Saturday, January 3, 2009

Left 4 Dead - Fizzles out!

Overall Score - 7/10
Gaming Experience - 5/10; Video - 9/10; Audio 7/10;

A promisingly attractive looking game - comes from Valve's Source engine. I bought it with high hopes. But the pleasure lasted for just a few minutes. What looked like a great game quickly fizzled out.

As the name would explain 4 people are left stranded in a city full of infected people who have turned into zombies. With the graphics engine of Valve one can be assured of a smooth seamless gameplay and I would incline to believe that the only major task the game makers would have had is to build up an intuitive and impulsive storyline. 

That is exactly where they terribly disappoint you. There are totally 4 types of weapons you can play with. That is all they have got to offer in the weapons section. Oh of course there is the option melee.

The zombies themselves are of 5 kinds:

1. The Hunter - the guy who crawls and pounces at you and grabs a few pounds of meat from your torso
2. Boomer - the burping overweight zombie who bursts when shot at showering with toxic yuck. Shoot at him from a safe distance to avoid some disgusting screen distortions.
3. The Smoker - the zombie who has the Mr.Fantastic tongue, I think, but whatever it is he uses that to grab you from a distance. He turns into some poisonous smoke when shot at, hence the name.
4. The Tank - The Behemoth but surprisingly fast and even more surprising can be killed pretty much easily by 4 the people put together.
5. The Witch - the weeping witch - just avoid her or else she scratches you and leaves incapacitated on most occassions.

Besides these guys, there are normal zombies to fill the time who rush at you when they see you but can be killed quite easily. The most freaking and initially interesting aspect of the game is the way a horde of zombies attack you.

The sounds are made real creepy and adds up to the aura, but the game as such gets TOO predictable and repetitive. So much so that you exactly know there is a hunter or a smoker to be expected next. There is no improvisation as the game progresses and no great challenges except killing ravenous zombies running up to you.

You cannot miss to see the resemblance of the Half Life environment, but then that is good. Only bad thing is it is not as much fun as Half Life was.

Left 4 Dead - starts well, after a while it is just dead.

Update 1:
After I got totally bored with this game, I decided to show it the exit and get rid of it from my PC - that is when I encountered with this problem - The uninstaller messed up the default Windows XP fonts and totally messed up everything. After a few irritating minutes, i got it resolved by fixing up my registry. If you encountered this issue, try the solution provided here.

That adds up one more reason for me to dislike this game and shows the sloppy work of the game developers.