Erratic Gamer - So many games. So little time.

I got my first chance to spend time with Left 4 Dead 2 last night, playing through the "Hard Rain" campaign with three coworkers for a couple of hours. We didn't make it past the finale, even though we were only playing on the Normal difficulty mode, but that was the only point where all of us died, and we probably could have made it through if we hadn't been too tired to give it another shot. I will say that there were many points during the campaign where we were in full-on panic mode, though, with at least two of us very near death, out of ammo, or both. At least once per map after the first one, we wondered if we would make it. It was pretty awesome.

If you've been following the game at all, you've already read about the changes they've made so I won't try to detail them all here, though I'm going to end up mentioning most of them because they're primarily good changes. It is a different game from the first Left 4 Dead, and even if it's not a very different game I think it's different enough to be better and easily worth the money, especially if you got in on the 4-pack that essentially chopped off a quarter of the price.

My favorite enhancements to the formula:

Melee weapons. It will be hard to go back to playing L4D1 without having axes, machetes, swords, guitars, baseball bats, etc. There's a good diversity in the selection, though they do seem to be roughly divided into "fast cutting" and "slow smashing" weapons. The guitar feels noticeably different from the machete but not so much different from the baseball bat. Regardless, they're effective and satisfying to use. My favorite is easy: katana.
The spitter. I would just say "the new special infected" but I think the spitter is really the star of the show, because it means the tactic of locking down a corner, such a ready go-to strategy in Left 4 Dead, just doesn't work anymore. Combined with the new "on the move" crescendo events, this game is serious about not letting you hunker down in one spot, and that's great.
The overall variety of weapons, zombies, "power ups", and so on. Having to make decisions between a health pack and incendiary ammo, or melee weapons and pistols (two types of pistol, at that), or pills and adrenaline, means you need to be thinking on your feet and talking to your team about those choices a lot more than in the first game. You want somebody to have that defibrillator, but you're going to have to convince somebody to pass up a health kit for it. Along with the increased variety of normal zombies (riot zombies, clowns, etc) and the extra special infected, there's a lot more for the AI director to play with, and I suspect the game will take a lot longer to become routine.
The atmosphere has been made palpably more tense. I still wouldn't call Left 4 Dead 2 a horror game, but while Left 4 Dead was a straight-up action game with zombie trappings, I definitely felt more freaked out in "Hard Rain" than I ever did in the first game. Having the AI director control the intensity of the storm and tie it to the horde spawns was a brilliant move, and when you've lost sight of your friends and you're low on health, you can't help but feel it in the pit of your stomach a bit. Other little touches like moving witches (and much more liberal use of those witches, especially in one level) further amp up the tension. It's simply much better than it was.

If I have complaints, they mostly center on the characters - I don't feel like Rochelle really has much of a personality yet at this point in the story, and Ellis simply seems to be a joke from the developers gone wrong, trying to get cheap laughs but ending up just grating. Maybe as I spend more time with them and follow the story (which I understand is not only fleshed out but also integrated into their vocal interactions much more) I'll change my mind, but for right now I miss the old team. That's a fairly minor complaint, though, and I'm definitely glad I picked up the game. Like L4D1, I feel confident I'm going to get a ton of play out of it.

Speaking of Left 4 Dead 1, as I mentioned earlier, Mike Bellmore and I spent last weekend playing through the mods for Part 2 of our "Zombie SPOOKTACULAR" feature over at Immortal Machines, and it got posted last night.

We played the highly anticipated "Cold Case" and "Dead Before Dawn" mods, both released on Halloween. The latter is quite good, if unpolished and occasionally unreasonable in what it demands of the players. The former... is not. To find out why, go read the column.