On a zombie rush
CHENNAI: The worst thing about Left 4 Dead is its name, which might cause some people to dismiss it out of hand as not being worth their time. That’s their loss, though, because they could not be more wrong. When Valve released Left 4 Dead in 2008, it was a different world. In 2007, they had released Portal, Team Fortress 2 and...Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Sated, the videogaming public wasn’t really expecting a lot from Left 4 Dead - many viewed as a kind of fill-in to keep them satisfied until Half-Life 3 (hah!). What they got, however, was one of the best multiplayer games of all time.
The game is set in a post-zombie-apocalyptic world, although the word ‘zombie’ is never actually used. Instead, you and 3 other survivors (human or AI players) will have to contend with hordes of ‘infected’ - including some souped-up ‘special infected’ as well - as you proceed through the various stages of each campaign. The game shipped with four loosely-connected campaigns, although more have been added since then. Although the setting often widely varies, the underlying principle of each stage remained the same - you start out in a safehouse, and you’ve got to fight your way across dangerous terrain to get to another safehouse. Get through enough stages and your reward is a finale, where rescue is arriving - you just have to stay alive long enough, in the face of non-stop waves of infected, to make it.
Left 4 Dead is really two games in one. On one level, it’s you and up to three friends having to work together to get through levels; and it just works. No other multiplayer game placed such an emphasis on teamwork and cooperation - if you were playing with somebody who had a hero complex, chances are you wouldn’t do very well. You have to work together, there’s no room for any Lone Ranger stuff at all. That’s not to say that Left 4 Dead doesn’t allow for clutch plays or moments of individual brilliance - it does, but your team’s ultimate fate will depend on just how good a team it proves to be.
And, speaking of teamwork, let’s talk about Versus mode - the other game that’s hidden in Left 4 Dead. In Versus mode, two teams will face off against each other over the course of a campaign - each side will take turns playing the Survivors and the Infected over each stage of a campaign. Once you try Versus mode, it’s almost impossible to go back to regular Left 4 Dead. The infected were bad enough there, but when you’ve got human players controlling the Special Infected, lurking around corners and on rooftops, waiting to ambush you? That is magic. Staying together and working together is even more important now, because a lone wolf might escape the AI’s attention in regular play, they’ll be easy prey to human players waiting for a chink to show in the Survivor’s armour.
The best part is that neither side is ever completely out of the running. Say your team just got wiped out as the Survivors without making it more than 200 feet away from your starting point - well, now you get to play as the Infected on that same stage, and your opponents won’t be laughing because they know that you could wipe them out in much the same way.
I could go on and on about Left 4 Dead, but I’m running out of space. So I’ll simply say that Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 (which released a year later) remain phenomenal games to this day. If you can get a bunch of friends together for some multiplayer gaming, there are very few experiences out there that can hold a candle to Left 4 Dead’s zombie apocalypse.
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)