by Aaron Wodhams

Created on: June 15, 2009

Valve have indefinitely retained their sublime ability to produce good games. After previous successes such as the Half-Life franchise and the Counter-Strike phenomenon, Valve have brought us Left 4 Dead for the Xbox 360.

Left 4 Dead is a survival-horror game structured around a first person shooter, based around an outbreak of a highly contagious strain of rabies, which infected the general population and turned them into zombies; leaving very few survivors. However, four of theses survivors, who are seemingly immune to the virus, form a coalition and are intent on survival. These characters include a Vietnam War Veteran named Bill; a College girl named Zoey; a quick-to-anger biker named Francis and an IT analyst named Louis.

The game sees these four characters traverse through somewhat varied campaigns, all with distinct backdrops, and such diversity does enrich the experience. Moreover, the settings you will be experiencing will range from overrun farmland to the sinister prospects of a blood-stained hospital, which are very immersive with their suspenseful atmospheres. What is more, while meandering through these environments, "the survivors", which the four characters are optimistically called, will have to repel zombie attacks until they can find rescue. E.g. on the first campaign the survivors have to wait for a helicopter to arrive while wait on top of a zombie-infested hospital. Therefore the game is enthralling at certain points as you apprehensively wait for rescue, but this does get tedious as you repeat the same dynamic in the following campaign.

Furthermore, your character and the rest of your troop are equipped with an assortment of weapons, and all types of generic weaponry are in this game, including the shotgun and assault rifle, which is however unoriginal, but these are weapons we can have familiarity with. To make things more interesting, explosives such as pipe bombs and molotovs have been included to justify the 18+ rating. The pipe bomb for instance, attracts a hoard of zombies after being thrown, until it eventually explodes and distributes zombie residue. So the element of gore in this game is certainly pronounced, and it only seems appropriate for a game involving zombies, which the film industry has attributed with immeasurable amounts of blood and gore.

To continue, the enemies in Left 4 Dead don't just involve standard zombies, no, these zombies co-exist with what are known as "special-types." These include a comically overweight

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