http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9601&Itemid=59
By Edge
Zombies might be a familiar theme in gaming, but an asymmetric multiplayer FPS certainly isn’t. The reality of Left 4 Dead colliding with people’s expectations was clear enough at the Munich playtest we attended recently, as Germany’s finest videogame journos shrieked in fear and delight. The survivor and infected teams were clashing on a previously unseen and remarkably intense new scenario: the Farmhouse. Rabid zombies came screaming out of the cornfields, and over-excited scribes punched the air as they managed to score an infected kill against the well-armed survivors.
The core of the game is easily understood: playing as part of a team of four armed survivors of the zombie apocalypse, you fight against AI-controlled waves of basic zombies and rather more potent boss types. You have to stick close to your buddies and covering fire between the FPS quartet is the only way to stay alive. What’s most exciting about this latest showing, however, is that the game now has the boss-infected, or the player-zombies, fully implemented. While gamers can choose simply to play an AI-populated scenario, they can also elect to have players come in as the zombie boss characters – a rending, leaping hunter, the exploding, vomiting boomer, and the nightmarish behemoth of the tank. As these beasts, players can see unique routes through the level, available only to the infected, and have a constant outline of the survivors’ positions in their vision. Playing as them, you begin to feel quite predatory.
It’s unlike almost any other FPS experience (the closest relations are probably the Aliens Vs Predator games), and the infected find themselves constantly working on new ways to mess up the plans of the escaping survivors, dogging them constantly, right through the epic final showdown. On the Farmhouse level this was a military truck arriving to take the players from the scene, and that means staying put in the farmyard for five minutes as wave after cresting wave of rabid zombies pours in from the cornfields. It’s a spectacularly gory crescendo, especially when the survivors find the mounted Gatling gun.
Valve is calling its five lengthy maps ‘scenarios’, rather than ‘levels’ or anything else, because they are huge, sprawling pieces of environmental design that could take players up to an hour to fight their way through. The Farmhouse is a great example of how proficient the level designers are at using the tools available to them. Despite being based on the ageing Half-Life 2 tech, the woods and train tracks leading to the farm are brilliantly atmospheric and deliver exactly the right kind of visual intricacy and precarious situations to allow a game to play out in an interesting and evocative way every time.
Combine all this design savvy with a ravenous PC multiplayer modding community and an equally peckish 360 audience and you’ve got a recipe for one of the biggest multiplayer games of 2008. Valve’s team, it would seem, are the ones with more than their fair share of the brains.
I love me some co-op action!
