Ironically enough, Left 4 Dead isn’t showing any signs of dying- Shacknews reports that Valve are planning a big announcement for their (awesome) zombie shooter. In true Valve style, the announcement has been postponed, as it was set for a pre-Christmas reveal. Still, Valve writer Chet Faliszek certainly didn’t skimp on the details.

The announcement was relating to new DLC for the game, including new scenarios, Versus mode availability for Dead Air and Death Toll, and for PC gamers, SDK, allowing custom map building. Other than SDK, all of the content will arrive at the same time on XBox 360 and PC, although of course on the PC there will be none of these ghastly ‘paying money’ shenanigans to be had. Still, it’s just speculation at this point, so there’s hope for 360 owners yet! Expect an official announcement from Valve soon (meaning ‘whenever they bloody well feel like it).

Left 4 Dead is the kind of game that helps you figure out who your friends really are. Do they run off to pick up that pipe bomb while you get bamboozled by zombies? Do they stray from the group in search of personal glory? Do they accuse you of kill stealing after you just saved their ass? Left 4 Dead helps you sort these things out while also managing to put the “survival” back in “first-person shooter with zombies and a cooperative attempt at survival”.

Left 4 Dead takes place after some sort of event happened that turned thousands of people into zombies, or as the game refers to them, “infected”. There really is no story, at least nothing that is presented to you in a traditional fashion. All that you will come to find out about what happened is what is written on the walls — literally.

There are four campaigns, each one presented as if it were a zombie movie. Players choose their characters before the game starts, and the loading screen then presents you with a ‘movie poster’ displaying who is playing which character as if you are the actors playing these roles.

You generally begin each campaign with a pistol that has unlimited ammo and a choice between a shotgun or submachine gun. The goal, ultimately, is get the hell out of there. You progress from safehouse to safehouse, each one serving as a checkpoint as well as a safe place to rest, heal up, and grab some more ammo or a different gun.

The infected try their hardest to prevent you from reaching these safehouses. They occasionally send ’special infected’ at you: the Boomer, a mutated fat dude, pukes all over you and makes the infected particularly eager to eat your brains; the Smoker lashes you with his super-long froggy tongue and reels you in for a beatdown; and the Hunter simply pounces on your face and claws you to death. Sometimes the A.I. Director decides to just swarm you with a hundred zombies and overwhelm you.

There are also two different special special infected: the Witch and the Tank. The Witch is a fairly decent-looking zombie chick that just kind of sits on the ground and cries (women…) unless you disturb her. She is actually incredibly powerful and can take down a survivor in a single hit. The game’s loading screens that show helpful hints even suggest you turn off your flashlight and try to just tip-toe around her, but what fun is that? This is why I am not a good friend…

The Tank, while not quite as one-hit powerful as the Witch, is equally as much of a nuisance. He rips up pieces of concrete from the ground and tosses them at you, generally knocking you off your feet. It’s actually quite amazing that he can find concrete in regular dirt or even in water, but I digress… He also likes to just straight up punch you in the face and send you flying across the map. The tank can take quite a bit more damage than the Witch, and it’s entirely possibly for a Tank to single-handedly take down your whole team.

What’s awesome about these ’special infected’ is that they are the characters you control in adversarial mode. One team plays the game as usual while the other team takes over the special infected and tries to stop them. Each time the survivors reach a safehouse or are wiped out, the teams switch.

Each campaign has a just few safehouses on the way to your final destination: a way out. Each finale involves radioing for help and then holding the fort until your ride arrives. The first campaign, for example, has you pinned down on a hospital roof as you await a helicopter to fly you to safety. These finales are full of intense firefights and frantic “help me!” situations — probably the most exhilarating gameplay experience I’ve had in recent memory.

As long as one person makes it to the escape vehicle, you win. As the credits role, kind sentiments of “In memory of…” pay respects to those of you that didn’t make it. You are also treated to player stats for the session like accuracy, headshots, damage taken, times incapacitated, etc. In closing, it tells you how many zombies were killed in the making of the film.

One of the things I find most impressive about Left 4 Dead is the physics. The infected seem to react quite realistically to bullets and butt-strokes to the face, so much so that it’s entertaining to just shoot them and watch how they react. The game also runs buttery smooth, both online and off, and I haven’t noticed any lag or framerate issues at any point during my playtime.

Honestly, my only complaints about Left 4 Dead are that it is completely dependent on having people to play with and that there aren’t enough playgrounds. The game is incredibly enjoyable with friends, but not quite as much so without them, and while each campaign can be replayed indefinitely, there aren’t very many of them.

These aren’t really faults with the game, though. You can’t exactly takes points away from Monopoly because it isn’t fun with just one person, and likewise should be said about Left 4 Dead. The real issue here is that there are only 4 campaigns, and each one can be played through in about an hour once you know the layout.

The A.I. Director, who internally adjusts the game based on how you’re playing, keeps the campaigns from being exactly the same each time through, placing weapon caches and medkits in different places, as well as sending different enemies at you at different times. Ultimately, though, there are still only 4 levels, and as fun as they are, we want more.

Considering the co-op nature of the game, us Riptenites spent some time killing stuff as a team. Rangebar, John, and I grouped up over Xbox Live and attempted to, well, live through the zombie apocalypse while Sam shot his way through the PC version. Their thoughts below.

Rangebar’s Take

With all of the high quality shooters that have came out in the past few months, Left 4 Dead is the one that separates itself the most from the pack. I say this because of its primary focus on co-op gameplay. Being able to get online and hop into a friend’s game at any moment, even in mid-game, and get through a campaign mission in a little over an hour is just one of the great ideas of Left 4 Dead. I describe Left 4 Dead as resembling the zombie film 28 Days Later, but just in video game form. No real story, just four survivors trying to get the hell out of an abandoned city infected with zombies. That’s another thing that’s so unique about Left 4 Dead, it strays away from an actual plot and stretched-out story, but just puts you in the game with three other friends, focusing more on the aspects of teamwork and strategy. However, one thing I didn’t particularly like about Left 4 Dead was the option of only four different campaign modes. I’ve already been through all four of the missions on normal mode, and now I’m kind of stuck between just playing versus mode (which is also quite fun, by the way) or playing the campaign modes on a harder difficulty. I’m hoping that Valve releases more campaign missions via downloadable content soon seeing that many owners have probably completed the four missions. My absolute favorite thing about Left 4 Dead (besides blowing zombie heads off with a shotgun) is just how easy it is to get into a game with a few friends or even starting a game up with the A.I. players and waiting on some folks to join in on the fun. And I think that’s the whole purpose of the game: it has relaxing and comfortable match-making system and gives casual gamers the great option of playing for an hour or two, enough time to get through a campaign mission or two. At the end of the day, Left 4 Dead is one hell of game and is easily a must-buy for any Xbox 360 or PC gamer.

John’s Take

Left 4 Dead is like sex. It’s okay (and sometimes degrading) when you’re just playing with yourself, but the more people you get involved the more fun you can have. If everyone is on the same page and willing to work together it can be an absolute blast, with the game throwing climax after climax your way until you just can’t take it any more. With enough people, even a relatively inexperienced or unskilled player won’t be a burden as long as everyone is willing to help make up for the weak links. Get someone who is only concerned with themselves, however, and it’s just a bad experience. Get someone who’s a douchebag and a shitty player and it ruins it for everyone. I’d say you have to play with at least three people (including yourself) because even with just two computer-controlled partners, the AI can get pretty stupid and annoying. They have a tendency to stand in front of you at the most inopportune times and absolutely refuse to duck. They also have no clue how to use the first aid pouches and Max Payne killers, going from using them when not needed to holding onto them even after someone is down to ten health. Granted, there are players like this also who may not jive with your healing preferences, but generally you can say “Yo, Asshole! How about you share that fuckin’ health pack you’re carrying so I can stop draggin’ my intestines behind me.” This is something you can’t do with the AI. There is no way to even drop a hint as to what you’d like for them to do. That’s not to say they’re horrible — they’re actually pretty decent most of the time — but standing in my way and the shitty use of health kits really burns my jockeys. The adversarial mode is also an absolute blast, though it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If nothing else, it’s definitely a different experience than what you find in other FPSes. The level of coordination that it takes to succeed as a human survivor is just insane when you have actual people pulling the strings of the super zombies. The AI can get pretty nasty, but even a modicum of coordination on the zombie side will tear apart an unprepared human team. I’m sure I’ve said it several times, but it is just an absolute blast playing on either side in the adversarial mode. Just like the single player game, one or two fuckwads can very easily ruin the game, so I highly recommend a heavy-handed approach to kicking out dissidents with a wrathful vengeance. All in all, Left 4 Dead is almost like a party game in that you will probably get little or no enjoyment from the game by yourself, but (wait for it) it’s an absolute blast when you get together with friends. I know I don’t play the game at all any more unless I’ve got other people to play with (which is often enough to make it worthwhile) but when I do, it’s an absolute blast. ABSOLUTE BLAST! ABSOLUTE BLAST!!!

Sam’s Take

Left 4 Dead is, without a doubt, one of the best games I have ever played (matched only by Team Fortress 2). Since you most likely know a fair bit about the mechanics of Left 4 Dead, thanks to either my colleagues or just general Internet usage, I will not be detailing them in my section of the review. What I will be telling you is that the PC version of Left 4 Dead is most certainly the definitive version of the game. Having played both versions, I’m at liberty to say that if you have the choice between the two, you will definitely want to go straight to Steam. Valve, since they run their own distribution platform, have total control over the game you’re playing. While that might be a bad thing in many cases, let me remind you that this is Valve we’re talking about. There will inevitably be hundreds of free updates to the game on the PC; in fact, the game has been updated for the better at least three times since release. Of course, the controls are better, the community is more mature (I’ve never seen a griefer or even a person younger than the age rating), and the modding scene are all perfect examples to prove my point. While I could stress that you need the PC version all day, I understand that not everyone can afford a decent enough PC, and there is a bigger issue at hand for me to address in my review. Having racked up around 40 hours on the game, I can safely say that there has never been a moment that was anything less than fantastic. The game is nothing but sheer fun. Strangely, this is a point a lot of people seem to miss. “Not enough story”; “Too short”; “No singleplayer campaign” — all genuine complaints I have heard about the game. It strikes me as incredibly strange that a game completely centered around cooperative play would receive complaints about aspects not to do with co-op. Left 4 Dead is not a single-player game. If you don’t have friends, do not buy Left 4 dead. However, if you do have friends, and you’re anything like me, this game is absolutely a must-buy. “Too short,” you say? I resist the urge to use an expletive here, because there’s no way it can be too short. I’ve played over forty hours of the game, and never had the same experience twice. The AI director, as Valve keeps trying to explain, is not ‘random’. It bases the way the entire campaign plays out based on what your team is doing. It’s far too complex to go into detail, but the director essentially reads almost everything about how you’ve been progressing, and bases the enemies it throws at you on that. Each campaign may take something like an hour to complete, but no matter how many times you play, it will never be the same thing — the only thing that’s constant is where you’ve got to go. The director even changes the scenery to make things easier or harder sometimes. “Too short” is a non-argument. Perhaps I’ve gone on too long about why you should like it, but the main point stands tall — Left 4 Dead is an incredibly fun game. Shooting zombies, no matter how clichéd, is great, and with 3 friends, it’s even better. Plus, playing as the infected is just as brilliant — killing a survivor with a big gun is just as satisfying as shooting lots of zombies with your own big gun. In case you hadn’t figured it out from the above text, I kind of like Left 4 Dead. Perhaps it’s not for everyone, but a review is a review, and my review says this: This game is about as close to perfect as you can get. 11/10 (Alright Dan, 10/10, but it’s better than The Witcher!) [Editor's note: No it's not!!!]

Anyone else have anything to add?

Roly’s Take

Left 4 Dead is my quintessential co-op game. It takes the instant gratification viscerality of Gears of War and perfectly blends it with that unknown factor of addiction that are the legs of RPG’s like World of Warcraft and Phantasy Star Online. Unlike the RPG’s addiction factor, Left 4 Dead’s reason to keep coming back isn’t an unknown variable, it all has to do with the AI Director feature. The AI Director ensures that every level in each of the four “movies” has the possibility of feeling and playing substantially different than another run through. Of course, the changes aren’t always that substantial. Sometimes they’re as minimal, albeit enormously effective, as replacing a health pack in a closet with 5 zombies instead. With the AI Director helping keep everything fresh, Left 4 Dead is exclusively a co-op game in design. Although possible and fully functional playing offline with bots instead of real-life companions, the experience does not compare. You can’t have a dialogue with bots. You can’t coordinate with bots. You can’t make bots feel emotion. You can’t be on the verge of finishing a level, only to be yanked back by a Smoker’s tongue and proceeding to yell half-sarcastically, “No! Save yourself!” and seeing your ‘friend’ make it to safety as you are devoured by more zombies than George A. Romero could hope to fit in a mall, no, you can’t have that with a bot.

Ultimately, Left 4 Dead is a must-own game for both the PC crowd and anyone with a 360… if you have friends. A majority of what makes the game so appealing rests solely on the cooperative gameplay, which unfortunately means that you are missing out on its true high points if you decide to go it alone. Of course, you can always play with total strangers, and some people may even prefer it that way.

The A.I. teammates could also use as tune-up, even though they do a fantastic (almost too fantastic) job of covering your ass. They mainly serve as motivation to get some real people to join just so you can yell at them and feel like it makes a difference. There’s nothing worse than the helpless feeling of knowing that your fellow survivors will never hear your words of advice or your cries for help.

Aside from a 4-man band on one TV, Left 4 Dead is the best co-op experience to be had in 2008, as well as one of the best zombie games ever made. Infinitely replayable, it’s certainly worth the price of admission, but we would still love a few more maps to play on just to keep things fresh and more varied. In this case, you can’t have too much of a good thing.

As reported earlier this week, some gamers were able to hack into the servers for the Xbox 360 version of Left 4 Dead, glitching the game and causing mayhem for other players in both the co-op and versus modes.

Well, Valve has quickly released a server-side fix to its Xbox 360 servers after reports of the hacking have spread.

“The fix is designed to halt the cheating behavior on the dedicated servers, which accounts for the majority of the co-op and versus modes of play,” says Valve.

Valve also intends to release an update for Xbox 360 gamers playing Left 4 Dead on user-hosted servers or via System Link multiplayer in “the coming days.”

Source: Gamasutra.com

Left 4 Dead 411 reports that Valve’s much anticipated Left 4 Dead has gone gold, meaning that the game is finally ready to be shipped. Steam users will find that if they have pre-ordered the game, they can pre-load the game ready for it to be played the second it is released on the 18th of November. The game releases in stores on the same day.

In other news, Shacknews has news that Valve have released hi-res versions of the movie posters from each campaign’s loading screen. Fans of the game, and even nostalgic movie poster enthusiasts, will agree that they’re very well designed and add a lot to the game’s cinematics. Outside of the game, they’re simply good desktop material.

Steam owners can now download the public demo of Left 4 Dead, Valve’s upcoming zombie shooter. Xbox 360 owners can also get their zombie freak on via XBLA, as the demo has been released there as well. This of course comes a week after the release of the pre-order demo, available to those who had pre-ordered the game. As you can see, I feel that this demo is much better than most full games out there, so I strongly urge all zombie fans (and everyone else) to download the demo and try it out. Look forward to the Ripten review of the game in the near future!

G4TV has posted a video containing 15 minutes of gameplay footage they recorded themselves while fighting for their lives against an army of zombies. If this doesn’t get you ready to hit “download” when the public demo of Left 4 Dead hits XBL tomorrow, you must not be a fan of four player co-op awesomeness. Hit the jump for the video.

Although I was only able to play the XBox 360 version of Left 4 Dead at the Eurogamer Expo, I have been playing the pre-release demo for the PC in the comfort of my own home, to my delight. The perspective I’ll be giving on the game is from a PC standpoint; to me, playing a Valve game on a console is like eating Ben and Jerry’s with a rusty nail- it still tastes nice, but the sheer pain (of using a controller) ruins the experience. Before you begin to shout at me, make sure you read the preview after the jump. Here’s a spoiler: it’s unbelievably good.

I’ll begin with the 360 version which I played at the Expo. If I put aside the obvious control faults, I can find nothing wrong with this game. I began with a standard shotgun, walked out into a hallway, and was immediately met by three screaming zombies running at incredible speed towards me. My shotgun tore through them, creating one of the best sensations a videogame weapon can create: satisfaction. It feels exactly like a shotgun should feel, and the zombies tear apart with the exact amout of force that a shotgun should provide. It was fantastic. I continued up on to the roof of the building I was in, and found that the four of us were going to have to radio for a helicopter to pick us up- but doing so would set off an alarm, causing a huge horde of zombies. When it happened, there were at least 100 of the buggers, who all seemed to think it was only my brains that were on the menu. Needless to say we didn’t make it, but my, was it an experience. Even on the 360, from the short amount I played, I can tell that this game is phenomenal.

Left 4 Dead on the PC is, going by the demo, probably going to be my favourite game of all time. It might seem a little presumptuous to base this on a demo, but if you’ve played it you’ll understand. The demo features 2 sections of one level, and I have played it through at least thirty or forty times, and never had the same experience twice. The game’s AI director places zombies based on how well you’re doing- if you’re doing well, without losing much health or ammo, the director will spawn a huge horde for you to fight off, or more boss infected.

Boss infected are special types of zombie that have abilities other than the simple melee attack. The Boomer can vomit on you, attracting all nearby zombies to attack you, or blow himself up in an attempt to kill you. The Hunter can jump around at incredible speed and pounce on you, knocking you down and causing a lot of damage. The Smoker uses his huge tongue to entangle you and drag you towards him or even into a pack of zombies. When killed (or on command) he releases a huge puff of smoke, which is impossible to see through. There is also the Tank, a huge hulk of a zombie that takes concentrated fire from all four of you for at least a minute to take down- if you see a Tank, the next thing you know, you’re going to be dead or dying. Finally, there’s the Witch. She does nothing if you leave her alone, but if you startle her by being to loud or shining your light in her face, she’ll drop you to the floor in one hit and proceed to kill you very, very quickly, unless your comrades can save you. You’re not going to want to startle the Witch.

Because of the AI director, you never know when or where it is going to spawn- I’ve experienced points of the game where there are no zombies one round, and the next there are hundreds standing there. It makes for an everlasting game, as other than knowing the direction you’re heading, you’re completely in the dark (metaphorically and literally) as to what will happen next. As with the 360 version, the guns are a pleasure to use, and zombies die perfectly. Later in the level when the more powerful weapons are revealed, they become even more fun, if that were possible. The auto-shotgun in particular is fantastic for crowd-clearing, shooting bursts of shotgun shells as fast as you want. I’ve never played a game where the shotgun is more satisfying.

The survival instinct is another testament to the game’s greatness; on harder difficulty levels, you’ll rarely have above half your health, and ammo runs short after so many zombie attacks. By the time you reach the safe room, your character is hobbling and spluttering, making for an incredibly cinematic finish- closing the final door just as the zombies start to swarm around it is a better adrenaline rush than any horror film, I can tell you. Oh, and if I haven’t mentioned it before, there are a lot of zombies. With the right circumstances, and a bit of developer console wizardry, it’s possible to spawn around 1,000 zombies on screen without a hint of lag, as seen above.

To finish, I can only say one thing. This game is looking like it could be the best game I’ve ever played. There is almost nothing I can find to fault it- and I’m usually more critical than most. I can’t stress this enough: if you’re not looking forward to this game already, you should be. Look forward to our review in the coming weeks.

For those who have pre-ordered Valve’s much-anticipated zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, the demo was released earlier today, for both PC and 360. Don’t worry if you haven’t pre-ordered; the demo releases for everyone on the 11th November, and the full game on the 18th.

I’ve been playing it as much as I can since it was released, but it seems to be going through some teething troubles right now, at least on the PC version. It seems the server files weren’t provided far enough in advance and they can’t keep up with the huge demand- it’s very difficult to find a game online at the moment, and when I have managed to, it has been plagued by lag. Valve are reported to be fixing the issue as fast as possible. Despite this, the single player portion of the demo is still fantastic, and the fact that it will never play out the same way twice means that the demo should easily last until the full game releases on the 18th.

[Update] Left4Dead411 reports that you can now use a server browser by typing “openserverbrowser” into the dev console. This solves the issues with finding dedicated servers.

Left 4 Dead surprises me everyday with the amount of sheer awesome that’s being generated by the game’s hype machine. If you kill every zombie in the infected town of Willamete, you get an achievement. Doesn’t sound so bad, right? I mean, when the zombie apocalypse comes around that’s kind of the plan. You know, to kill everyone. Want to know more? Of course you do.

The city of Willamete is not going to go down easy. Remember the Zombie Genocider achievement in Dead Rising? Yeah, it’s just like that. It seems like Valve is trying to one-up Capcom in the zombie apocalypse genre…literally. The Dead Rising Zombie Genocider achievement required you to kill 53,594 of the undead, while Left 4 Dead requires you to take down 53,595 zombies. This is called the “Zombie Genocidest” achievement. I see what you did there, Valve.

This shit just got real.

Source: Capcom Unity

With a reported 10 million dollar advertising budget (half of which is said to be for television spots) Valve is doing everything they can to make sure you and your friends are ready to kick some zombie ass.

The game hits store shelves in the US on November 18th, but a boat load of money says you’ll be seeing severed digits everywhere you look long before then. In fact, Kotaku reports that the commercial above will begin airing on November 8th.

Valve have announced an official contest today entitled “Dude, Where’s My Thumb?” that challenges budding zombie hunters to take a photo of themselves in front of one of the many advertisements for the game (in London, New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area).

The contest encourages you to be “creative” and “crazy”- don’t just take a photo of yourself, do something cool! The photos should be submitted to Valve via this page, where they’ll be judged by none other than Valve president Gabe Newell himself. The Top 25 entries will receive free copies of Left 4 Dead, with the best overall getting a brand new rig from AMD.

With pre-orders of the game almost double that of the Orange Box, Left 4 Dead is looking to be one of this year’s best selling games. You can enter as many times as you like, so head down to one of those areas and take an awesome photo.

If you’re going to apply, why not send us a copy of your photo as well to whatsup@ripten.com? You could make our front page, and that’s every bit as good as a free copy of Left 4 Dead!