Thanks to the kind folks at Valve I was able to get my hands on Left4Dead a day early, which really wasn’t that early as it turned out that 2 others from our community had the game last night as well.  After a straight two hours of game play I can farely say that Left4Dead has fully exceeded my expectations.  My only recommendation thus far is if you play on any mode other than normal is it’s imperative that you have a full squad of 4 players to play with.  Read more after the jump…

The demo does a good job capturing the essence of what Left4Dead is all about, but what it totally leaves out is maddening difficulty of the end levels for each episode.  I played on No Mercy with two friends on the advanced difficulty and it was hard enough save the lack of a fourth person.  We worked well together as a team, going from this point to the other but our fourth man controlled by AI was not on the same program as we were.  The beauty of Left4Dead is the necessity of team work.  Each player MUST communicate with one another in order to flow like a well oiled machine.  You need to know when to have each others backs as well as when to heal whom.  The AI has a hard time just picking up a pipe bomb or molitov cocktail (which they wouldn’t do).

On the final level of No Mercy we were left to defend against a few waves of zombies as we awaited a helicopters arrival to pick us up and bring us to safety.  We had a plan, huddle in a small room where there was only one entrance and destroy all the zombies that ended up in front of the door.  Again, the three of us were on the same page but Mr. AI himself decided to be on his own program and leave the safe room to fight against the zombie hordes alone.  We basically made our computer friend bait as we continued against the onslaught but when the Tanks (giant Hulk like zombies) decided to show up we had to leave the safe room and work a new strategy. 

After at least 15 tries on this one particular point in the game we were finally victorious and the sighs of relief were heard all around our head sets.  We finally completed the mission, the episode was over only, there are 4 more episodes to complete.

Left4Dead is such a phenomenal game especially with 4 players cooperating accordingly.  If you even remotely like zombies, correction, if you like video games you absolutely owe it to yourself to pick this game up and play it with your friends.  You will not in any way be disappointed with what you experience in this game.