The “Break it Down” Blog

Andrew Burnes over at VE3D has thrown up 26mins of Left 4 Dead gameplay video from the demo. I found the following bit of gameplay the most representative of the environments, scenarios and team-dynamic going on in that title:

I’ll admit, the first time I saw Left 4 Dead demoed (maybe a year ago?) I thought the graphics were mild and the gameplay was just too frantic to be fun… almost like an insane arcade shooter. Now what I’m seeing, with this polished gameplay of the soon-to-be-released title, is that they polished up the graphics a bit and toned down the insane non-stop action to be more modularized.

You’ll notice that after a big battle things calm down for a bit, I like that. Before it seems nonstop, which wasn’t fun, but just uncontrollable.

Also notice that there is Friendly Fire, I was surprised by that given you have to shoot zombies off of team mates from time to time. I think I’ll end up killing the hell out of my group a lot, especially on a console where aiming isn’t quite as picture-perfect as you might like.

Either way I’m more excited for this title. I’m not doing much PC gaming recently, and Valve tends to hate the PS3, so I imagine the console to pick this up on might be the Xbox 360. I don’t necessarily want to pay the texture-quality penalty so I’ll wait for the reviews and see which console, between the two, does better.

Then again co-op is a concern… I definitely want to co-op with Friends, so I might just ask what platform they are all getting it for first (even if it’s the PC).