| 25 January 2010
Our first user-submitted post comes from reader Levi Juhl. His favorite food is pizza and he enjoys long walks on short piers. Click here to submit your own post!
Trying to get a bunch of strangers to work as a team in a video game must be one of the hardest things for a game designer to pull off. Especially when you’re talking about FPS games, which often cast you in the role of a super-soldier destined to save the galaxy against impossible odds. That kind of setting trains you to go for the glory when you take your game online. Players try for the most kills or most flags caps, often oblivious to the fact that they’ve now got other people playing with them.
Valve has ingeniously devised a way to coax teamwork out of even the most ardent do-it-yourselfers by dropping you in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and eliminating all objectives save one: survive. Running off on your own is as sure a way to commit FPS suicide as jumping off a high ledge or shooting a rocket launcher at your feet. In Left 4 Dead 2, you will get pinned, puked on, and swarmed, and if you want to keep playing, you’ll need to rely on someone else to cover you. It’s an effective and fresh game dynamic that goes along perfectly with the series’ zombie-movie setting.
The key to this game’s success is in its balance. Towards the end of my time with the original Left 4 Dead, all four of the survivors were routinely making it to the safe room nine times out of ten. You could get yourself out of most situations by backing up against a wall, bunching up, and waiting out a few waves of common infected. If the Special Infected were going to win, it required Swiss-watch-precision timing and usually a healthy dose of luck.
The sequel’s most significant additions address this issue specifically by adding in some new zombie types and putting the survivors on the run. With the addition of the Charger and Spitter special infected, bunching up is as deadly as running off. Watch out for those two in narrow spaces – a Charger can stun all four survivors and the Spitter’s acid will burn through your health very quickly. A third new bad guy is the Jockey, whose ability to march a survivor in any direction he chooses can seriously stall or otherwise disrupt the survivors’ efforts to keep going forward. When you couple these new zombies with the longer, better designed levels, things are a lot tougher on the survivors, mostly because the series’ signature ‘crescendo events’ now require that you move from point A to point B while battling continuously spawning zombies. Holding off an infected swarm for five minutes on the roof of a hospital from an entrenched position with ammo, health packs, and a minigun is a walk in the park compared to running across a bridge and fighting for every inch.
The balance is now right where it needs to be for a zombie game. At least a few members of the survivor team should be dying more than half the time. In practice, this is definitely the case. Few teams make it at all, and certain sections, even after a month and a half of playtime, I’ve never seen anyone beat. The survivors got some new toys as well in the form of new guns, temporary boosts, and melee weapons, but ultimately it’s all about how well you work as a team. The humans can make it, they just need to be on their game – one slip-up can spell disaster for the whole group.
Your ability to enjoy this game is heavily dependent on other people understanding the mechanics, knowing the levels, and not being deuchebags, which is a tall order for sure. But then that is the problem that has plagued multiplayer gaming for decades now, isn’t it? The victories are that much more rewarding when you know you haven’t left anyone behind, you’re out of ammo on your primary, and everyone’s health is in the red. Hopefully that’s enough to get the jerks to get with the program, and if it’s not, give it a few months and those people will move onto the next flash-in-the-pan shooter game. In the meantime, there’s a handy ‘Kick Player’ button that works wonders…
Oh, and there’s single-player, somewhere, I think. Maybe?
| < Prev |
|---|
