Reviewed on PC. Also on Xbox 360. Developed by Valve. Retail versions published by EA
Left 4 Dead is Valve’s latest First Person shooter, based mainly around online cooperative play. L4D has also managed to at least partially bury the meme-cow (a cash cow for memes) that was TF2, at least in the short term. So what is it about this game that’s got everyone excited?
So the conceit is that each of the four stories are their own survival horror movie. Four survivors- Francis- the tough biker, Louis the office worker, Zoe the spunky chick and Bill, the old fart ex marine. Those are my descriptions based on playing the game so forgive me if they misrepresent the ‘canon.’ The four of you basically go from point A to point B Starting and ending each level in a new safehouse. And along the way there are zombies. Like everywhere. There are the common or garden zombies who just move towards you, sometimes slowly, other times rushing at you, often in numbers. And there are the specials.
There’s Boomer, a giant fat bile factory, who, if you get too close, will vomit on you and have hordes of zombies rushing you. Then there’s smoker, with his enormous tongue; Hunters who’ll jump you and pound the crap out of you; and tanks, who are basically big motherfuckers. There’s also the witch, but DON’T DISTURB THE WITCH YOU TARD!
That makes it sound simplistic but its actually a blast to play, easily the best Valve MP game in ages. You can play either by yourself which is underrated and an enormous amount of fun, and are able to select any chapter in any of the campaigns (of course there are no checkpoints within any of the chapters, so if you die you start again). Or you can play with three others, each of you taking on one of the four characters (one of each BTW). You need to work together, if someone runs off and gets cornered, they will need to be rescued. You can of course heal yourself or heal you teammates and they can of course heal you if they feel like it. But Multiplayer does highlight one thing, the AI in this game is very good (even on single player).
This is down to the much vaunted AI director. This will spawn enemies at just the right time and in just the right places. No two playthroughs of this game will ever bee the same and for that reason I recommend playing the single player through by yourself at some point. When you play with people, they’re selfish with health packs, shoot you by mistake and run off by themselves and get killed- which is a pain since that leaves more infected for you to deal with. There’s also a versus mode where four humans can go against four players on the zombie team. The zombies are weak but respawn and can choose exactly where they will lie in wait for their human opponents.
The graphics are pretty decent for a source based game. It doesn’t look ugly per se, it just looks a little underwhelming compared to even some the best console games, let alone high end PC’s. Sound is fantastic, from the music, the voiceover work to the punchy effects.
Left 4 Dead looks like a poor value proposition when you compare it to Team Fortress 2, but it actually offers so much more, not least is a very good single player mode. It’s memes are also not as moronic and insular meaning this is a fun game for everyone to get right into. Everyone loves zombies right?
Controller1.com rating 3/3
These days its trendy to describe your game as a platform. This conjures images of one large purchase that is the basis for more content arriving later. Its not meant to sound like they’re nickel and dimeing you, but really it is.
Rock Band was the first game to describe it self as a platform. The idea is you don’t need to have every Rock Band disc that comes out in order to have everything. If you bought Rock Band 1, you could import all (bar) 5 songs into Rock Band 2. They’d be stored on your hard drive. If you wanted to play a RB 1 song whilst you have the RB2 disc in the tray you can. There’s a $5 fee, ostensibly to cover the placate the rights holders of the music licensed for the first game, but it doesn’t matter, you can have all those songs. But at some stage you need to have both discs in your possession to do this (though yes, you can rent RB1 and import). You can’t just buy RB2 and DL songs that were in RB1 from the Rock Band store. You will likely have to do this for every iteration of RB that comes down the pipe.
Guitar Hero World Tour is late to the party on this whole platform thing. You cannot import DLC you bought for GHII or III into world tour so I’m guessing that’s reserved for World Tour 2.
Singstar on PS3 has a good way of dealing with this. On PS2, there are dozens of disc-based standalone track packs for Singstar. On PS3, there’s Singstore. You only have to have one singstar PS3 disc to use as a key and you can download new tracks all the time. I have Singstar PS3 vol 2 and have bought some Queen songs from the store- these play back fine in Singstar ABBA. I’m not sure if the ABBA tracks will make it onto Singstore but for most part you can buy any track that’s been released for any singstar game (in your territory, at least). There’s apparently a patch coming for non-backwards compatible PS3′s that will let you play PS2 Singstar Discs on a PS3. Yes, the Singstore is rather slow and clunky, but it works (eventually).
Burnout Paradise is a good example of a platform in a more traditional game. Criterion have made Paradise City and have been constantly adding new features via free (and soon, pay to play) patches. Its almost as if Paradise City is what you get if you want Burnout for the next few years. GTA IV is also going down this road with its DLC. You spend a lot of effort making a huge sprawling city, why make it obsolete within a year (a la Vice City), you can make DLC cheaper and quicker than a full game or expansion pack.
PC Gamers will tell you PC has been doing this for years. WoW is a good example of a platform in this context. But so is the Source Engine and Steam, home as it is to CS: Source, DoD: S, HL2 and its episodes, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc. Any popular games with moddability (Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights) have had their life extended for years thanks to all the new content that’s been made available.
Console gamers are seeing this with Little Big Planet. But you don’t hear too much about this being a platform- which means LBP2 is coming next year. Games such as CoD4 Modern Warfare have proven to be incredibly popular but for some reason, possibly related to money, Activision has chosen not to support the game as a platform, for which they could sell more map packs and expansions and gone straight to another standalone game in CoD WaW. Why? Well $5 or $10 map packs are nice. But a $50 or $60 game is nicer.
Reviewed on Xbox 360 and PC. Also on PS3
Developed by Valve (PS3 version by EA). Published by Valve (PC via Steam) and EA (Xbox 360, PS3)
Half Life 2
Working my way through The Orange Box, as you do, I thought I would collect some thoughts on HL2′s campaign, which is the only part of the Orange Box I had played previously. It’s also the longest part of the
Orange Box, unless for some strange reason you’re still playing Team Fortress 2.
Half Life 2 tells the story of Gordon Freeman when he arrives in City 17. Between Half Life 1 and 2, there have been a fair few unexplained events happening off-screen. Earth has now been taken over by the
Combine, who exert their control through a traitorous human. Gordon takes charge of the resistance, get a girlfriend and shows Bioshock (Bioshock? Bioshock?!) still has a way to go in unseating Half Life 2.
It’s funny that in an industry where every successful and original game is copied relentlessly that no one has really tried to do the type of story and varied gameplay, and really no one who’s tried has
got it right, with the exception of Bioshock (Bioshock? Bioshock?!). This thing just doesn’t feel all that dated.
Graphics hold up very well on 360 and the sterling audio work carries over with nary a glitch. The game runs smoothly on 360, load times aren’t excessive and the controller works well. It took me about 14-15
hours to play though the second time, maybe a bit longer – its hard to estimate re-tries, and even on its own would have been worth the price of admission.
The weapons are all interesting takes on the standard FPS fare, though you have some oddities such as the crossbow being the only long range weapon and the Combine rifle. Sometimes it feels as though your
character is a bit too large for the corridors he’s traversing but on the whole, a very entertaining experience.
Half Life 2 is one of those games you have to have in your collection, either on PC or on Xbox 360. There’s also an Xbox 1 version from a few years back, but like the frame-rate optional PS3 version of Orange box, this is best avoided.
C1 Rating: 3/3
Episode One
Well, almost through the Orange Box, Meh-pisode One is the least interesting single player element in the Orange Box.
I finished it in about 3 hours (probably 4 with restarts) so its not a very long experience, but it really is ho-hum compared to the brilliance in evidence throughout the rest of The Orange Box.
Meh-pisode One carries on from the rather unusual ending of HL2. You and Alyx Vance have to RE-ENTER the Citadel (which has all these things that weren’t there before). At least here you get to spend alot more time with Alyx Vance, who clearly has the hots for Gordon Freeman. It is an expansion pack since there are all of two new character models (one of which, the Stalker does almost nothing thataffects gameplay) So Gordon and Alyx go through an underground car park, Gordon and Alyx go through a disused Hospital, yada, yada, yada. Nothing to see here. Move along. So why play it?
Well, I hear Episode Two is the dogs balls. It’s supposed to be fantastic, even more fantastic than HL2. So even through I read that Meh-pisode One was ordinary, I knew I’d have to sit through it in order to ‘get’ Ep 2.
So it wasn’t bad, but I had never played it, I would never had missed
it. It’s like most PC expansions packs, you really can’t see the point.
C1 Rating 1/3
Episode Two
Well, I have finally finished going though everything in the Orange Box, and believe me by the time you’ve played through all of Portal, TF2, Half Life 2, Episode and Episode Two, you certainly feel as if
you’ve gotten your money’s worth…
So Episode Two is about 4-5 hours of gameplay continuing on from the end of the rather ordinary Episode One. Episode Two is much better, with the sense of deja vu you get playing through some sorta familiar level types is less than Ep 1.You have a level in a mine infested by Ant Lions, with a new variant
that spits acid at you and luminescent Ant Lion Grubs which restore one point of health everytime you step on one. Then there’s a new car to drive and the Magnusson devices at the climax. So its more of the
same with some tweaks but there’s enough of an improvement over Episode One that playing through this if you have Orange Box is a must.
Graphics are still decent, slightly better than the earlier installments and framerate never misses a beat. Sound is still great with the voice acting being a particular highlight. The ending battle is somewhat more intense than anything outside of TF2, and it almost goes on for too long but once you have a stratgey
in place, it’s not as daunting as it appears at the start of the battle. I found the difficulty levels throughout to be better than Half Life 2 or Episode One so it wasn’t too easy or too hard, just
right.
So, would I play Episode Three? Well, that depends on how is made available to 360 or PS3 users since I don’t want to end up buying the game on Orange Box again (I have already bought Half Life 2 when it
came out and TF2 on PC as well). If I can just buy one part at a reasonable price (by reasonable I don’t mean the ridiculous prices on Steam where all of Orange Box on PC is $50 but TF2 on its own is $30)
and on console, I might give it ago. At the moment, I am a bit Sourced out and will take a long break from HL2-based games for quite a while (unless Day of Defeat for Xbox LIVE is announced).
C1 Rating: 3/3
PORTAL
Portal started off as a HL2 mod that become a phenomenon in its own right. a short 306 hour puzzle game played in first person mode, Portal has several things going for it. Unique gameplay that’s going to be hard to replicate without being so obviously a clone; a presentation that will never be matched for originality, humour and creepiness- a veritable meme factory; and that song.
The 360 version of Portal as part of the Orange Box is great. Its a short review for a short game. You just need to play Portal. rent orange box, or just by the PC version on its own but go out and get this now.
Team Fortress 2
Lastly, my least favourite part of the Orange Box. Its my least favouite but its not bad, it just doesn’t click with me like it does for so many who believe it to be Jesus’ son. TF2 is a class based team game based around capturing control points(battlefield), or collecting intelligence (capture the flag) and similar gameplay types (since this review was originally written in late 2007, other modes have been added and are not reviewed here).
Its one of the games you either get it or you don’t. The ones that do love this to the point where WoW was just a footnote in videogaming history. Its obviously a very well put together and quality game that I totally don’t get despite owning the PC and 360 version (the 360 version of TF2 is the only unplayable part of orange box on 360,)
C1 Rating: 1/3
overall Orange Box: rating 3/3
