As of roughly noon today the Left 4 Dead 2 demo hit Xbox Live, giving gamers a taste of what the latest Valve shooter had to offer.
As an avid zombie lover, I eagerly queued it up for download. These are my impressions.
I guess the most important addition to this game is the melee weapons. There has been quite a debate about the addition of these. At first it seemed everyone was excited and whatnot about being able to kill zombies with, say, a frying pan or guitar, but that excitement didn't last very long. After the gameplay videos surfaced the melee weapons seemed extremely overpowered. The truth is, they are very powerful weapons. Luckily, the balancing is actually a very sharp double edged sword. The swings of your weapons are very carefully timed to allow to to take enough damage, that adds up very quickly, between attacks. This isn't that terribly much of a factor on the easier difficulties, but on expert and even advanced I found myself dying way quicker than my teammates if I was in the fray swinging my guitar.
The melee weapons one hit kills are even more evened out by the new pistol upgrade. In addition to the dual-weild capability they have added a newer and way better upgrade. A Magnum. This gun has one-shot zombie killing bullets, unless you shoot them in the foot or something. The gun also seems to be a pretty rare drop from the director, speaking of which, has also changed immensely.
While the demo may only be two sections of an episode, the experience was thoroughly different each play through. The weapon spawns, locations of boomer bile, medkits, and other goodies were all seemingly randomly generated, but seemed to fit the situations that arose almost perfectly. The zombies were also much more intensely presented by the director. Zombie hoards pouring out moments before you seal yourself in a safehouse is a very intense sight to see, and when a Spitter or Charger comes run out things get really hectic.
That brings me to the addition of the new special infected. These three new enemies; the Spitter, Charger, and Jockey. The addition of these three new infected doubles the amount of special infected you will be running into mixed in with the zombie fodder. I will spare you the details of what exactly they do, in case you want to be surprised when you grab the demo, but a quick google search will pull up the info if you want. They all have their own unique power, that really compliments the classic specials they kept in the game, and will really throw a wrench in things if you don't pay attention to them. Overall one of the most noticable things in this game is the way the zombies are much more aggressive and in your face this time around. One of my friends mentioned he thought they were running faster, they were on top of me before I could make a rebuttal.
There are so many little additions to this game that it would really take forever to write down. Even though it is a demo it really illustrates how much they have refined the Left 4 Dead formula, and I can't even begin to fathom all the other surprises the full version has up its sleeves. Perhaps I will post another night about some more of the little improvements I have noticed. But you should really just go grab it, you will be impressed.
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