A few friends and I went up to the University's computer science lab last night and played some Left4Dead 2. We only played two campaigns, out of order, and shamefully were unable to finish the final onslaught of the second one, but I think I had enough time with it to form an opinion. It has a few problems, but all in all I'd say it is a well done sequel that added more to the franchise in a year than most hyped up two or three year dev cycle sequels do.
First off there are tons of new weapons, they were all right, but most were similar variations of each other, like three versions of a shotgun. The melee weapons felt kind of awkward, but work fantastically when surrounded by swarms of zombies. That and hearing a southerner randomly walk into an abandoned convenience store and yell, "Ninja Sword here!" never really gets old.
The first campaign we did was "Hard Rain" and even though it reused the first two chapters by making you backtrack through them for the next two, the rainstorm changed it so significantly that you could hardly notice. Also the horrible peaks of the storm happening every few minutes definitely kept us on our toes. The second campaign we did was "Dark Carnival" and that one had some pretty incredible environments, including running along a roller coaster track and a finale that I won't spoil. The level design for both campaigns were very reminiscent of some of the more memorable sections of the Half Life series and that's never a bad thing.
Where the game really has a head over it's predecessor however is the AI director. That bastard is harsher than ever before. If anyone happens to fall behind, within a minute he'll have to deal with a Jockey or some other special zombie. Same thing if you pull ahead, you'll find yourself face first in a Chargers giant palm in no time. The whole game just feels more frantic as well. You have to keep moving, dawdling just results in more zombies rushing you, but you also have to stick together. It's the same concepts from the first game, but with the pressure ramped up, combined with less ammo than before. It almost feels like a survival horror game in that respect. Valve turned it up to 11 and the result feels much fresher and newer than the Halo or Gears of War sequels ever did.
Still, the game is not without it's faults. For one, the bare bones emergent narrative structure of the game hasn't changed at all. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I seem to recall Valve saying they were going to put more effort into the story telling this time around. Aside from a few more snarky comments and references to their surroundings from the characters it really hasn't changed.
Also, not really a gameplay issue, but we ran into a number of bugs or glitches while playing. Every now and then, with increasing frequency, the game would temporarily freeze up for one of us while still going for everyone else. I'm not sure if this was a game issue or a lag issue, but it was fairly obnoxious by the end got us killed in more than a couple clutch moments.
The weirdest thing we saw all night was a Witch that would not die. My friend startled her with an incendiary shot, while I blasted her with a shotgun. We both went down, then she started to freak out after she realized she was on fire and wandered around twitching. She continued to do this fire induced animation long after the flames were gone and no longer seemed to have any interest in us. It was quite the glitch.
Faults aside, Left4Dead 2 was not a let down and would have been a pretty ridiculous content pack. The AI director really changed the pacing and the whole game felt kicked up a notch. It's nice to see Valve pushing out quality with some sort of frequency. Now I'd just like to know where the hell is Episode 3?
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