Left 4 Dead 2

Meet the new zombie exterminating team. 

Here, we have (from left to right) Nick the gambler, Rochelle the reporter, Coach the coach (pun was probably fully intended), and Ellis the mechanic.  By far the most hilarious character is Ellis, who loves to storytell about his buddy Keith.  If you play as Ellis, every safehouse intro, there’s a dialogue about the misadventures of Keith and him.

It’s a new cast to reflect the change in location, the South.  All five levels (yes 5, not 4 from the first game) are connected sequentially.  The first campaign is the Hotel/Mall area where you escape by driving out a racecar.  The second campaign begins with the four survivors leaving that same racecar to venture through a carnival.  The game also showcases certain locations you’d see in the South, like sugar plantations, swamps, and harbor towns. 

Of course who can forget the scribblings on the walls?  They range from heartwarming goodbyes, urgent messages, to words from someone you’d shoot yourself. 

Like the first game, you don’t ever find out how the world turned into a zombie-fest, but at least the second game took into account the different types of people who would be infected.  In the first game, you only saw normal civilians.  Now, you see zombified soldiers in bullet-proof gear and zombies in hazmat suits.  You can tell that you need to do more to kill the bullet-proof ones right?  In addition to the normal zombies, they’ve brought back your standard Tank and Witch. In fact, the game brings in everybody plus some new additions like the Spitter, Jockey, and Charger.

Gameplay is virtually the same except with some notable differences having to do with the environment.  The game adjusts zombies and items according to the players, but the game can also make some doors accessible and change the weather.  The second game I feel has a sense of humor by more frequently placing witches directly in your way.  So venturing through would require a “sacrifice.”  Also, there are some alarms in the game you can’t avoid and staying until the horde dies down won’t work. 

There is also a significant difference in weapon choice.  You can only carry two weapons: one with unlimited ammo like the handguns and impressive selection of melee weapons or the limited ammo guns like the sniper, shotgun, and machine gun.  The molotov cocktails and pipe bombs are now accompanied by Bile bombs and ammo upgrades like incendiary and explosive rounds.

The endings of each campaign is similar to the first game in that you’re scrambling to get out while swarms of both common and special infected are running to you for a free meal.  The rolling credits are of course still funny with the characteristic: “x number of zombies were harmed in the making of this film.”

Good sequel to the first game, though more campaigns would be appreciated.

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