Yaaaaarrrrrr – Crash Course, aka L4D1:DLC2, as Valve themselves succinctly put it, has just gone live. It’s a new map, new storyline stuff and, in theory, a full Versus argy-bargy contained within a mere half hour. And all for free, not that this seems to placate the vengeful. Exit and restart Steam and it should download and install itself for you. If you don’t already own Left 4 Dead (and aren’t planning on picking up L4D2 instead on 20th November), there’s also a celebratory 50%-off sale on from now until October 1st.
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You know, I spent some time with Left 4 Dead once upon a time. I found it quite dull and repetitive. I have seen other people play it since then, and not only did it further impress itself on me as dull and repetitive, but it was confirmed for me that the people playing it on Xbox Live are complete and utter dinguses. (I cannot vouch one way or the other for the PC community.) So I’m pretty sure I don’t like the game and don’t want to own it.
And yet. The combination of the $15 sale price and the continued collective Internet orgasm over it are seriously tempting me. I am a weak, weak man.
“the people playing it on Xbox Live are complete and utter dinguses”
That kind of goes without saying, innit?
L4D is (imho, of course) one of the best bang-for-buck games out there – where bang is fun and buck is time (since money is of no consequence – $15!) – so long as you play with good people. My experiences with joining random servers have been generally good, but almost all the time I spend with it is with friends. With mics. Mics are critical, for success and fun.
You’ve gotta play the right game mode too. If you want slow-pace, tactical survival, the only choice is Co-op Campaign mode, Expert difficulty, where each zombie punch will set you back around 20HP. Anything easier tends to be a waste of time. If you’re looking for more frantic PvP action, Versus mode is where it’s at. Survival mode is like the equivalent of Time Trial in a racing game – only with thousands of zombies and heavy weapons. Single player is not even worth mentioning.
In conclusion, very, very, very worth it if you have friends you can play with. Probably only very worth it if you don’t.
If you have three other friends that have it or can be talked into having it on your platform of choice (and all of whom have headsets, which are critical), then it’s good for a few hours of fun and probably worth that price. If you have less than 3 friends, you’ll get stuck with bots that will prevent you from playing expert (which is undeniably the most fun way to play the game) or with idiots.
The PC community is not good, you really need to know folks that are playing to have a good time. Even then, it ultimately gets dull and repetitive because there’s really not a lot to it. Still, with some friends you could easily get your $15 worth out of it, I’d think. Then again, your description of the game after playing it briefly sounds like the way I’d describe the game after having played it for about 30 hours, so maybe you get bored with this particular variety of shallow MP shooter faster than I do.
Yes, the game is more fun with friends. Any game is. But it’s not like it becomes unplayable when you can’t play with them. I’ve played a lot of games with random people, and I just added the folks I enjoyed playing with to my Steam friends list and over time, I built up a list of people I could play with any time without any drama. It really didn’t take that long either. Don’t listen to the people who would try to convince you that the game is not worth playing without 3 other friends as well. and 15$ is a great price for the game too.
It wasn’t so much that I got bored with it as I never started having fun with it. I need a bit more depth to my shootybang, or a bit more variety, or both. It didn’t help that even though the campaigns are ridiculously short as shooters go, they’re mostly a lot more than I’d really like to play of the game in one sitting. Crash Course might help with that, I suppose.
It’s pretty amazing fun when you play it with friends. And use TeamSpeak. Because the in-game voice function sucks. Why do I have to press a button to say something? Gah…
You don’t – just set the speech mode to “Open Microphone” or whatever in options :P L4D and TF2 have some of the best voice support (in terms of ease of use and quality) of any MP game I’ve played.
Oh, thanks for the info. :-) Well, I only tried the voice function one time when I played with random people on the internet, but with friends I use Teamspeak all the time to just talk, so I never looked through the settings really.
“Why do I have to press a button to say something? Gah…”
Because we don’t need to hear you cough, hear your mom come in and ask you something, hear you eat, hear you drink or hear any other amount of bodily functions.
Voice actived is a gimmick setting, and it’s a crime that it’s become the standard for consoles – and that it’s being forced onto the PC.
I play with friends I know well and, ehm, from experience I can say it’s only fun if you hear the other ones constantly.
Yeah, me and my mates use Skype as it means if the game crashes or whatever we can still communicate and it’s definitely all about voice on all the time. It means if someone jumps you get to hear their immediate reaction rather than them having to press to communicate.
I can shall break so far on topic that I fear the comments track might bend:
SQUUUUUUEEEEEEEEE
The best experiences I’ve had with L4D were on XBL and the worst have been on PC. Somehow WASD+MOUSE doesn’t feel right on this game (shock, I know!) and worse, the players I’ve found on PC have been major dicks, compared to those on XBL (again, shock, I know.. but…).
every review and thier mother talked about how l4d was incredibly low on content. valve was like, hey dont worry we will provide tons afterward.
they provided squat. $20 for the game is a good price.
“This book is 500 pages. That book over there is inferior, as it is 200 pages.”
A version of Trivial Pursuit containing 20 question cards is every bit as worthy of my $30 as a version of Trivial Pursuit containing 200 question cards because quantity isn’t important.
Yeah, I’m sure you can also play through all the maps in Counter Strike in one hour…
At least the first part of this campaign is kind of bad and boring, like the worst parts of Death Toll. I didn’t play the finale, so that may be great, but the first level feels rushed and lacking detail – take a look at the safe rooms, they have one or two big graffiti scrawls and a lot of blank walls, not the dense storyline-in-tags that the other episodes had. Truly, their heart is not in this one.
The finale is actually quite interesting in what they try to do. Unfortunately, despite their efforts, it’s pretty much a normal finale. The hard part (at least on campaign) is that they put a finale at the end of a 5-10 minute level that you have to do over if you fail.
To be honest, the campaign felt kind of generic and “samey.” And there does appear to be a bug where they turn on almost every single item spawn. I have never, ever, seen so many tier 2 pickups spawned in.
Here’s a stupid question, where IS the finale? A friend and I have been playing for about half an hour on the last map, but we’re just going in circles.
At the end there’s a mechanic’s garage, and a generator out in the open that works as the switch.
Found it, thanks. I’m curious, what did you mean by “what they try to do” with regards to the finale? It seemed pretty standard, to me.
Without spoiling too much, I was referring to the bit where you go back out before the escape vehicle gets there. Which, now that I really think about it, isn’t all that different.
No. This is just not good enough. Where, oh where, is the trademark polish?
Played a few Versus games on it yesterday, It’s not bad. The map has a stupid amount of explosives and items which I thought was a bug first off, but they’re pretty much vital to surviving, given the rediculous number of places for hunter pounces.
The actual finale itself though is pretty poor for the infected. There’s a minigun inside the building which means high damage pounces are out of the question. You can slip round the back to get them through a window, but if they’re guarding it you’re doomed. Director has an annoying habit of spawning boomers and the tank right in the minigun’s line of fire, too, which sucks.
That said, you can use the generator to block line of sight – so you can spawn a boomer right next to the survivors just as they start the finale, which tends to mess them up pretty good :p
The item spawns have now been fixed, and by that I mean greatly reduced.
They were in no way vital to survival… and there aren’t that many pounce spots, a lot of building tops are blocked off even. It’s just like any other L4D campaign in that respect… if you learn the map and know how to deal with infected (as a team) you will make it through each map as survivor the majority of the time fairly easily.
My thoughts:
Two new props. Both maps visually bare and repetitive. Level design stale and uninteresting, regressing from the original campaigns. Half the building tops shut off to hunters.
You’d think they’d fix it up before releasing it. If they already did that… then… wow.
Piece of shit.
I am not a boycotter, so my hope is that they’re just trying to not upstage L4D2 with this release… but I have a niggling suspicion that L4D2 might end up similarly reusing a lot of set pieces and props and textures and EVERY LAST THING OVER AND OVER AND OVER. Maybe I just play too much? ;)
I hate the “fun with friends” argument. Loads of stuff that isn’t fun is still fun with friends. Making honking noises through your nose is fun with friends. The character designer in Tiger Woods games is fun with friends. Playing HL1 deathmatch where everyone’s avatar is a cartoon character is the best fun ever. With friends.
(Gears of Wars, however, isn’t even fun with friends as I discovered. Whadda POS.)
It’s definitely worth picking up L4D at €15; you will get your bang for your buck. IMO, it’s doesn’t have unlimited playability, but I have played many hours through all the campaigns a few times and through the survival maps a few dozen times (the perfect “10 minutes before dinner is ready” online shooter mode). It’s the kind of game which I’ll forget about for a month or two but invariably go back to for a bit more. If I got that much enjoyment out of an offline FPS, I’d consider it a no-brainer. However, people seem to think that if you “only” get 50 hours of enjoyment out of an online shooter, it’s somehow a failure.
P.