Left4Dead 2

    l4D1: pc&360

    l4d2: PC&360 version on its way

    I play a lot more on 360 because that's where more of my friends have it but I get the pc version for the mod tools and a few people I know on the pc. Its also nice to see how it looks with the graphics on full.

    The more I play this, the more mixed feelings I have about it. I haven't played it enough to form a full judgement yet (particularly regarding the SI combinations), as I've been pretty busy lately. I'll post a revised opinion after I get in another few weeks' play.

    Anyway, here's my bitch list. Many of these are problems that have been repeated from the first game which I find to be very strange.

    Swamp fever is deathly dull with a terribly boring finale, Dead Centre's mall is hardly dripping with detail and even hard rain's "ooh it's getting stormy" thing doesn't distract from the rolling greyness. I quite like The Parish and Dark Carnival is the best of the bunch -- I think that's a really cool map; it has a lot of distinguishing features and things to see and do. Compare Dark Carnival to Swamp Fever -- is this made by the same company?

    Quite a few of the maps are obscenely short and easy. E.g. Hard Rain 1 & 4 are almost a joke. On Hard Rain 4, a rushing team will face 3 (three) SI attacks; unless something goes badly wrong, nothing is going to happen. Many of the maps have limited cover for SI. Various routes involve walking along a road with parked cars and nothing else to help. This gives many of the maps a Death Toll 4 feel -- rubbish for attacking. Throw in the fact that there's lots of unnecessary medkits + pills and they're even easier. Worse still, there are extra medkits in the safe room or immediately outside the safe room most of the time, rendering early attacks pointless.

    I'm still convinced the variety in things like shotguns + rifles is largely pointless. More to the point, as with the first game, tier 2 weapons are still too strong. Instead of being auto-shotty biased like L4D1, it's all about the rifles now. 3 or 4 people with AKs shred just about everything. The game is a lot more balanced and challenging with tier 1 weapons.

    Tanks get shredded by assault rifles. You can't even throw rocks from afar as they get shot to pieces more or less instantly when rifles are involved. At least in the first game it was an actual distraction to shoot rocks. Valve may have done this to try and force tanks to rush, but rushing on a lot of maps is suicide. Disappointingly, teams can still set tanks on fire when they're AI controlled if the tank gets a poor spawn, plus many tank spawns involve the tank being cut off by a doorway or something similar, meaning you either lose control or get set on fire instantly. This wouldn't be so bad if the choke points let the SI spawn, but you usually end up with 4 survivors in a room blocking all the spawn points.

    I'm getting somewhat irked by the ineffective combinations of SI, too. There are many critical points where you need a charger in particular, but you may not get one. Worse still, you end up with a smoker and jockey in enclosed spaces where you need a charger, boomer and spitter. This is really annoying. In L4D1 the main gripe was that you didn't get a smoker at critical moments. This problem has now been exacerbated by the variety of SI in L4D2. I guess this was somewhat unavoidable.

    Oh and the characters are still boring me. I found the original game's characters a lot more interesting/amusing ("attention all boat owners: We are the boat cops! We command you to pick us up!"). Regardless of the new narrative (which makes versus feel a bit weird) and linked maps, I've yet to come to really like any of the characters other than Coach, and that's because he's a one man cheeseburger apocalypse.

    What do I really like? The charger is awesome for splitting teams up, the Jockey is a funny fucker, 4v4 matchmaking is very good, zombies + frying pans = good combination. The rolling crescendos are much better than the old cupboard fest. It's generally easier to wipe teams and the scoring is better, though not necessarily fair (almost won a game yesterday despite getting owned on for most of it solely because I wiped them as tank on the finale -- we ended up losing by 50 points or so).

    I fully realise that I'm excessively critical because of how much love I have for the first game, btw. I just expected better.

    So now it's official and we can talk about it:

    New DLC is on it's way, reunion of old and new survivors.

    http://store.steampowered.com/news/3237/

    Just played through it: incredibly disappointed. Valve coyly hyped up that the survivors from the first game were going to meet up with the survivors of the second game, and that one of the original survivors was going to die. Awesome, I thought, but no. Here's how Valve managed to fuck that up:

    Quote

    I went into The Passing without expecting anything groundbreaking in terms of gameplay (it is, after all, just a DLC pack). What I was expecting was some story. The overall arc of Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 isn't very presented. Hell the first game was supposed to be 4 unrelated B-Movies strung together with Valve retroactively making an actual coherent story out of them all. But with the release of Crash Course and an overall arc between episodes in Left 4 Dead 2, I was expecting Valve to at least do something memorable for this somewhat hyped The Passing. What we got is two decently sized levels of typical L4D2 zombie killing. Fine. A little stale, but fine.

    What do we get as our two-groups-of-survivors-crossing-paths? We walk by a bridge with three survivors standing on it, looking normal, acting like everything's ok, and ready and willing to help About three sentences later, we're off. Ok... maybe the cool part is coming up. Go about searching these rooms and oh-by-the-way there's Bill's body in a corner room there. No subtle hint of sorrow from the original character NPCs, no awesome go-down-in-flames moment. Everything's fine and there's a body in the corner over there that nobody seems to notice. I understand that this is Left 4 Dead, we're talking about. It's not exactly a game for its cinematic value and storytelling and most people just want to kill zombies and be done with it, but come.on. That's it?!? At the very least, we could have had the original survivors covering the new group as they make their way across the finale, with a short 20 second in-game cut-scene of the old survivors holding off the last wave of zombies while the new heroes speed off into the distance only to have Bill get whisked away by a charger that crept up out of nowhere, his body thrown into the wall with Zoey and Francis shooting after the Charger only to realize they're too late. The Charger and Bill lie motionless on the ground. Zoey breaks into tears hovering over Bills body whimpering "Bill!.... No..." with Francis offering his best attempt at sincerity: "I'm going to miss that old bastard..." [CREDITS]. Something!... Anything is better than oh-by-the-way-Bill-died-when-you-weren't-looking that was delivered. What valve did was pretty much akin to if the original Star Wars never showed Ben Kenobi's death, but rather Ben Kenobi deactivates the tractor beam and is along his merry way and only finding out in dialogue as Luke runs to the Millennium Falcon "Sorry kid, the old man's dead, now get your ass on board!".

    We spent the entire Left 4 Dead game with these characters; their dialogue and dynamics building through each succeeding chapter. With Left 4 Dead 1's scarcity of ammo and supplies with you constantly running out on harder difficulties, forcing you to rely on these characters as your life line in dire situations establishes something with these characters that was completely not acknowledged in The Passing. The only possible way Valve can make this right is if the Left 4 Dead 1 DLC has you play the events prior to The Passing and concludes with Bill's death, and it's actually done in a way that respects the character.

    Yea the l4d1 characters where over hyped a bit too much. Still I though it was a fun map and wish they had given us the source so we could look though it in the editor. Its a good length too, I though some of the other l4d2 campaigns where too long when you are doing them on expert.

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