Review: Left 4 Dead

There have been countless survival horror video games since Resident Evil got the severed head rolling in 1996, but Left 4 Dead takes things in a new direction, making your friends just as important as your enemies.

You play one of four survivors - tattooed biker Francis, horror flick fan Zoey, Nam veteran Bill, or IT geek Louis - trying to escape from a series of zombie-infested locales including city hospitals, sewers, airports, nature reserves, cornfields, and rural towns.

While you can slug through the four campaigns by yourself, the real joy comes when you hook up with friends and play online. When you're snug in the 'safe room', it's easy to abandon a computer-controlled ally who's fallen to the ravenous zombie horde, but much harder when it's a mate (screaming at you to help them, if you're playing with headsets enabled).

Each of the campaigns can be played independently, and they're styled as z-grade movies with titles such as No Mercy, Blood Harvest, and Road Toll, 'movie posters' and credits at the end.

Lovers of fast and slow zombies are catered for. In general, they lurch around like extras in a George Romero flick but piss them off by, for example, triggering a car alarm, and you've got yourself a 28 Days Later-style gorefest.

There are also 'special' zombies to keep you on your toes: the vomiting Boomer, acrobatic Hunter, Gene Simmons-esque Smoker, the Hulk-like Tank, and the downright freaky Witch (if you hear crying, turn off your goddamned torch).

Fear not. You're armed with a pistol (unlimited ammo) and can pick up other weapons as you go: Uzi, pump-action shotgun, M16A3 assault rifle, Benelli M4 Super 90 combat shotgun, and Ruger Mini-14 rifle. There's also molotovs and pipe bombs (which actually attract zombies, for maximum splat).

It's the details that make this game come alive. The corpse lying on the bed by the light of the flickering TV; the roaches that run from underneath the wrecked fridge door; the graffiti scratched onto the safe house walls (No zombie is safe from Chicago Ted).

Like most half-decent zombie flicks, each campaign ends with a desperate battle against wave after wave of undead freaks. But if you make it, if the four of you survive intact, there's a real sense of achievement.

Left 4 Dead is the closest you can get to a zombie apocalypse, without actually being in one.

Left 4 Dead is available from all good games stores for the PC and Xbox 360. This review refers to the Xbox 360 version.



Guest review by Gary Kemble