’s name almost amusingly feels like a caution against leaving players for dead, as teamwork is what’s needed to hold your own against foes who can overwhelm players who don’t get along with the group. Game controlled companions can at least make it feasible solo and the game is even a little overzealous in having computer players sub in for possibly disconnected or idling players so you aren’t left with a useless ally, so while you may end up leaving someone behind in that chaotic rush to clear the level, you’ll only get there if you keep your allies alive and fighting along the way to properly face the zombie menace.