Left 4 Dead 2 Micro Review: It’s A Blast. @ NotCliche

After all that Left 4 Dead 2 talks about boycotting, it being an expansion at best, pre-orders skyrocketing out of the roof, I just had to try out Left 4 Dead 2 myself to see how good or bad it was.

As a matter of fact, it’s pretty damn good.

Despite the initial skepticism about how nice L4D2 would be — all of which generated from the hate and dismay of how Valve announced a sequel in less than a year — I can safely tell you guys that Left 4 Dead 2 does actually warranty that full game price tag that it has on the shelves.

Although I didn’t get a full experience of Left 4 Dead 2 myself, seeing that I’ve only touched the demo of the game, the game is actually pretty well-polished in comparison to what Left 4 Dead 1 has to offer. The change of environment is extremely welcomed, and fighting zombies in a brightly lit environment does brings about a whole new kind of experience while walking through the streets of infected.

Glorious blood everywhere!

Left 4 Dead 2 introduces quite a lot of new feature to make it stand out from L4D1. One of these new features are “semi-rare” infected, which is basically your normal zombie with some extra added to them to make them a little more challenging than the normal infected. As of now, I’ve only encountered 1 type, Bulletproof infected, and the opening shows yet another one, Fireproof infected. You’ll also encounter another whole bunch of special infected which can essentially spell doom for any party if they aren’t careful with the new infected.

All shooter games can’t be completed without guns, can’t they? Left 4 Dead 1 had suffered greatly from it’s small selection of guns as well as the toy gun-ish feeling when firing these weapons, Left 4 Dead 2 remedies the problem nicely. At the start of the game, you’re given the choice between the standard SMG or the shotgun; but here’s the difference: in the 3 games I’ve played so far, these two standard weapons will be alternated between several “clones” of the weapons itself.

Boomer’s Bile can be used as a weapon against them now.

For example, I could pick between a Silenced SMG and a Chrome Shotgun in the first game. The second game presented me with a SMG (not silenced) and a Chrome Shotgun. Not much of a “wow” factor, but it still adds an interesting element into the game itself.

The sounds when firing the gun sounds reasonable enough, a great improvement over the original game. Unlike the first game, firing a Combat Shotgun makes you feel manly all over, and firing a Hunting Rifle has a sound fitting to the damage you’re doing to the infected.

The blood on your melee weapon is a plus.

Speaking of damage, the damage inflicted on the infected is just awesome. You can make a clean hole through the chest of their body if you give them a shotgun in where it counts. There are also many other ways to see gore in the game, such as shooting at their back to reveal their spine, shooting the legs to remove both legs and stuffs like that. A neat improvement over the first game, but this is probably what got Australians the censored version.

In all the games I’ve played so far, I’ve only gotten my hands on three out of ten melee weapons available. I haven’t really seen a difference between each melee weapon (the damage and swinging speeds), seeing that I was too occupied with killing infected than really caring about how each melee weapon performed. Did I mention that the melee weapon replaces your infinite ammo pistols?

Help the Scout-boy!

The demo had only show a small portion of the game, about 2 chapters in a campaign. Not much, but you can repeatedly play through it to get a feel of how the game is like. The two chapters (or levels) were interesting during my play through, and it was a different experience during each play through. Guess the AI director got a lot better in the sequel. If you’re interested in playing the demo yourself, all you need is a Steam account and you can get access to the demo as early as you install it into your hard-disk.

The only gripe I’ve got with the game? Same as the one with L4D1. The “reloading” sound is simply too annoying. But then again, if you don’t hear “reloading” every few second, then you’re probably not playing L4D.

While Left 4 Dead 2 had been the subject of many speculations, it is a huge improvement over the previous iteration of the game. New weapons, new environment, enemies and even awesome personalities in the game, what else would you want of this game?

Now, onto getting my copy of Steam…

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