Left 4 Dead

“Another Zombie game, so what?”, I hear you cry. Yes, we are spoiled with Dead Rising and it’s squillions of zombies (and squillions of way to kill them) but coming later this year is this little tasty take on the Zombie FPS genre.
Ok, on first look at Left 4 Dead’s feature list it’s kinda your basic, generic, done-to-death survival Zombie game:

• Location – Contemporary America (yawn).
• Playable survivors – 4.
• Survivors to include a Vietnam vet – Yes, sir. All present and correct, sir.
• Do you have to survive by killing lots of Zombies – Yes.
• Any Zombines? – No, silly they are in Half-Life: Episode 1.
• Virus-induced Zombies then – Yep.
• Multiplayer – Yes.
• Single player – Yes. The game’s AI will control the other 3 characters.
• Graphics engine – Source engine from Valve.
• Playable Zombies? – Yes. 4 of them!

See that last point about playable Zombies? It is this single, oh so overlooked, feature alone that sets Left 4 Dead apart from all other Zombie games. Finally, you get to play as a Zombie and kill all those damn, annoying survivors.

As a Zombie, which quite frankly I’m always going to be, you can’t use weapons but you can do stuff like vomit blood on everyone. The other 3 classes of Zombies have other abilities which we get to find about when the game is released.

Stealth and cunning are the way of the Zombie (rather surprisingly, unlike the Zombies in Shawn of the Dead who were really dumb!) if you want to survive, err, continue to be dead. Full frontal attacks on well armed survivor groups = lots of Zombie death. However, attacking when they are out of ammo or re-loading = lots of survivor death. If you do happen to be killed by any of the survivors (boo!) you respawn back into the fray after a short time.

See you all online then. I’ll be the Zombie muttering “fresh brains” most of the time and vomiting lots of blood everywhere.

Release date: First half of 2007 (PC), Winter 2007 (Xbox 360).

Related links:
Left 4 dead website
Steam – Valve’s software distribution platform