Left 4 Dead 2 Review - Xbox 360

2.5

Gameplay: 5
Graphics: 4
Audio: 4
Multiplayer: 5
Innovation: 3

Introduction

So, Left 4 Dead was widely received as awesome. The four-player zombie survival game from Valve was directly inspired by the modern zombie film (read: hordes of running zombies) and in turn directly inspired other films (read: Zombieland). But a mere year later the company that has dedicated years to updating Team Fortress 2 with new content revealed a sequel that you had to pay full price for. It was basically a map pack.

Then the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification denied the game an MA15+ rating and effectively preventing the sale of the game here. A modified version that removed “decapitation, dismemberment, wound detail or piles of bodies” was granted the MA15+ rating, allowing it to hit its release date, but hopes of the original version being released were quashed when the appeal was lost.

Hence, the nannies.

Gameplay

You should know how Left 4 Dead 2 works. It’s a first person shooter in which you and your three buddies (either from the real world or as AI players) must band together to make your way through a variety of scenarios in search of safety. You can equip one main weapon and either a pistol or melee weapon as an alternative. You can also carry a variety of items to regenerate health or ammo. Each of the five scenarios feature several sub-levels and a common theme, like a shopping centre, a carnival or a swamp.

It all works okay. The levels are for the most part interesting and feature unique objectives, though most of the challenge in the game comes from staying alive and not from any deep puzzles. The shooting is reasonable if inevitably hampered by the transition to the Xbox controller. Not every button choice makes sense – it feels like the developers merely looked for buttons to make the PC controls too, rather than actually think through or redesign the controls for a console shooter.

But let’s get down to it. Zombies are not people. They are, for all intents and purposes, monsters – in the same way that Locusts are monsters and Goombas are monsters. I’d argue that psychologically, chopping off a limb or beheading a zombie is less traumatic than the killings of actual humans in Heavy Rain. If you lose someone in that game, or kill someone, it hits like a ton of bricks. And yet Left 4 Dead is the one that had to be augmented. It’s like the OFLC hadn’t seen a zombie film before.

Removing the damage to the zombies sucks enjoyment from the game. It was clearly a quick and dirty job. Bodies fall to the ground and disappear, or worse yet, flicker for a second. You swipe at zombies with an axe and they just sort of topple over. It’s like you’re playing one of those fake videogames you see characters play in television shows. They have no weight, no reality, and thus playing the game becomes a detached experience. I’d like to stress here that the point is not that violence is ...