Left 4 Dead - Dated But Still Very Enjoyable

We all have that one friend who seems to never have aged since they were 16, except maybe 3 days but other than that looks pretty much the same. Maybe it's just me but that's what I likened Left 4 Dead to. Remember back in 2008 when it came out and everyone went nuts over it? Yeah, I remember that too. I remember those moments - the first time I saw the release trailer, the first time I reached the top of Mercy Hospital, and the first time I confronted the Tank. That was a quite a long ago, but you'd be foolish to think that nobody's still playing this gem anymore these days.

In case you've forgotten or perhaps have never played it (please tell me you have), Left 4 Dead is a coop survival shooter taking place during a zombie apocalypse. Some kind of a virus goes loose, causing a pandemic known as the Green Flu which turns people into walking corpses, dubbed "the infected"; the term 'zombie' is actually never used at all in the game. Two weeks after the outbreak, four player-characters who are immune to the virus, dubbed "the Survivors", team up and fight through hordes of infected to make their way to safety. The premise of the game is basically that - go from point A to point B while shooting zombies.

There's Bill, the old-but-still-kickass Vietnam veteran whose memorable opening line, "son we've just crossed the street" still sends a chill of excitement down my spine. There's Zoey, a college student and the youngest of the bunch. Her questionable proficiency with firearms is justified by the hours she used to spend on watching action movies in her dorm before the outbreak (yeah, right, by that logic then every action movie fan is a gun expert by their 100th movie). There's also Francis, an outlaw biker, complete with a leather jacket and skull tattoos. Also, beard and boots. Last but not least, we have Louis, an IT analyst whose laid-back personality makes you feel like, "Oh well, all hell breaks loose but at least we always have Louis here".

Now I may be alone in this, but I firmly believe that the Survivors are the (most) perfect blend of characters in any work of fiction I ever read, played or watched. The blend of characters in the sequel Left 4 Dead 2 is nothing compared to the original one. Valve did have an earlier version of Bill and his group, but all of them looked weary and lacked any unique personality. I'm so glad Valve decided to come up with the ones we have now. Sure there's not much plot to the game that sort of nurtures the development of these characters, but somehow I can feel the different personalities and moods that each of these characters brings. Louis is vibrant for example, and in the contrary, Bill is serious and tense. That's the magic of this blend of characters. I don't have the word for it, and if I keep on trying to explain something as vague as this, I'll probably start to sound nonsense and lose my point. Go figure.

Have mercy please, I'm running out on ammo.

Left 4 Dead is an arcade shooter. You have different modes to play but most of the time you'll be cycling through the same maps but with different people. As said beforehand, there's not much plot to the game and the premise is extremely simple. The characters fight (mostly by shooting) their way through urban apartments, scary cornfields, sewers (because no game is complete without a sewer level), cemeteries, burning airports and many other classic zombie movie settings to get to the safehouse of each of these locations, then rest before continuing their journey to another safe house and the next until they finally reach the end of the level. That's basically the way the game works. No specific quests, no complex inventory management, no character development, and all you need to do is to make your way from A to B. This is why it still amazes me even today that with such a simple premise, Left 4 Dead is still capable of offering layers of replayability to players. Hence, this is why the game lacks in narrative in favor of the replayability.

While each level has one distinct destination, which is the safehouse, there are various routes you can take to get there, although it's still quite linear, but at least they're not structured like the tight corridors of those strictly linear first-person shooters such as the not-so-recent FEAR 3 in which all you can do other than moving forward is going the opposite direction (aka backwards), but even then there's absolutely zero point of backtracking, making such shooter games no different from a 2D side-scroller save for being 3D. You can take shortcuts, or if you choose to, you can explore the area or take the longer routes to search for supplies.

God exists in Left 4 Dead and goes by the in-game name of the AI Director. The AI Director is a system that monitors and studies your playstyles, and it will place items and enemy spawn points based on how you play the game. It also controls other things like music and the mood of the game. The less intelligent AI are the bots, but they're quite okay if you chooses to play solo. In fact they're incredibly much more capable compared to bots found in other games. The first thing I noticed was how efficient they are when it comes to pathfinding. They're always alert, move as soon as you do and you can count on them to help you up when you're pinned down by a special infected, except when they're already inside a safehouse, in which case they won't help you at all even if you're right outside of the door. Also, they are not only good with firearms, but use them smartly. Once I noticed a bot playing as Zoey and it constantly switched between a sniper rifle and dual pistols according to the proximity of its target enemy. The bots' only weakness is that while they're the first to pick up meds, they usually leave the grenades (molotovs and pipe-bombs) alone. Perhaps they're not developed to be smart enough to use throw-able weapons, so maybe the developer excluded their ability to pick those things up entirely. Hmm, I never looked at it that way until now.

If you look closely enough, the attire of the infected are different based on the settings, showing how dedicated the developers were to details. These guys here were probably working on construction site when the outbreak occurs, judging from their attire.

The various settings in the game stay true to those of a good zombie movie. Hospitals, abandoned churches, small villages, farm houses and the works; they're dark, murky and gloomy although after a while they kind of feel the same but this isn't much of a problem, at least to me, which is quite surprising, to be honest. They actually do make you feel like the world is torn apart by the pandemic, and those who survive had took off in a total hurry, and the Survivors were left for dead. When you see those infected in army uniforms, it sort of give you the sense of despair, that if a pandemic as serious as this one was to occur in real-life, even the military would be no match for it. All in all the settings work really well to portray those cheap and typical washed out zombie movies, which by the way no mean a bad thing. This is what makes the original Left 4 Dead so special and distinct from the sequel, which has more various settings but feel more similar to other survival shooters such as Dead Island instead of having its own distinguishable atmosphere like the first one has.

The settings can be unnerving at times. The sound cue that signals the presence of a special infected adds to the tension. The one I'm most cautious to is that of the Hunter as it growls quietly in the dark waiting to leap at you as soon as you're within its line of sight. The only thing I dislike about those dark hallways is how quickly (in probably two or three seconds) they give me motion sickness when my in-game vision is limited to the circular illumination of my flashlight. Now and then you'll hear a low sobbing somewhere. That signals the presence of the special zombie known as the Witch. There are quite a few things that bug me about the Witch, but mostly it's the fact that she cries. As far as I'm concerned, zombies don't cry. Perhaps she's a new kind of zombie. While the others eat brains all day, all she does is cry. Maybe she's suffering from an eating disorder, most likely anorexia. Come to think of it, she's really skinny for a zombie.

Regardless, the Witch isn't hostile unless you make her so. If this game was real-life, it'd be best to leave her alone. But it's not real-life, so killing the Witch is a must for the sole purpose of having that boyish fun from annoying her. The Witch is dangerous for one reason: once provoked, she goes straight at you and as soon as she touches you, you'll be knocked down and with her razor-sharp claws, she'll scratch your pretty face to death. But she's easy to put down to sleep, just make sure you do it quickly. While you can always kill a Witch, she'll show up somewhere else later. Same hair, same clothes, same skinny frame (that was a joke, sometimes I like breaking the fourth wall). Let's see, what are the other special infected. Oh, there's Tank, an aggressive and bulky infected who is obviously on steroids. Then there's Hunter, the hooded assassin who stalks your group and leaps at you before you even have the chance to pull the trigger. Then there's Boomer the couch potato and Smoker the strangler. Seeing from the way I described these special infected, you know how fond I've grown of them. That's another thing that makes Left 4 Dead so special and lovable.

Left 4 Dead's movie poster-style loading screens.

There are many great games out there that were great during their prime but were left for dead (pun obviously intended) when their more aesthetically-appealing sequels started overshadowing them. Take Call of Duty 2 as an example. It was a great game, one of my favorite classic shooters but face it; the term "Call of Duty" is more synonymous to those post-Modern Warfare games, people hardly recognizes the old games as a part of the Call of Duty franchise. "United Offensive? The fuck is that?" Left 4 Dead too has passed its prime, but at least it's not entirely forgotten. People still look at it today the same way they did when it came out; only now as an aging game.

Yes, Left 4 Dead is dated, and as a matter of fact at the time of its release, there were comments saying that Source Engine was beginning to show its age. Dated it may be, but even today, it's far from being dead. Just like other Valve games; such as Half Life, Counter Strike (mod) and Team Fortress 2; what keeps the game fresh is not just the sentimental value, but also the fact that it really is that good. Left 4 Dead, like I said in the beginning, is like an old friend who you will always enjoy spending time with.