Imagine you’re being chased by a horde of people who have lost the ability to distinguish between brains and cocaine-laced chocolate pudding in a bowl shaped like your head. Now you can experience the joy of being vomited upon, thrown into walls and strangled alongside, and sometimes by, your closest friends.

Welcome to New Orleans.

What makes a game a sequel instead of DLC or an expansion pack these days? Expanded enemies and tactics? Gameplay and engine updates? Equal or greater playable content than the previous game? Graphics updates? Considering  every other sequel released in the last two months has hit maybe two of those at best, the Left 4 Dead franchise proves that Valve can indeed make a full blown sequel in less than eight years. This of course leads to the inevitable question: What the hell Valve; where’s Half-life 2: Episode 3 already?

Left 4 Dead 2 keeps all the fun of Left 4 Dead 1 while expanding on its premise in every area.

For those not familiar with the franchise, Left 4 Dead is a zombie apocalypse game whose entire plotline can be summed up by the first half of this sentence. There are thousands of common infected individuals and a few mutated “special infected” which possess strange powers that frequently cripple or incapacitate party members, requiring you to cooperate to survive. Left 4 Dead started with three special infected which were playable in versus mode, and served to incapacitate survivors or summon hordes of common infected to vex the survivors. There is also the hulking boss zombie referred to as the Tank with the ability to annihilate anything in its path which is only playable if the AI director deems it suitably hilarious. The goal of the survivors is to move from safe house to safe house throughout the city attempting to make it to some sort of evacuation site.

While none of this has changed in Left 4 Dead 2 they’ve added three new special infected with the abilities to forcibly alter a player’s movement, charge large groups of survivors to the ground, or coat floors with acidic goo forcing players to think and maneuver quickly. These variations drastically change gameplay and bring the strategies to a whole new level.

Though the actual Source engine didn’t receive an upgrade this time around, the AI director has. Now, in addition to zombies spawned strategically to maximize intensity without damaging the difficulty curve, the AI director can change and remove paths and entire city blocks to keep the battles new and exciting. The models and movements of the enemy zombies have also been enhanced, which is good even if they did steal the female boomer model from photographs of Sally Struthers.

It is my belief that a sequel should stand on its own without being compared to its predecessor, so rather than saying that the friendly AI got a slight improvement from the last game, I’ll say that the friendly AI is mind bogglingly stupid. It shoots zombies and not you very well, but that’s about it. It often fails to assist you when you’re grabbed by a special infected, frequently runs the wrong direction and stops moving when the rest of the party is trying to move quickly, and loves strafing circles around your crosshair when you’re trying not to shoot it. On top of this it sometimes forgets to pick up ammo or medical supplies, and is downright incapable of using explosives of any kind. Given the litany above, I consider the inability to use explosives a small blessing.

There is a new cast of characters in keeping with the new locations.  As with any franchise, the cast is kept racially sensitive. Where last time we had a biker, a black guy, a tough girl and a senior citizen, we now have a black girl, an obese man, a redneck and a convicted felon. As you can tell, this makes the dialogue frequently hilarious. ‘brains will wash out of white suits, swamp water doesn’t… don’t ask me how I know that,’ says Nick, the conman, complaining about his ruined clothing. Of course, there are still no Asians to be seen. I guess the infected like Chinese food.

A subtle overarching story connects each of the five campaigns together, and each campaign consists of four or five interconnected maps, broken up by safe houses. The campaign ending finales and panic events still involve causing loud noises that attract hundreds of infected. These noises sometimes require the survivors to run to far away levers that shut them off, or have the survivors collecting gas for a vehicle or setting up a light show to signal helicopters. All of the level design is fun and well done, though some seem to have a blatant disregard for versus mode. Some of the finales are about as balanced as a zombie on a unicycle. One particular finale was removed from versus mode altogether because, presumably, they couldn’t find a way to make it possible for survivors to complete. But since the versus mode keeps track of points, and both teams have to play the maps as infected and survivors, this doesn’t make the game unfair, just a little less fun when you’re playing the unlucky people with the tasty brains.

The loadout of weapons is very good this time around. The SCAR, M16 and AK47 play around with the accuracy vs damage curve, while the sniper rifles and shotguns play with clip sizes and effective distance. You’ll find a few favorites and stick with them, but you’ll learn that every gun has its uses, so it’s good to have a variety among your party members. The meelee weapons and Desert Eagle serve their purpose as balanced choices other than dual pistols with infinite ammo. The grenade launcher is fun, but approaches uselessness when you have to save someone from a special infected and accidentally blow up half their health bar.

Left 4 Dead 2 features two new play styles I haven’t yet mentioned, Scavenge Mode and Realism. Scavenge mode is a form of versus that challenges players to gather gas canisters while zombies are challenged with gathering the players’ brains. Then you swap places and see who gets the better score. While fun for a little while, this mode would be more appropriately named Zombie Fly Fishing.  Realism removes the highlighting effects on useful items and changes how zombies react to bullets. I’m not sure what’s so realistic about requiring headshots to kill zombies. If they need a working circulatory system, the chest would still be a valid target.  In my experience this serves only to make the game less fun, but there is an undeniable allure to finding out how you would function in the “actual” zombie apocalypse that doesn’t pull any punches. But Valve, if you wanted realism, try starting with realistic dialogue. Real people don’t say “let me heal you,” or “I’m going to heal.” Healing is what your body does after you bandage it, not what you do in the process of bandaging.

Left 4 Dead 2 keeps all the fun of Left 4 Dead 1 while expanding on its premise in every area. The servers are a bit slow and overtaxed, and there are still a few graphical glitches, but that’s Valve, and I’m sure they’ll fix it sometime this decade. The stupid AI, and occasional game imbalance do drag down an otherwise perfect zombie apocalypse simulator, but if you liked Left 4 Dead 1, and especially if you missed out on Left 4 Dead 1, this is the holiday pick of the year.

Survivor 4/5