This co-operative action horror FPS takes you and your friends through the cities, swamps and cemeteries of the Deep South, from Savannah to New Orleans across five expansive campaigns. You'll play as one of four new survivors armed with a wide and devastating array of classic and upgraded weapons. In addition to firearms, you'll also get a chance to take out some aggression on infected with a variety of carnage-creating melee weapons, from chainsaws to axes and even the deadly frying pan.
A point was made by the people who boycotted Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) on release. Even though it was sold as a sequel game exactly a year after the first title was made public, it feels more like a huge patch since the playability is fundamentally the same. However, there were some additions: more game modes, lighter environments, humor, character lore, to name a few. Despite all the criticism, the expansion that L4D2 represents has proven that a game can last a long period of time in terms of popularity and community engagement, turning it into a classic.
The first difference in ambience noted in L4D2 is that the maps are a lot less dark. Set in New Orleans, the environment doesn't feel excessively less threatening since it now leads us through burning mall centers, amusement parks swarmed with infected, swamps, rainy overrun towns and more. It feels a lot more diverse than the repeating gloominess of L4D maps. New models for uncommon infected and special infected were added, and older special infected models were reworked, remaining coherent with the new environment and the advanced stage of the outbreak. While most of the rest of the ambience remains the same, I must remark that more complexity was added to infected dismemberment, which allows for a myriad of damage animations to zombies, still with great care for detail.
Different characters were added. Old ones make a comeback in some DLCs. The lore was expanded through a multitude of media and developed connections between the prequel and L4D2. Despite all these additions, I find myself again not interested at all in the background story of the characters and the game. Though there is a lot more contrast between tense moments and funny dialogs, which I think makes the characters even more relatable than L4D at some moments.
If gameplay in L4D was great, in L4D2 it gets on steroids. The addition of new primary and secondary weapons, including melee, was welcomed among the community. Maps not released in L4D were made available as DLC content, each and every one of them with new challenges, paths and climaxes. New special infected not only enhanced the existing Versus mode, but they were also paired with new game modes and mutators for existing maps, increasing replayability by the tons. And that's not taking into account the AI director that has been perfected with each patch. This leaves the door open to somewhat new kind of co-op strategies, especially for new game modes. And maybe the highest point of L4D2 has been and still is modding, which promotes a great stream of creativity among the community for modeling, mapping and creating add-ons, so this is possibly what allows for the continuous survivability of the game.
As good as L4D2 apparently is in comparison to its prequel in almost every aspect, I think it still deserves a slightly lower rating since at its core it's just a huge patch, and because the changes in ambience, character building, and gameplay resources have made the game lose a bit of its original charm as a properly unforgiving and hardcore survival horror.