Left4Dead hands-on preview

[Blín D'ñero]

Platform: PC, Xbox 360
Release Date: Q3 2008

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 17th May 2008

I’m running through a forest, eyes darting left and right looking for both zombies and clichéd, predictable introductions to game reviews where I describe a part of the game in the first person. There’s none of the former and at least one of the latter until – there! A shotgun blast from my left puts the zombie down in one.

The guy sitting next to me laughs and high-fives a guy on his left. Behind me Chet Faliszeck sighs. I grit my teeth, ready for the surge of zombies who heard the gunshot and swarmed us last time I played this level just ten minutes ago.

But the zombies don’t come and Chet breathes a sigh of relief. I look around at him and he chuckles something about how the AI director is re-pacing the game on the fly. My three fellow survivors and I push forward through a crawl space and find a room stocked with weapons, spattered with blood. Someone cheers about finally being able to swap their shotgun for an assault rifle, but I’m more quiet and withdrawn.

I back into a corner, grabbing a Molotov cocktail on the way. I have a bad feeling about this.


Moving through into the next room, it all seems quiet. We’re in a hallway where glass windows let us look out to a warehouse below. There are rooms to the left and right, but apparently no way down. A burly guy in a sleeveless leather jacket checks the room on the left, calls out that it is clear. A girl in a grotty purple hoodie does the same on the right. In the corner the fourth player is trying to crouch-jump onto a sink for some reason. We all breathe easy and laugh at him for a moment.

Then glass smashes and about twenty zombies stream in through the opening, clambering and leaping from the warehouse floor. The zombies are gross like few other in-game enemies – bulbous, dotted in tumours and stained with ichor and ooze. It isn’t that they look just look evil or quote-unquote twisted – there’s no chainsaws for arms or faceless helmets here. The threat is real, human and horribly deformed.

Something in front of me bears its claws and screams at me in a way that almost makes me fill my boots with fear. Someone on my left takes it down with a pistol shot and I hear someone yell thanks; that could be me or it could be the responsive AI of my character.

The guy in the corner calls out that he’s run out of bullets and the player next to me chides him for taking that damn assault rifle. A mass of rags and matted hair leaps on him and pins him to the ground as he pulls out a pistol. Three of us can see this shadow clawing at him, but we all have our own threats to deal with.


Eventually one of us, I think the one in the Army uniform, manages to get a free shot or two in his direction. I run over and help him to his feet, his character remarking that he’s tore up pretty bad. I pull out a medkit and pass it to him, but he’s backing away from me and shooting over my shoulder already.

Slowly I realise that I’ve got my back to the window and that there is something behind me that’s big enough to shake the screen when it moves. It’s a Boomer and if we aren’t careful it’ll kill us all in a matter of moments.

I turn, start backing up and fire with the first thing that comes to hand; the Molotov cocktail.

As the fire starts to lick the ceiling and chew on the walls, everyone starts screaming and dropping to the floor. The Boomer in front of me explodes in a fountain of clotted blood and there’s a single second before I fall down when I realise that I’ve horribly misjudged the situation. Everyone around me sighs and releases their keyboards, waiting for the flames to finish them off.

“You really can’t get the hang of those petrol bombs, can you?” says Chet Faliszeck, the game’s writer. “Never mind though – shall I start up a new game?”

I nod at him slightly faster and more eagerly than is perhaps entirely professional, but I can’t help it – I have to play some more of this game because, frankly, it’s what I’ve been waiting for my whole life; co-op zombie carnage from one of the best developers in the world.


Zombie Barbecue
That introduction was originally meant to be a lot shorter, but I have to admit that I got kind of carried away. Zombies do that to me. I love them to bits, right down the slow, shambling shuffle they do that always makes me think of a teenage suffering from diarrhoea on their first day of school.

Zombies in Left4Dead, Valve and Turtle Rock’s new co-op focused shooter for the PC, aren’t actually like that though. They don’t meander or moan, lurch or lumber.

No, they scramble and scream.

I chatted to Chet Faliszek after I’d finished playing through the game a few times and he laid the basic premise out for me in quite some detail – that these aren’t strictly zombies. They aren’t undead.

“They aren’t actually undead, but they have no humanity left. That part of them is gone and that’s why they hate you,” Chet told me. I did silently question why they hated me personally, but I didn’t actually ask that out loud.


“They’re infected and they’re super-hyper kinetic and filled with energy,” added Chet. I felt it was a good move too – there’s only one thing more exciting than being chased through abandoned buildings by ultra-fast zombies.

The actual gameplay and basic set-up for the game is remarkably simple then; four players join up together via Steam to try and complete a short stint in the roles of four survivors of a zombie infection. What seems simple though actually belies a hidden depth to the way the game is organised.

Left4Dead is made out of four acts, with each act being a small chapter in the on-going story of the survivors and each act comprising of five levels. Each act has one over-arching goal and each level tells a portion of the struggle to reach that goal. The acts then all come together to tell more or less a complete, emergent story.

So, for example, one act might tell the story of the four survivors trying to make it across a part of the city and get from their original hidey-hole to the local hospital. There they plan to get medical supplies and a helicopter.


The journey from A to B will be told across five levels with logical ending and starting points, so that you can play just a single level or an entire act depending on how you want play the game. Each level ends at a smaller safe house where the survivors can rest, reload and regroup before pushing on. It builds flexibility into the narrative; the players can wait here for a week or a minute between levels depending on their playing habits.

These safe points are also important in setting up a flexible playing style – at the start of each and every level you’re in a position where you can swap your guns, grab some health packs and discuss your tactics. When everyone is ready the timer ticks down, the invisible walls lift and the players launch themselves out of the hiding place and into the big, bad world.

Straight away you feel vulnerable, like you’re being watched.

In fact, you are being watched – the AI director is constantly monitoring your every move, tinkering the settings and making sure you never know what’s coming next.

Games Master
The AI director is one of the most powerful and clever tools that Left4Dead has available to it. It’s revolutionary, quietly capable and surprisingly effective once you’ve seen how it really works by playing a level more than once.

But what is the AI director?

Simply put, it’s a games master – a part of the game that sits in the background and constantly monitors a hundred different settings and variables to try and deliver the best game experience to the player.

It is the AI director which is constantly watching you and once you’ve been made aware of its presence it will make you feel vulnerable and scared even when you’re in a safe house – sorry!

The AI director doesn’t just watch though, it also controls everything around you, manipulating the variables to try and deliver to you a unique game experience every time.




By constantly keeping an eye on the health and ammo of every player and then watching the time you’ve played the game for and the pace at which you are progressing, the AI director can learn where and when to spring traps on you…and when to let you slip through unmolested.

During our hands-on we got a chance to see this in action several times. There was one part of a level in particular, just before the warehouse we mentioned in the opening. It was on high ground, with a train yard below us and the edge shielded by a chain link fence and a porta-cabin over on the left. The path led along the edge, through some trees, to an air vent that let us into a safe house.

The first time I played the game I was with three journalists I didn’t know. We approached this area after battling a few smaller skirmishes, but we were all on full health and everyone had begun to naturally spread out. I searched the cabin for health and ammo, two others went to check the edge and peer over it and the last player ran straight off along the path. Then all hell broke loose.

Zombies started swarming from all directions. They clambered up the cliff, vaulted the fence and started flocking towards the two nearest survivors, who backed away while shooting – completely unaware that they were backing in to an even larger crowd that was quickly closing in.




I tried to cover them from the cabin, but grunts started pouring in through the windows and door. My shotgun couldn’t keep up a stream of lead long enough to hold them off and I went down quickly, listening to the screams of my team mates – none of whom lived long enough to revive me.

The next time I came back to play this level it was with a different group of players, some of whom I vaguely recognised. We played with radically different tactics, shouting directions back and forth and staying very close together. The smaller skirmishes were much easier. When we reached that area for the second time, we still stayed close together and collectively moved to the cabin. There we restocked, healed and waited for a few minutes for what we expected to be a massive battle. It never came.

Instead, the AI director must have noticed our higher health, different weapons and improved tactics because when we came out there was no sign of the horde. Instead we managed to get a couple of feet away from the cabin before a single Boomer cam lumbering up behind us. It was a clever move from the AI director – these guys deal in area attacks and will explode when shot, so with us clustered together it stood an excellent chance of wounding us all.

And I’m just going to end this example there because, like the other story before hand, this one ended with me killing my team mates with a Molotov cocktail. Those things really are very unpredictable!


Left and Dying
It’s been three pages and I’ve already shared three rather in-depth stories about Left4Dead and there’s a good reason for that – it’s simply that letting players create unique stories is something that Left4Dead excels at.

Granted, you’re never going to be able to turn to your friends and tell them long stories about character motivations and how you outwitted the bad-guys without firing a single shot – this isn’t Deus Ex after all.

What you will get though is a clear capacity to tell exciting stories about how to charge through crowds of undead and shouldered and shot gunned your way to victory until someone stupid hit you with a Molotov cocktail by accident.

There’s a whole lot more depth to Left4Dead than we’ve let on yet though, like the fact that characters will automatically shout things at each other if the AI director deems that players need to communicate but can’t – it’s very handy to have the guy covering you automatically yell that he’s out of ammo when the two of you are trying your best to hold a front line.




Then there are the zombies themselves – there are a number of different types of zombies and it isn’t just limited to grunts and Boomers. Better yet, all but one type of zombie are playable for players – if you do end up taking a team mates Molotov to the cranium then you respawn as a zombie and try to get your revenge, though we didn’t have a chance to try this ourselves.

One of the most interesting things we found though was the body awareness that characters have. Left4Dead isn’t set in the same mould as Half-Life 2 and players are always both vocal and visible – when you look down you can expect to see your shoes beneath you.

This awareness also comes in to help the gameplay at various points and there are some stunningly effective moves that occasionally come into play. When we mentioned that a player had been pinned down by a zombie before, that wasn’t just a figure of speech – zombies will occasionally knock you down and claw at you viciously. It’s up to you pull out a pistol and try and get some help.

The realism and awareness steps further into the gameplay when it comes to the matter of healing. There’s no HEV suit to administer neuro-anti-venoms and morphine, so you’ll have to bring bandages with you and stop to apply them if you start running low on health. It’s just one of the many touches which bring a wonderful sense of cinematic realism to the game and help make it truly exciting.


First Impressions
Left4Dead was always going to be great, that much we knew. It was coming from Valve and it was about zombies, so even before it was unveiled as a four player co-op we all knew we were going to be in for a good time.




Yet still, Left4Dead managed to surprise us in a number of ways, for reasons both good and bad. On the one hand we were utterly shocked to see how effective the AI director is at making the game unique and constantly replayable. On the other hand though, we have to admit that the levels we played through did seem a bit on the small side and it’s getting to that point where the Source engine might be starting to show its age. The thing is four years old by now and though continued development and expansion has helped, the cause is starting to flag a little.

Not that that matters hugely when you get right down to it – as far as Left4Dead goes gameplay is God and the multiplayer backbone of Steam means that the game will run smoothly from the off.

As I mentioned to Chet when I interviewed him, Valve has a reputation among games developers for testing games absolutely to death. What for many designers would be a case a few weeks at the hands of some tired half-asleep geeks is an on-going process of refinement for Valve and it’s something that really shows in Left4Dead.

The game is immediately playable and easy to pick up, but underneath the hood are some incredibly complex and effective tools to make the experience unpredictable and constantly replayable. This is Left4Dead’s key strength and it makes the game easily one of our most awaited games of this year.

Left4Dead is planned for the PC and Xbox 360 and should be launching later this year.

Source (with pictures)