Left For Dead Preview
There is a lot of things that I like about Left For Dead, but I am not completely sold on it yet. The coop is enticing, but it is hard to say until you have it home on your 360 how it is going to play.
At its core, Valve’s Left 4 Dead isn’t a complicated game. In its main cooperative mode you play as human survivors who must, using bullets and teamwork, overcome hordes of swift, “infected” (zombies) and reach the end of a more-or-less linear stage to escape. The survivors are then graded on their performance, and onto the next stage you go. That’s pretty much it in terms of basic structure, but Valve’s added in plenty of wrinkles to make it interesting, including split-screen offline and online cooperative modes for the Xbox 360 version.
The modes split the screen only two ways, and you can choose between vertical and horizontal orientations. For our play session with the Xbox 360 version of the game, we chose for the screen to be split from top to bottom, and found it worked pretty well. We were playing on an HDTV, so any owners of sets with 4:3 aspect ratios may have a different experience, but it felt as though all that was important was contained within the viewable area.
A more interesting note is that you can play on the infected side as well as survivor on the same screen. So, in addition to playing as the gun-toting survivors, you can enter a versus mode where you’ll cycle through spawns as four of five types of boss infected. There’s the smoker, who can lasso survivors from a distance with its long tongue; a hunter, who can pounce from long range and claw at survivors it pins; and the boomer, who can vomit on survivors to trigger a rush of infected. Then, once in a while, an infected player gets the option of playing as a tank, a hulk-like menace that can absorb far more damage than the others and can slam survivors or rip up and toss chunks of the ground. There’s also a witch that can more-or-less instant-kill any survivor that bothers her, but she’s never put in a player’s control.