A silently screaming zombie suddenly finding itself beheaded takes a few more steps towards me before crumpling to the floor. I glance around, and that’s when I hear it; an engine. An APC is coming towards the house we’ve barricaded ourselves in. I scramble out the window only to see it pull up…and then continue driving around the house. I panic and start chasing after it, skirting across the edges of the roof and trying my damnedest not to fall to a not necessarily premature grave, considering the circumstances. Finally it stops; beginning the agonizingly long process of opening its hatch. My leap off the building may have been a little over eager. The fall was a bit harder than I anticipated, and I wasted a few precious seconds reorienting myself and getting off the ground. Stupid, man. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Suddenly the com screams to life. I turn to see my sole remaining teammate–on the ground behind me and surrounded by a horde of the undead that wanted nothing more than to tear him to shreds. I take a step towards him, readying my shotgun. The APC is to my back, along with god knows what that could be creeping up behind me. A million thoughts are crashing around my head, but they all boiled down to fight or flight. Fight, or flight? That’s when I hear a screamer, and that’s all the reason I need. I turn my back on him and continue shuffling towards the APC. Apparently my shuffling was lackluster; the horde was on me well before I made it. What happened next was a desperate flurry of shotgun blasts and rifle butting, but somehow I managed to make it on, barely, with a sliver of health left. I didn’t even realize how much I was trembling until the end game stats started to roll.
There are many factors that go into how we evaluate games, but at the end of the day, we’re always brought to the same question; how did the game make us feel? If, upon completion, a game makes us feel sad, or frightened, or euphoric, it’s these sensations that will stay long after you forget everything else.
And Left 4 Dead excels in this regard. Playing with friends, you’ll celebrate your triumphs, mourn your losses, and share the same feeling of dread when confronted with seemingly impossible odds. And the reason it succeeds so much is because of the expertly refined gameplay mechanics that encourage co-operation on an intimate scale rivaled by few other game experiences.
The game proper can be summed up fairly simply. Players assume the role of one of four identically playing survivors that have somehow managed to group together and avoid turning into the living dead. Players can either play a 4 player cooperative game against the computer, or an 8 player VS game that pits a team of humans against special zombies. Gameplay is divided up into four distinct campaigns, with each campaign being further divided into five chapters. And while the campaigns are distinct, they all have the same simple objective: get from point A to point B without dying.
Of course, during a zombie outbreak, it’s easier said than done. Survivors face a veritable menagerie of the walking dead. The standard zombies are dangerous in numbers; they only take a few bullets to drop, but if they surround you then things can go bad fast, as their hits impede your movement, making escape nearly impossible as long as they’re attacking. Hunters are similar to the spider zombies from Half-Life 2—they’re given away by their banshee shrieks and are able to pounce and instantly incapacitate a survivor. Smokers are similarly abled, only instead of pouncing they’re able to drag survivors away from the group with their tongue—usually from great distances. In a trickier vein, boomers are able to projectile vomit on survivors, temporarily blinding them and attracting a horde of zombies to their location. Upon their death, they also spray a wall of vomit in a small radius around their bodies, making their disposal particularly tricky. And while these are deadly in conjunction with each other, the absolute star of the zombie horde has got to be the Tank, a monstrously imposing figure that can soak up bullets as if they were were air pellets. Rounding out the team is the witch, a sort of proximity mine that will almost always kill whoever unwittingly disturbs her.
Because each special type of zombie specializes in disrupting survivors, either by separating, incapacitating, or flooding them with zombies, co-operation and staying close are of the utmost importance. It’s no exaggeration to say that the odds of the survivors being completely wiped out increases an order of magnitude for every survivor that falls. And it’s the very necessity of their survival that helps contribute to the sense of camaraderie that pervades throughout. Because, while it’s all well and good to get on well with your teammates, one usually finds themselves a bit more appreciative when they very much depend on them for their very survival. And the game acknowledges this by making it making cooperation a necessity without too severely punishing the weakest link. Survivors are, with the exception of the hardest difficulty, fairly hard buggers to kill. Once they run out of health, they become incapacitated, but still able to fire their pistols. From there they can be revived and downed and revived once more before finally kicking the bucket upon falling once more. Event then though, they can be revived later on in the level. Dying does have consequences; the remaining survivors are at much greater peril and the dead players gets to watch his friends battle desperately to revive them. It’s a fixable problem, but it creates great tension.
Of course, too much tension is never a good thing; it just leads to exhaustion. The developers attempt to alleviate this issue with an AI they refer to as the ‘Director’. It takes into account how they survivors are generally faring, and applies just enough pressure to keep things interesting without becoming tiring. It accomplishes through mixing up the zombie spawns as well as the beneficial items scattered throughout the level. It gets it right most of the time, although it’s prone to doing odd things like loading the survivors down with medpacks when they’re all mostly healthy, or spawning a horde of zombies literally on top of them. The most important thing is that it mixes it up just enough to make replaying the campaigns an enjoyable experience. Good thing too, as they can be completed in around two hours on a challenging difficulty.
So, the actual gameplay mechanics are pretty universally solid, but that’s only half the equation. It’s no use having a good game is connecting and playing with other people is a huge frustration. For the most part, Valve gets it right. It’s easy to hop into a game with friends, or right away if you’re feeling jumpy. Players can join a game in progress, and should they drop, they’re replaced by a sharpshooting, if tactically unwise, bot. Another nice touch is that players are given the option of temporarily handing control of their character over to a bot should they have to use the bathroom or take a pesky phone call. Finally, voice communication is built in and intuitive, with support for open channel and push to talk. The only real frustration I’ve encountered is the fact that players are unable to choose their own dedicated server, leaving themselves vulnerable to the whims of whoever owns the server they randomly land in. This can lead to anything from bizarre server rules and random kicking to unreasonable server locations, prompting poor latency on the part of half or sometimes the entire team. It’s not enough to wreck the game, but on a particularly unlucky night, it can take up to twenty minutes just to find an acceptable server. The problem is compounded in vs games, where the risk of people randomly being kicked increases as the number of players doubles.
Historically, high expectations and Valve games go hand in hand. It’s been a long wait, but Left 4 Dead doesn’t disappoint. The tight cooperative gameplay mechanics and scaling difficulty provide players who prefer co-op a great deal of replayability, and for those with a more competitive streak, vs. mode is just as compelling. The entire game is a great example of how mechanics can drive player behavior, and if it encourages more developers to opt for this sort of open ended yet cinematic co-operative play, then all the better. If L4D is anything to go by, it’s something we could all enjoy more of.