Team Xbox has released their review of Left 4 Dead. They gave it a 9.1 out of 10.
No, Left 4 Dead isn’t a particularly deep game, doesn’t offer a ton of variety and could use some more polish in many areas.. but it’s so immersive and satisfying the majority of the time that you will ignore some of its shortcomings. Not totally forgive them, mind you, but it feels like the good outweighs much of the bad. On more than a few occasions, I pointed out some glitch that came up during a match to a co-worker and the response was, “Yeah, but it was so much fun!” It’s like having a 1965 Mustang convertible with a faded ragtop.. you can kind of gloss over the cosmetic for what’s under the hood and how it feels driving down the road.
Gameplay: 9.6 It’s so immersive and satisfying to sling lead at an infinite number of creepy, crawly zombies! It’s not particularly deep, but there are far more moments that’ll make you grin goofily and move tensely to the edge of your seat.
Graphics: 8.6 Some of the visuals are fantastic, such as the zombie movement and death animations, but there’s also a lot of sloppy terrain clipping and glitchiness that hinders the overall experience a tad.
Audio: 9.1 It gets repetitive (as most games like this do), but there’s fun variety in the spoken lines and the sound cues of various boss zombies are great for determining proximity and direction.
Longevity: 9.3 No, it’s not a deep journey, such as Fallout 3, but what’s there will probably have players battling for quite a while in the game’s competitive multiplayer settings.
Innovation: 9.4 Valve takes what could have been a run-of-the-mill shooter and injects enough freshness into it that it should stand well away from the pack. It’s a great blend of survival/horror and FPS action.
Overall: 9.1
411er askquestionslater posted what he found on the developer commentary about the Screamer:
The Screamer was a boss zombie who didn’t have any actual attacks; he was bound in a straightjacket. You knew when he was around because of his crazed, maniacal cackling. The trick to the Screamer was that if he saw you, you had a moment to kill him before he ran away. Once the Screamer got away from the Survivors to a hiding place, he would emit a loud howling scream that would cause a huge mob of zombies to attack the Survivors. While there were several exciting moments of knowing you had to chase him down to shoot him before he screamed, dodging zombies all the way, ultimately it proved too confusing for Survivors to discover how he worked, or even to reliably notice him in the crowd. He was cut, and his horde-drawing attack eventually evolved into the Boomer attack.
So originally, the Boomer only exploded. They scrapped the Screamer and let the Boomer vomit.
