Left 4 Dead 2

Back at San Diego Comic-Con, we got our hands on one of the most highly-anticipated games of the event (and of this year), Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. This shooter sequel was a surprise announcement at this year’s E3, but with its November release just around the corner, it’s looking as polished as one might expect.

We played half of the “Swamp Fever” campaign that was unveiled at Comic-Con, which amounted to two levels. Those levels, unlike the “Parish” campaign from E3 set in New Orleans, took players to a thick marsh in the Deep South. Players traversed land and water in equal parts, but we definitely tried to stay as dry as possible. Deep water was dangerous, which often inspired our ragtag crew of four all-new characters to take detours on dry land and traverse choke points fashioned from makeshift plywood bridges.

Another difference from “The Parish” was the apparent absence of daylight. The daytime mission in New Orleans quickly set apart Left 4 Dead 2 as a marked departure from the dark locales of the original game, but here in the swamps, it’s near-as-makes-no-difference dark again. It could be dawn, or dusk, or really any time of day, for very thick fog clouds out sunlight and leaves what visible sky there is a deeply grayed shade of blue.

But this game isn’t about the sky, it’s about the zombies. But where other games might crowd their sequels with more baddies (like God of War 3 or Gears of War 2), Valve has given its zombies more talents and abilities to make things harder for our party of four. We’ve already mentioned the Charger, whose job it is to push people around in Tank-like fashion and break up tight groups. But I was surprised to see how un-Tank-like he actually was. He has the height and bulky upper body of the boss zombie, but not his seemingly endless strength. The Charger, like other Special Infected, goes down after two or three bullets.

Another new Special Infected, the Spitter, made her debut at Comic-Con. She has the same mission as the Charger, which is breaking up groups that have their backs to the wall. True to her name, she spits out acid which corrodes players to death if they don’t clear away from the burning ground. The effect is not unlike fire from anywhere else in the game. It’s even the same shade of orange as fire, so the signal is crystal clear: move.

Some Common Infected, too, have gotten some tweaks. With the same attack power and general weakness as your average horde zombie, they’ve come to be called “Un-common Infected” for the extra bells and whistles they come with. There have been reports of zombies decked out in hazmat suits, making them invulnerable to the fire from a Molotov Cocktail, or in Kevlar, making them only vulnerable from behind. In “Swamp Fever,” we came across crouched Infected. They hang out down low, like a Hunter ready to pounce, and they’re surprisingly hard to hit. They’ll also take you by complete surprise if you’re wading through waist-deep water, making the swamplands even more dangerous.

Thankfully, our Survivors have some new toys to take out these new zombies with. Much ado has been made of new melee weapons, but my experience with the cricket bat didn’t sell me on the idea, and I longed to return to a weapon with bullets. All of those guns, by the way, have been transformed to look like something more military-grade. The Hunting Rifle, for instance, now looks like a full-blown sniper rifle. But my favorite toy was the all new automatic sniper rifle. Slotting in between the Assault Rifle and the Hunting Rifle, this weapon packs a 30-round clip, firing no more than 2 rounds per second, and adds a scope to assist in long-range shooting. With my new friends packing the usual Assault Rifles and automatic shotguns, I helped target those slippery Special Infected lurking in the distance and entrusted my teammates to wipe out the closer zombies.

The game’s infamous AI Director must have approved of our plan and it rewarded us with an upgrade. The usual tip popped up to alert us to its presence, but a little icon of a gift-wrapped box with a bow let us know that we had done something special and deserved to be rewarded. Near the next ammo cache, a small box offered Incendiary Ammunition. I took a dive with the ammunition and came to regret it at the next major zombie horde fight.

One level has a “climax event” (the parts where players trigger something which alerts the horde) set in the shell of a downed airplane. Players can take on this challenge in a variety of ways, such as going out on the wing, but we chose to stay in close quarters inside the plane. This was a problem for my incendiary ammo, which exploded into small batches of fire with every round I fired. Before too long, two teammates were incapacitated from my setting them on fire. They were a bit angry, but I found it to be the hilarious result of a long string of things which will never be repeated.

That uniqueness of each round is what I’ve always enjoyed about Left 4 Dead. And as I hinted in my most recent Pushing Buttons column, Valve’s latest just feels like more Left 4 Dead, not a full-blown sequel. But I, for one, love it for that. I suspect that the millions who’ve already pre-ordered the sequel, despite all the Internet nonsense, will feel the same.

Left 4 Dead 2 arrives on Xbox 360 and PC on November 17.

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