Zipfinator wrote:
Anyway I have 1 gig of RAM and didn't get pagefile errors on the demo.
How the hell old is your computer?
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I've been playing this game for a good week now and I feel now is a good time to post my critiques about the game, and my overall review. Many people will agree, disagree, and probably ignore my post anyway, but I feel it is good to share my opinion about a game that I've been very on the fence about. So here it is:
Valve has upped their game when it comes to experiencing very cinematic environments without ever having to lose control over your character. Each campaign in Left 4 Dead 2 aimed to present a certain event, sequence, or feeling that is very cinematic and presents itself in a meaningful and memorable way. Whether it's the hectic and vision impairing storm in Hard Rain, or the Midnight Riders concert featured in Dark Carnival, there's always going to be a sequence unique and personal to the campaigns setting and environment. In comparison to L4D1, the presentation has been lifted to a whole new emotional and story based level. However, there are many concepts that could have been fleshed out more that it has been, and many ideas that could have gone further in the emotional level. For example, Coach was reminiscing his old days when visiting one of his favorite childhood theme parks, however I feel the emotional level of the dialogue didn't really seem to make the sequence feel important in the terms of understanding the characters growth or sadness that was inflicted because of the apocalypse that occurred. I'll get more into the dialogue later in this post, but I feel that specifically there's many concepts of characters mentioning things about themselves that never end up going anywhere in terms of emotional connection.
The new assortment of weapons and undead are one of the most visual features added to the game, there's really no way you could miss them! It's hard to believe Left 4 Dead 1 didn't have many of these weapons and undead, and revisiting the old left for dead really feels bland because of it. The Spitter, Jockey, and Charger all have a good role in the versus campaign and scavange mode, however I feel there's still a few problems with all of these additions.
For one, the charger is very similar to the tank in body size and proportions. Seeing the whole body of the charger, it's pretty easy to tell that it isn't a tank. However, when the map is cluttered with common infected, which it usually is, or if there's visual props getting in the way of line of sight, you may only be able to see that larger part of the charger, and you easily confuse it for the tank at first glance. This is a very minor detail, however it can be plain annoying during a tank spawn to mistake a charger for the tank and throw boomer bile at it from afar. This has happened a few times to me and team-mates that I've played with online, and it doesn't help that both have a very similar vocal pitch to one another. You really need to listen out for the differences in voice and really need to confirm visual that the target is what you think it is, which can be cumbersome when millions of infected are rushing toward you.
I also feel that in versus, which since l4d1 the infected have been buffed slightly, the classes still feel a bit unbalanced to one another. While l4d multiplayer should be about teamwork, I also sometimes get the feeling that your role as, say, a jockey is less important as the role of a smoker or spitter, especially in game modes like Scavenge where they can both really destroy your opposing team. And the boomer really is a one hit kill, which should benefit close up attacks, but at the same time your puke takes too long to recharge to actually be effective more than one use. Why is it that puke has a longer recharge than spit, even though puke can easily be countered by throwing a pipe bomb in any direction? It's also ironic how as a boomer you are better off puking once and dying right after rather than waiting for your puke to recharge and use it again. A bit of balancing revision may be necessary to make versus and scavenge a bit more fair when the survivors out number the infected team. And on that note, why aren't there bot special infected when the teams are unbalanced even though survivors get bots to replace missing player slots? That concept just pisses me off. I would assume valve considered that at some point amirite?
All the weapons are great additions, but the differences between the weapons available are sometimes so small that it's very hard to clearly understand how the weapon even adds anything to the l4d package that isn't just visual perks. Some weapons have obvious difference while other feel very similar to the others, which is certainly easy to say about melee weapons. The Katana and the machete are so similar that it's hard to really give someone the answer of "well which one do you think is better?" because to be honest they feel like they could be the same weapons but with just new world and first person models.
Collision with infected can be annoying, due to the source engine still having very choppy player collisions. It wouldn't really be annoying if it was just a stop every time you hit or ran into a common infected, but the source engine really feels laggy and uncontrolled when you are dealing with player x player collisions. I'm not exactly sure why this hasn't changed, or what it's connected to, but it's a trend that's been around since CS:S and is probably the reason why they have removed team-mate collision in the majority of their modernly released games. It would have been great to see this collision issue be resolved by this time of the engines life, however it doesn't seem like any progress was made at all to make player collision feel smother. Due to this, I feel this game is at it's worst when it should feel at it's best : fighting zombies up close with as many melee attacks as you can!
I honestly could have expected a few more areas open for scavenge play, seeing as all they have really done with all of them is block off areas of the campaign, and there's plenty of more areas they possibly could have fit in the scavenge mode gametype. I also feel that scavenge mode is really an afterthought, even though it's really the best quick multiplayer option the game has. By that, I mean that it wasn't really advertised very well to the community and the majority of the players I've dealt with in scavenge mode didn't even know what scavenge mode was until after the first game, which is shocking seeing as it's probably one of the only additions in the game that REALLY plays differently than it's predecessor.
The dialogue in this game is a huge miss for me. I feel the characters don't really feel pain, emotion, or anything when I play through the campaign. for example, the majority of the time friendly fire goes off, they make claims like "you know shooting people hurts, right?" which isn't really the ideal dialogue to say "HEY quit the friendly fire" and also eliminates the feeling that these characters actually can hurt one another. It just isn't a normal response to being shot. Rochelle has the annoying tendency to use annoying expressions (Holy Licoln's Mullet... That is all) and to be honest is by far the least convincing character in this whole situation, especially when she cracks jokes about coach when he's dead on the floor. While there were plenty of jokes in the original L4D, I feel this L4D really tries much harder for people to recognize them as jokes, or really typical dialogue jokes that really don't seem to parody the horror action genre of film like the first game did. Overall, my biggest letdown with the game was the fact I felt no real emotional connection to many of the characters in L4D2, and really didn't enjoy playing one or two of them because of it. (I <3 Coach and Nick though!)
Lastly, the lobby system still has a lot of issues. First off, there should be a vote auto balance in scavenge and versus, but more specifically scavenge. There's been a few times where I am dominating or flat out losing against a team, and there's no auto balance to make the teams more equal and fair, and without fair teams the multiplayer aspect is just broken. No autobalance to fix the teams also makes players rage quit when their team loses, rather than making the game try to automatically balance out the teams. Not only that, but I feel as though the campaigns should be more clearly #'d in chronological order, because I ended up playing The Parish first, at one point mistaking it as the initial campaign. At least, until the end.
Maybe quick match should take into consideration which ones you have and have not done, and then give you the one that makes most sense chronologically to the ones you have accomplished. Also, I keep getting Japanese servers when I host games!!!! Is it because I have a Japanese language pack installed? I have no clue, but I find it ironic that my ping with Japanese servers is often better than my ping on east coast servers... It's probably Japanese nation wide fiber optics and superior internet. (/Japan Fanboy)
Obviously there's also many things to enjoy about this game! For those who don't want to read all of this to get the idea, here's my basic summary.
If you liked L4D1, get L4D2. If you didn't like l4d1 or felt it was lacking content, don't buy l4d2 expecting better / more content on launch. If you missed out on l4d1, I would recommend l4d2 but I honestly feel bad about said person missing out on the epicness that was L4D1, and thus I would tell said person to wait until both are packaged together at a reasonable price of 40 - 50 dollars. I honestly don't understand why valve didn't package L4D1 with L4D2, seeing as that just makes the game seem even larger for those who missed out on the old game... I also still follow through with the lower price point is expected, especially since the game is already starting to feel empty within it's first week of release.
by AverageJoe on Fri Nov 20, 2009 6:12 pm 
