Left 4 Dead Preview At PC Gamer Showdown

Sierra Oscar · October 6th, 2008, 09:04 PM

Well, the previews for Left 4 Dead are starting to come out around now. Here is one preview from the PC Gamer Showdown event.

Aside from the partially-dressed women (none of which were there to advertise games, curiously) and a free tasteless slab of plastic in a bap, there were plenty of games.

There was even a big eyeball-like thing called the jDome which is like playing on a large, um, dome.

Very disorienting, but then all virtual reality is. It’s the future, people - soon everyone will have a curved projector screen (and a wonderfully expensive projector, of course) in their bedrooms to play first-person games and to watch Cloverfield on.

But enough of all that non-gaming tosh, let’s get to the main event: the booth babes Left 4 Dead!

A new Valve game is always big news in the PC gaming community, often greeted with as much fervour as Kevin Keegan is in certain parts of the north-east (just with fewer unemployed people hanging around in the middle of the day waiting for Sky Sports News to interview them.)

Anyway, Left 4 Dead has had the hearts of every Gamezine staffer a-fluttering, eager to get our hands on it as soon as it was announced. At last, we managed to get those official mice in our hands and give the zombie scum a good seeing to.

The queue was consistently large all day, but with four players at a time it went quite swiftly. Sometimes watching the game was just as cool as playing it, with constant “oohs”, “aahs” and “whoas” livening up the proceedings. Left 4 Dead earned every squeal of excitement, let me tell you. Most of them came from us, we’re sad to say.

The organisers had made the sensible decision to have one of the PCs linked up to a big screen, making it easier for the admiring throng to see how badly they were playing.

The game really does encourage team play, it isn’t just a marketing gimmick trotted out to cash in on the co-op fad.

You just cannot complete a level without your team intact - it’s too damn hard - so saving your teammates becomes as important as killing zombies. The AI Director does a superb job of balancing moments of silent tension with sudden zombie horde explosions, when at an unpredictable moment you suddenly get swarmed by the bastards.

The individual stages making up the grander, overarching levels are quite short and can range in difficulty – although it would be worth pointing out that the AI Director reacts ‘on the fly’, so each time you play a stage it could be quite different, in terms of where the enemy appears.

The first stage we played was completed quickly and easily, but the second level (played with Jon ‘Log’ Blyth and Steve Hogarty of PC Zone magazine, to name drop a little) nobody had managed to actually finish alive. Needless to say, our professional expertise and skill meant we didn’t exactly buck that trend.

Valve has another winner on their hands, it seems. Left 4 Dead’s focus on team-play ensures that anyone of any skill can work together, win, and enjoy themselves. Personally, it can get a tad boring butting heads with people who live on Team Fortress 2 or Halo 3 servers, so a game in which the casual as well as the hardcore are catered for should, with an justice, be very, very successful.

David Brown and Chris Capel attend the PC Gamer Showdown event and all they got were these lousy burgers ? gamezine.co.uk