Left 4 Dead demo impressions

YEAH!

This game’s good! The demo’s been out for a couple of days and, despite a few issues concerning lag and the availability of dedicated servers, I’ve been having a blast shooting things with other people online. I won’t write much more – there are dozens of previews online, plus you can download the demo yourself and find out how you like it – but I’d like to briefly mention a thing or two.

The game is meant to be played cooperatively with other people. Forget those dumb bots. Also! Go for the advanced or expert difficulty to experience a relatively challenging levell of resistance from the mindless undead. Harder games are much more interesting, as tactics and co-op coordination really come into play.

The whole “Director” thing kind of reminds me of crazy Blast Processing-like marketing talk. In practice, you do notice differences from one game to the next. The AI controls the sound effects, music and visual effects to set the mood. It also rearranges the placement of health items and weapon caches and manages the flow of enemies. It works well (and by that I mean unobtrusively), if a bit cruelly sometimes, but doesn’t deserve its own special name.

Things absent from the demo  that I expect to find in the full version are: a) branching paths through the levels (the couple of levels on the demo were linear) and b) the ability to play as the Infected, which should be tons of fun.

I’m glad this game turned out well.

PS: I watched Ice Age 1 and 2 yesterday. They were fun! I stole the picture above from the second movie.