Left 4 Dead 2

Over the coming weeks, I hope to be trying out people’s attempts at custom campaigns and posting one’s which I think deserve a mention and review. I am in no way associated with the author of any which are posted – just to make that clear. Now, let’s get to it.

Browsing the internet earlier, I came across what appeared to be an interesting custom campaign created by someone of the Left 4 Dead 2 community. This campaign/map is in its early stages, but I thought I’d try it out non-the-less.

From a first glance when the map initially loads, it looks very professional and well done (which it does throughout). All textures look great (no broken/faulty ones), the starting point looks well-polished and positioning of objects look at VALVe-Standard.

Let’s walk through it.

You start off on a beach. One side, a mass of water. The other – something which appears to be a jungle. Behind you is a shipwrecked wooden boat (I believe it is the same model as Virgil’s). After picking up all of your items from the crates, you can continue forward along the beach. My first time going around the first corner introduced me to a tank, which was nice (followed by a Spitter, Hunter and Boomer).

Once you’ve pushed your way through the beach, you’re welcomed with a nice open space. Now, with this open space there are two sides. One side is the one you’re standing on, the other is the one opposite a river. My instinct was to cross the river to the other side to look for an escape route onto the bridge (which is directly above us at this point). I simply could not find the pathway up there for the life of me…until I turned around and saw it was on the other side of the river (the side I was initially on).I feel that this part is pretty misleading and would definitely benefit from being fixed, as I would say 9 times out of 10, people would go the exact way that I did.

Once you’re up the slope and onto the bridge, you find a very familiar, yet very well constructed road with wrecked cars all along it (somewhat like Dark Carnival). I felt this part was very fun, not only because the entire horde came from behind, but it seemed like more of an open space whereas the beach was quite confined due to the large amounts of water. The bridge, I believe, only had one car with its alarm set on, which was quite disappointing as I think it would definitely benefit from many more (although not as much as the impound on Parish) to make it that little bit extra difficult.

Pretty much once you’re off of the bridge; you have the Safe Room in sight. Every single time I’ve played, there is always a sneaky boomer in the Safe Room right behind the door, so look out for that!

Once you’re locked in the safe room, the game is pretty much unplayable from there on [watch video], due to when the second level loads; you’re stuck in one position unable to move at all (except for changing weapons). But as the author made clear, it is still in Beta stages and nowhere near done yet.

Concluding, this map is definitely a fun one to play, and feels very solid for a custom map. There are several areas which I think could be improved on, such as the location of the footpath to the bridge, car alarms etc., but apart from that I’m quite impressed.

Something that is rather tricky to get around is the fact that if you’re in the water, Special Infected are going to spawn from under there, so look out for that! (Tanks don’t like the water).

Overall, very good map but obviously needs some work doing to it (it’s only a Beta) but I’ll give it a 7/10.

Pros: Everything looks very well placed and constructed.
Cons: Stated above.

You can download this from here.