Left 4 Dead (2008)

When Left 4 Dead came out, it was a new concept for me. Fully rendered 3D zombies and a series of stages to progress through with your friends, in order to be rescued. I had so much fun with this game and its original concept back then, inspired many other games to follow the same or a shared format.

In Left 4 Dead, you play as one of four characters who, as a group, need to travel to an extraction point from where they are rescued. There are a lot of maps to choose from and each map consists of five levels.

On your journey you come across hordes of infected and, every fifty steps or so, one of the three special infected this game has, appears and tries to make your life miserable. Those three are the Smoker, which uses his long tongue to reel you in and choke you, the Boomer (no not a sixty year old man with forty grandchildren), a bloated fat sack of pus that explodes on you, covering you in goo and attracting other infected, and the Hunter, a hacker-man type dude in a hoodie that jumps and claws at you with the most deafening screech. You find scarce resources like health packs and pills to keep you going, and later on, you find some better weapons.

Left 4 Dead features two mini boss type infected that appears once in a while. Those are the Witch, a mutated girl that sobs and sits on the ground. When you startle her, she goes apesh!t and charges towards you. If she hits you, it’s a one-way ticket to the floor. And then there is the Tank. An oversized bodybuilder zombie on steroids. He is the Left 4 Dead variant of “Hulk Smash” and one can quickly understand what will happen if he successfully shows you the way of the fist.

You can play Left 4 Dead with friends or random people, where each person takes over one of the four characters. You can play solo, in which case the other three survivors are filled in with bots. The AI of those bots is surprisingly decent, although they feel a little lifeless, which is to be expected from playing with bots.
The action is intense, and the tension builds up when you are almost there or your whole team is down, and everyone is depending on you. This feeling is enhanced on higher difficulty levels.

The graphics in Left 4 Dead are dark and grim and fine to look at. The animations are a little sluggish and zombies dying, do so in a scripted motion. When you encounter the Witch for example, and you pump her full of shotgun hail, she casually falls down to the ground on heir knees and dies. She should be flying to the nearest planet in a “realistic” situation.

The controls are smooth and work very well. I really like that you can stomp zombies that get to close, so you earn yourself the necessary second to blow their head off.

You also got a versus mode in which you can be one of the special infected and need to let the survivors fail their journey at any cost.

The sound design is excellent. The grunts of the zombies, the ambient music and weapon fire, all sounds very good.

Like I said, I had so much fun with Left 4 Dead and can play it anytime for a few rounds of old-school fun.

Definitely recommend it.