Character and Story
Left 4 Dead Two continues to take four survivors pitted up against the undead horde in a struggle to survive. This time around the survivors are “Coach”, ironically enough happens to be a high school football coach. Rochelle a local reporter, Ellis a young mechanic and finally a shady conman named Nick who much like Louis seems over dressed for the end of the world.
What’s different?
Unlike its predecessor, Left 4 Dead 2 will actually follow a story arch. The survivors will be starting from Savannah Georgia then having the four survivors seek sanctuary in New Orleans. Something this critic was definitely wanting out of the first one. As I recall from the developers commentary, they wanted to tie in some kind of story, but when they were rescued something tragic would happen. As in No Mercy when you are rescued by the helicopter, the pilot is attacked by a stowaway zombie and the helicopter crashes in the wilderness and the story would have continued on from there. When the beta testers reached the end of the chapter and this happened they expressed they felt like the achieved nothing if they were just going to die or have something tragic happened at the end. I am for one glad Valve has decided to go back to having the game play follow a story, unlike the last one where you could play the chapters in any order. The AI director has been improved a bit to scale the difficulty up and down based on how everyone is performing.
I’m a lumberjack, and I’m ok.
In terms of firearms, the weapons are still shot guns, sniper rifles and assault weapons. A change that I’ve noticed is that you can now have different ammo types. When I was playing the demo I came across “incendiary rounds” that managed to set infected on fire. There are also melee weapons this time around. The only weapon I came across was a fire ax but it has been confirmed by the developers that there will be a chainsaw and a frying pan to help you clear a path through the zombie horde.
New Undead
The new additions to the infected included a charger type unit that does what you might think from the description – charges at the player in an attempt to impale you. There is also a common infected that wear HAZMAT suits that happen to be invulnerable to fire. So any fire damage is negated. There is rumor of a “wandering witch” but when I played through the demo I did not come across one.
Overall Impression
Left 4 Dead 2 takes the same formula that made the original great. Co-op fun with your friends with randomized events and item placement. Left 4 Dead 2 seems to fix all the minor problems that afflicted Left 4 Dead with more power ups and a story that I hope will help develop the characters as I thought the ones in the original seemed rather flat and one dimensional. Left 4 Dead two is scheduled for release sometime near mid November.
