Left 4 Dead [review]

If the names Zoey, Francis, Bill, and Louis don't mean much to you, then you probably haven't played the exceptional shooter Left 4 Dead. But if they trigger memories of gunning down endless hordes of zombies and desperately fighting for your life while screaming at your buddies, then you're quite familiar with Valve's thrilling cooperative multiplayer shooter, which shipped late last year. Now Valve is prepping the first batch of downloadable content for the game, which it is going to give away for free to both Xbox 360 and PC players sometime in March or April. What's in it? Well, we went to Valve this week to find out.

Now while it's not unusual for a PC game to get extra content for free post-release, it's vary rare for Xbox 360 DLC to go out sans fee. But Valve and Microsoft have figured out an arrangement. If you haven't bought Left 4 Dead on the Xbox 360 yet, Valve, the company that practically invented Game of the Year editions, does plan to release a special Critics Choice Edition of Left 4 Dead on April 21 for the console. It will feature the original game, as well as all the updates and the DLC. The DLC itself will go out digitally to existing Left 4 Dead players sometime before that date.

There are two key features in the DLC. The first is that Valve has finally added Versus mode to the Dead Air and Death Toll campaigns, a process that meant tweaking and enhancing quite a number of levels to allow for a balanced playing field. Versus mode lets two teams take turns playing as survivors or zombie specials in an anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better duel. The winner is the team that can accumulate the best score, which is usually determined whether the survivors make it to safety at the end of each level in the face of everything the zombie players throw at them. Left 4 Dead shipped with only two of its campaigns playable in Versus mode, so the DLC instantly doubles that numbers.

We played with Valve employees in a Versus game on Dead Air, the airport level. Now, playing with the guys who created the game may seem a bit unfair, and that's because it is. Still, we had a blast, as well as learned some expert tips from the designers themselves. (One diabolical tactic is to use the smoker to grab a human survivor with his tongue and drag him or her through the metal detectors in the airport, thus triggering a humongous zombie horde. Surprise!) Just like with the existing two Versus campaigns, Dead Air proved to be a fun cat-and-mouse struggle, as the humans attempted to race to safety while the zombies tried to improvise coordinated ambushes on the fly.

The second big addition in the DLC is the introduction of an entirely new Survival mode that's designed if you just want to get in and have fun for about 10 or 15 minutes at a time, though the fast pace and challenge of it means you and your group can do round after round while the hours waste away. In essence, it's the equivalent of Counter-Strike's five-minute matches.

In Survival mode, the goal is simple: you and up to three other players are on a single level and must stay alive as long as possible against an unending assault of zombies. Each Versus match starts with a setup time, as you can scour the map for weapons and equipment, like health kits and gasoline tanks. You can take as much time as you want, as the timer at the top of the screen doesn't begin until someone hits the button that starts the zombie horde. Once the button is pressed, the action gets off to a furious start and escalates from there.

How furious is it? Consider this: In all of the play testing that the Valve designers have done while creating this mode, none of them have ever survived past the 10 minute mark. We're told the company best so far was about nine minutes, with a team of elite players battling like crazy to keep one another alive. Our experience at Valve averaged around three or four minutes a round, but they're like the fastest three or four minutes of your life.

What makes it so challenging is that the Survival mode doesn't waste time building up. After the initial wave of zombies you'll start getting hit by waves of special zombies; these are the hunters, smokers, boomers, and tanks. You'll get multiples of them at a time; I often saw two or three hunters or smokers leaping around the battle while the mindless horde minions were everywhere. In one battle, we had the tank, a boomer, a couple of smokers, and a hunter hitting us at the same time. We're told it's even possible to get two tanks at the same time, a prospect that seems both ludicrously unfair and hilarious at the same time.

The way to survive as long as possible is to work together, which means sticking together as well as doing everything you can to protect the weakest member of the group, especially if they're knocked down and must be revived. There's plenty of equipment available in various areas of the level; some of these areas only open up during the match, so after you exhaust all the equipment in one room, you'd best move as a group to the next. One of the most dangerous moments is when you run out of ammo; you then have to make a coordinated move to one of the few ammo points on the map to restock.

So what's in it for you? Well, beside the intense action, there are all sorts of personal records you can accumulate. The most obvious one is trying to get a best time for each of the 16 Survival levels in the game. There are extra incentives as well. You can earn bronze, silver, and gold medals if you survive long enough. Though the medal times for each map will be tailored for each map, right now the basic idea is that you need to survive for at least four minutes to get bronze, six minutes to get silver, and eight minutes to get gold. (In our play session, the best we ever got was within a minute of earning silver.) Of course, online leaderboards will also let you compare your times with those of our friends for bragging rights.

As soon as your group is wiped out, you get the match results and then the entire thing resets. Basically, once you start playing you can do round after round easily, which eats up the time. Survival mode is playable on 16 levels, 15 of which are taken and modified from the existing four campaigns. We played in Dead Air's airport terminal, Blood Harvest's farm house level, and No Mercy's hospital level. There is one entirely brand-new level in the DLC called Lighthouse which the designers say may be the toughest level of them all.

Lighthouse is exactly that; a lighthouse atop a seaside cliff. You also get a sense of what you're in for when you realize that you start with a ridiculous amount of stuff at your disposal. There are about a dozen gasoline containers and propane tanks, as well as plenty of Molotov Cocktails and pipe bombs. It's like that age-old first-person shooter tradition of giving you plenty of ammo and health before encountering a major boss. What makes Lighthouse so dangerous is that it's a pretty open level; there aren't a lot of places to hide, and those places are pretty porous once the zombies start knocking holes in walls. Even the lighthouse tower itself is dangerous; while it's scenic and gives you a height advantage, you're exposed to any smoker who can grab you and drag you off the room with its tongue. You're in a dire position if you're on the ground and the rest of your teammates are still in the tower.

Granted, its going to be free, but even if Valve charged a reasonable amount for it the Left 4 Dead DLC would remain a great value. The Survival mode is perfect for a quick fix, while the new Versus campaigns should provide plenty of gameplay. In addition to the DLC, Valve will also release the SDK for the PC version, allowing PC users to start creating their own mods and levels for the game. But if that's not for you, there's always plenty of zombie killing to be done.