by William Bentley

Created on: June 12, 2009   Last Updated: June 15, 2009

Left 4 Dead is the latest FPS from gaming giant Valve, the same people who brought us Team Fortress 2, Portal and the Half Life series. Needless to say they have a bit of experience in making great games, hell Half Life's been around for almost a decade, and that's still going strong. So the question on everybody's mind, would L4D live up to the success of its predecessors?

In the game, you and three other survivors must team up to take on "The Zombie Apocalypse", this seems like something that has all been done before, and it has, but is the way Valve puts a completely new spin on the genre. The zombies in this game are less like the shuffling, clueless things in so many zombie based games, (Well to tell the truth, they are, but only before they know you're there) and more like the fiends in 28 Days Later, clearly this is a zombie horde that has overrun the local Nike store and looted themselves so go faster trainers. Added to this you have five different types of uber-zombie, each one with their own delightful, if somewhat gory method of ripping you apart.

If you don't have Xbox live, you should give this title a miss, although it does support single player gaming, this is more of a warm-up for the multiplayer modes. The bots included with the game, have somewhat pathetic AI, they follow you around like lost puppies, will not use grenades, and seem to have an obsession with healing you when you're going for the unbreakable achievement, (Finish all 5 levels of a campaign without being healed). However, one thing that can be said in their defence, is that they are incredibly good shots. This can be particularly annoying in the versus mode, where one team is given a chance to play as the boss infected, you think you're perfectly concealed in that bush. But because it doesn't count as a solid object, a bot will turn through 180 degrees and pop two shots through your skull before you can say "Blargh I'm an angry zombie", then you're back looking at that 25 second respawn screen. However one aspect where the AI doesn't let you down is the games amazing "Director", this judges how well you're doing, and tailors the zombie spawns accordingly, if you're suffering it may put a few health packs to help you along, but if you're breezing through the level, you can expect to come across a tank, this 12 foot tall killing machine can rip through your entire team in a couple of seconds, and will take the combined firepower of all four survivors to take down. Valve has even

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