Left 4 Dead

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Left 4 Dead

Can Valve follow The Orange Box with the most exhilarating shooter of 2008?

Words: Jon Blyth, PC Zone UK

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“Turn your flashlight off! Don’t look at the witch!” commands Chet. The Witch is the game’s Ring piece, a sobbing girl who only surfaces from her lachrymose reveries to rip you apart with one hit. For that reason, it’s considered prudent not to shine your torch on her, or shoot her. We wanted to look at the Witch. We snuck a crafty sideways glance at the slouchy mare, just as a teammate let rip with a volley of machine gun fire.

We’re not sure if this was simply to show off her powers, but it certainly had that effect. Sobs became a crescendo of screams, and the inert girl began killing us. The guy who’d shot the gun was the first to go. Everyone else had run off by this stage, leaving us with about 20 seconds of bleed-out time to stare at the now-purposeless Witch, who resumed a kind of hopeless, agonised writhing which would have looked pitiful if she hadn’t just butchered us.

Eventually, players will be able to play as the Super-Infected, but that’s not being shown to critical journalists at this point. In dead mode, however, we did get to see what it might be like; letting our camera follow a Boomer, we saw whole areas of the map invisible to the living players, with short cuts to facilitate ambushes - even a couple of inert regular infected zombies. While there’s less of a definitive sense of victory in playing a zombie, it’s sure to offer plenty of big dumb fun for people who love to ruin other people’s games.

Do we think we’ve managed to get across the experience of playing the game? Of course not. The best we can hope for is to get across how much we enjoyed it – and try to infect you with our impatience for the final game’s release.