The corridors are choking on the detritus of panic, the walls and floors blotted with unfi nished paperwork and gore. Here and there, patients wander about in dull-eyed torpor, their fingers tracing listless silhouettes on overturned desks. Around a corner, something howls into the stifling air, its outrage muted by the splintered doors and rotting bodies between us.
Bill reloads his shotgun and sucks on a cigarette. “Hunter nearby,” he drawls, his eyes narrowing against the gloom. Moments later, a hooded figure bursts into view, clearing the passageway in a single lunge to pin Francis to the ground, desperately tearing at his face with grimy fingers. Their deceptive indifference promptly abandoned, the errant patients turn on our group, fury twisting their bodies into sudden and extraordinary exertion.
Disorder erupts from every doorway, as Mercy Hospital’s previously fl awless health and safety record takes another hard hit.
This zombie apocalypse stuff really sucks for staff morale, and Betty down in Human Resources would be pitching an apoplexy if she weren’t already smeared most of the way across her office.
Okay, so technically they’re not zombies, but rather the luckless casualties of a virulent, psychosis-inducing weapons-grade strain of rabies… but whatever. They look like zombies, and that makes them zombies in my Big Book of Contingency Plans.
So anyway, these zombies have overrun just about everywhere, leaving those left mysteriously unspoiled by the pandemic to their own devices in the midst of the rubble of civilisation and a relentless, prowling host.
Left 4 Dead offers players the chance to live the Zombie Apocalypse Dream with three friends in an all-out extravaganza of
Molotov cocktails, mostly unidentifiable grisly bits, and an enormous, lumbering testimonial to the dangers of steroid abuse.
Working together (which mostly involves not inadvertently killing each other with careless shots), players must negotiate a
series of monster closets disguised as a hospital/airport/small town/rural farmland, and find rescue. Driven by an ingenious artificial intelligence dubbed “The Director,” the game adapts dynamically to players’ progress, becoming increasingly difficult or lenient according to their changing circumstances.
Enemy boss characters and supply spawns, for example, are never quite the same between plays through, depending entirely on context. Everything is presented with the sort of inimitable verve and class we’ve all come to expect from Gabe and his pals over at Valve Corp., and the only real gripe I can level at the game is the lack of content. The game ships
with just four scenarios, each of which plays out in 45-90 minutes.
While the procedural narrative and additional versus multiplayer mode allow for a reasonable number of replays, the limited settings and enemy types become a bit “been there, shot that” quickly. If their content model behind Team Fortress 2 is anything to go by, however, we can probably look forward to magnanimous rollouts of free add-ons over the next few months.
Until then,however, Left 4 Dead feels a bit skimpy.
Loading ...
