Originally Posted by
Games TM
While certain videogames require a lengthy sales pitch, there are also those that sell themselves in very few words and Left 4 Dead can count itself among the latter. The result of a collaboration between Turtle Rock Studios and Valve is a Source-powered co-operative first person shooter in which players must fight off hoardes of rabid zombies. With that information alone, it's hard not to be excited, but thankfully we can reveal a whole lot more.
The first thing to note is Left 4 Dead doesn't try to rewrite the horror rulebook, it is still very much a classic tale of a zombie-infested Earth and a small group of humans desperate to survive. However, it does take many of its key influences from modern-day films such as 28 Days Later, rather than Romero's Night Of The Living Dead. This means the action takes place throughout a wide range of contemporary settings. It also means that the zombies are fast and enraged, rather than the slow, braindead and tacticallt inept.
Taking part as one of four Survivors, the main objective is to escape each level alive, a task made incredibly difficult by the legions of nimble-footed living dead that burst through walls, scale chain link fences and leap down from rooftops in order to kill you. The Infected also continually respawn, ensuring that their numbers remain vast, while the Survivors can only be revived when at least one team-mate arrives at a checkpoint. However, if all of the Survivors perish before reaching such an area then the whole scenario is lost. To make matters worse, four powerful members, who all boast unique human-slaying skills, bolster the Infected ranks.
The troublesome quartet can, just like the remaining three Survivors, be handled by the artificial intelligence, but humans are also able to control them - and given the unique experience they provide, thats something you'll definitely want to do. Every FPS fan is happy when given a character wielding a gun, but when controlling a Hunter, a zombie blessed with phenomenal speed and the ability to wall jump, or a Smoker that can use it's long tongue to lasso prey, they might not feel so comfortable. The same can be said of the Tank, a huge foe with the ability to hurl cars and concrete blocks around, and the Boomer, an obese zombie that can vomit on Survivors and violently explode when shot. As a specialist zombie, it will be your job to make the Survivors' escape even less likely.
Indeed, with the odds stacked heavily against them, the Survivors are forced to work together and that's clearly something that Turtle Rock Studios has worked hard to achieve. The use of an 'AI director' monitors each players activities and estimates the stress of their particular situation - it also guarantees that the zombie swarm will swiftly take down any player that peels away from the rest of the bunch. In addition to this, the Director controls the pacing of the game - to avoid combat being too intense or slow - and procedurally populates the environments with AI zombies, which means that every individual playthrough is unique. Each scenario will last 45-75 minutes, but as Left 4 Dead will only ship with four, it's important that the Director does a good job.
It remains to be seen exactly how versatile the procedural generation of enemies will be, but Left 4 Dead has great potential. If the two sides are balanced - whether AI controlled or not - and the locations are varied enough to allow for different approaches to the challenge then this could be one of the finest co-operative games of 2008. With the power of Source engine and Valve behind it, Turtle Rock Studios has a very real chance to dramatically raise it's profile with Left 4 Dead and given what we've seen and heard so far, there's a strong chance that it will succeed.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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