Its roster of weapons may be fairly small, but there isn’t a bad one among them. Indeed, Left 4 Dead is probably Valve’s slickest and sharpest game. But it helps that Left 4 Dead is also an astonishingly good shooter, a fact that it rarely gets enough credit for on account of its multiplayer leanings. It’s a really clever approach to cooperative game design, and it’s what makes Left 4 Dead special. Through this, the game emphasises the importance of communication, of watching each other's backs, of moving in sync with one another and covering every possible angle. The Witch places herself at points in the level where there’s often no way past her, often forcing one player to risk their entire health bar to get rid of her.Īll the while, the game uses its regular Infected to draw players into certain areas, throwing hordes of random sizes at you to throw off your pacing and disguise the attacks of its Special Infected. The Tank punches players so hard they fly across the room. The Boomer blinds you and pushes you away from one another with its vast, exploding carcass. The Smoker’s tongue drags players away from the team. This is most evident in its Special Infected. Instead, Left 4 Dead takes a reverse-psychological approach to encouraging teamwork, constantly trying to separate and isolate players, while generally disrupting your carefully laid plans. You can hand your teammates a bottle of pills, heal them with your own medkit, and help them on their feet if they get knocked down, but that’s about it. Left 4 Dead has surprisingly few player-to-player interactions. When it does this, you just know that it’s cooking up something particularly unpleasant.Īs well as keeping the game fresh and unpredictable, the AI Director ties into what makes Left 4 Dead such a compelling cooperative game, namely that it is constantly trying to stop you from cooperating. The most terrifying moments are when it clears the area of zombies entirely, letting you travel for a few brief moments unhindered. Whether it’s chucking a massive horde of zombies at you or casually dropping a Tank in the worst possible location, the AI Director always ensures the tension is ratcheted as high as it can go. Hovering somewhere above you like a malevolent god, the AI Director ensures that while Left 4 Dead’s levels may remain fixed, they never play out in the same way twice. Like a virus infecting a host, Left 4 Dead works all of its despicable magic silently and unseen. By the end of the first level, you’ll have naturally coalesced into something vaguely resembling a team, having quickly come to understand that this game is trying to kill you in any way it can. Within five minutes you’ll have figured out that shooting while someone is stood in front of you is a bad idea. If you can point a gun at a zombie and shoot, that’s a good enough start, because Left 4 Dead is a very efficient instructor. Left 4 Dead’s simple character designs make it abundantly clear that you’re supposed to be inexperienced and you’re supposed to be unprepared. They’re about as far away from heroes as you can imagine, together purely because they stand a slightly better chance of not having their insides ripped out than if they go it alone. You’re not a crack team of Navy SEALs or god-tier Space Marines you’re a bunch of scrappy and ill-fitted survivors: a lackadaisical college student, a heavily tattooed biker, a half-crazed Vietnam vet, and a terrified-looking office worker. At a surface level, Left 4 Dead is the most accessible cooperative game there is. There are only a handful of weapons and levels, and mechanically the game comprises moving and shooting pretty much exclusively.īut, of course, the reason Left 4 Dead is so good is because it seems simple. There are no classes in Left 4 Dead, no skills to unlock, no specified roles to play. In a way it’s odd that nobody has bettered it, because the design seems so simple. No other game has made me laugh and curse and joke and argue with my friends quite like Valve’s zombie blaster. Instead, I simply want to talk about why Left 4 Dead is still the best cooperative game ever made. I’ve written about that story before elsewhere, so I don’t want to dwell on it again. Valve’s cooperative shooter didn’t just give me a fun time it’s also responsible for several of my existing friendships, and it kind of got me into this job in the first place. This game means more to me than arguably any other. I can’t let Left 4 Dead’s tenth anniversary slip by without ringing the big zombie bell.
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