The Masterman's blog

Left 4 Dead. Rated M. 360 version.

One of the best zombie apocalypse games ever. Left 4 Dead's opening scene starts up with 4 survivors (Zoey=Chick, Bill=Old, Louis=Black, Francis=Biker Dude) walking around in an alley and finding a dead special infected called the Boomer.

Let me start at the beginning. 2 weeks before the start of the game, a disease started called the Green Flu. Millions of people started trying to evacuate. A lot of them didn't make it. This means that there are tons of zombies walking around on the streets wanting to eat your flesh. Sounds exciting right? I'm not done. Some of them mutated. They took on certain qualities that made them "special" compared to the rest of the infected. First off there's the Smoker. A tall zombie that grabs survivors with it's tongue as they're trying to move along. The Second S.I. (Special Infected) is the Hunter. he jumps from tall places, and lands on you and starts tearing out your guts. The third S.I. is the Boomer. He's a really fat zombie that kinda waddles around puking on people. The thing is though, the puke attracts other zombies to come and hit you. The fourth S.I. is called the Witch. She won't attack you if you don't startle her. But there's so many achievements for startling her that you might as well. She basically sits in a corner (or right in your way) and cries. Yes that's right. She cries. you're probably thinking "She cries? Yeah cause that's reeall dangerous ain't it." The problem is though as mentioned before is if you startle her. She runs towards you at a high speed and as soon as she touches you, you're incapacitated. And she sits there and tries to rip out your guts with her claws. Until you die. Painfully. Oh yeah, and if you're on Expert difficulty, she kills you instantly. :DThe last S.I. which is really just bad ass and gets his own theme music, is called the Tank. Think... a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger (The way he used to be) combined with the Incredible Hulk. That's right, you're getting the picture. Big freakin zombie that will pound the shit out of you if he can catch you. He also throws concrete, cars, round bales, trees, etc. at you as he goes.

So yeah, that's the basics of the Left 4 Dead world, now let me catch you up on the story.
No Mercy No Mercy is the first map you start on. You start on the rooftop of a building, travel down through the sewers, and finally pop up near Mercy Hospital. Which of course, is filled with zombies. You fight like hell to get to the top of the hospital where you can call in a chopper for evac. You also have to fight off hordes of zombies and several Tanks while you wait. But then you finally make it to safety! Or not...
Crash Course (DLC) So then, Zoey shot the helicopter pilot. Apparently he was turning. So the chopper crashes and you are all actually fine. So basically same thing, you fight your way to a bus station where you find an armored truck, and escape.
Death Toll This now brings us to Death Toll. Presumably the bus ran out of gas and you had to start walking again. You fight your way first to a church where the crazy church guy rings the bell. These zombies are attracted to sound by the way. So lots of zombies come, you kill them or die. Depends how good you are, and you force your way into the saferoom where the church guy has become either a Smoker, Boomer, or Hunter. You continue on to a boat house. There's a radio in there that you can call evac in with. A fishing vessel comes to pick you up. After a giant battle of course.
Dead Air The boat people kicked you off because they were having marital problems. (Who wouldn't at a time like this?) This of course leads us to Dead Air where you fight your way through hordes more of zombies and escape on a plane driven by a guy with a Southern Accent
Blood Harvest The plane crashes and the map starts with the survivors at a camp site. They continue on throughout lots and lots of woods until they find a lone farm house. You call in evac from the army this time! An armored rescue carrier comes racing in and saving you from certain doom! Maybe...
The Sacrifice (DLC) This is the last playable campaign. And someone... doesn't make it. Between Blood Harvest and The Sacrifice your group went to an army outpost, found out that they were carriers of the disease, and started up a train and got the hell out of there. Leaving all the army people and the doctor to die at the last stand at the lighthouse. Sacrifice starts with the group getting off the train and Zoey being mad at Bill for leaving all those people behind. Bills grand scheme is to find a sailboat with lots of supplies in it and flee to the Florida Keyes. The group finds one such sailboat but have to raise a big, metal, squeky bridge to get it out of harbor. The group start up the generators to start the bridge up. They fought off all the zombies and were on the bridge as it was going up when...one of the generators stopped. Realizing how important the rest of the team was to him. Bill jumps off the bridge and restarts the generator. As three Tanks start clobbering him until Bill has made The ultimate Sacrifice. (In the game, you get to choose who dies.)

All of the maps detailed above are very replayable and the acheivements are fun and a challenge to get. The characters slowly grow on you the more you play it and you end up realizing how sad you actually are that Bill died. VALVe (the creator of the game) did release the Sacrifice comic on l4d. com if anyone would like to read that before picking up the game. The replay value of this is fantastic though and their are plenty of little inside jokes for VALVe and zombie fans everywhere. Because of how just sucked into the story you get and how much the characters really start to mean to you (after 100 hours or so of playtime :P I think I've got close to 300 hours so yeah...) you truly start to appreciate the game. It was new and original for it's 2008 release date. The only slight downsides of this game are... on Versus and Survival modes there are so many spammers and people that use glitches that it's really not fun to get voted out because you're not like them. I believe the L4D servers are shutting down soon anyway so I guess that won't really be a big problem anymore. And the maps do get old after a while. You do basically the same thing on every single map. Over all, I'll give the game an 8/10 the way it is now. If they ever release more DLC for it than it might get better or worse.