|
Left 4 Dead | 
| From: Electronic Arts
Category: Video Games
List Price: $29.99
Buy Used: $12.99
as of 3/16/2010 17:03 PDT details
You Save: $17.00 (57%)
New (13) Used (50) from $12.99
Seller: GoodBooks76
Rating:  246 reviews
Sales Rank: 1279
Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: Shooter Action Games
ESRB: Mature
Media: Video Game
Edition: Standard
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Number Of Items: 1
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Operating System: microsoft_xbox_360
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.5 x 0.6
MPN: 9856
Model: 09856
UPC: 014633098563
EAN: 0014633098563
ASIN: B000QY9C90
Publication Date: October 31, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | Co-operative gameplay in epic struggle between survivors and zombies | | • | Choose to play as survivor or 4 types of infected mutants | | • | Set across 4 massive campaigns | | • | Game creates a unique and dramatic experience based on players' actions | | • | Multiplayer games for 1-to-8 players |
|
| Accessories:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Product Description
Set in a modern day survival-horror universe, the co-operative gameplay of Left 4 Dead (L4D) casts four "Survivors" in an epic struggle against hordes of swarming zombies and terrifying "Boss Infected" mutants. Developed by Turtle Rock Studios and Valve, creators of the Counter-Strike and Half-Life games, the latest AI technology allows for multiplayer games of one to eight players.A new and highly virulent strain of the rabies virus emerges and spreads through the human population with frightening speed. The pandemic's victims become grotesquely disfigured widely violent psychopaths, attacking the uninfected on sight. As one of the "lucky" few apparently immune to the sickness, you, unfortunately, are also trapped in a city crawling with thousands of the bloodthirsty Infected. Alone, you're dead. But together with a handful of fellow survivors, you might just fight your way to safety.Players can play as a Survivor or as one of four types of Boss Infected, each of whom possess a unique mutant ability, such as a 50-foot tongue lasso or a giant belly full of explosive methane gas. The gameplay of L4D is set across four massive campaigns. The zombie population of each mission is choreographed by an AI Director that monitors the human players' actions and creates a unique and dramatic experience for them on the fly.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 246
 Who thought playing with zombies could be so much fun? November 18, 2008
J. Brooks (Nampa, Idaho United States)
72 out of 80 found this review helpful
Plain and simple, this is the best zombie game to date!
The AI "Director" as it's called creates a different play experience each and every time. Doesn't matter if it's the same level, they'll throw different amounts of the "infected" (zombies) at you, from different directions, at different times, which completely changes the games replay value. And it not only controls the zombies, it also controls music, weapon placement (so certain weapons aren't in the same place each and every time you play), and so on.
And you never know how deformable the terrain is until the Director throws a Tank at you (a really HUGE musclebound zombie that will rip you to shreds). For example I had a Tank come bombing at me, rip a whole in a subway car and just destroy everything around me, including myself...
Now one of the main reasons you should buy the game, the split screen and system link play. You can play split screen with a friend, then hookup online with another friend. Then to take it to a whole-nother-level, 8 player versus mode. Up to four players take control of the Survivors and up to four players take control of the unique zombies (such as Tanks and Smokers) along side of the AI controlled zombies.
The other unique feature the game has are voice commands between the survivors, some are even automatic like when you are reloading, so that the other survivors don't reload at the same time just in case zombies start coming at you. A nice feature that really prevents everyone from reloading at once and getting swarmed.
I would consider this the "must have game of the season" bar none!
Pros:
A completely different gaming experience every time you play.
Play with friends on the same system via split screen, online, or both!
Very tense and suspenseful music and spooky sounds give you the creeps.
TONS of replay value.
Amazing zombie death animations (physics based).
AI survivors will actually heal themselves, heal eachother, heal you, and exchange items!
Never knowing when something really bad is about to come down on you.
Cons:
AI survivors sometimes just stand in the way or don't help you when you are in trouble.
The Offline Co-Op We've Been Waiting For!! November 20, 2008
Kyle Slayzar (Bismarck, ND)
44 out of 56 found this review helpful
One of my largest criticisms of the video game industry is the real lack of offline co-op and multiplayer games in the next-generation consoles. Pure would've been a great party game had there been an offline multiplayer. Concurrently Battlefield: Bad Company and Far Cry 2, which were awesome single-player games, would have been even better if the game allowed a second player to join in on co-op. There is online co-op with a few games but nothing serious.
Offline co-op is not as popular as it was with the XBox since every video game developer thinks because World of Warcraft has over 10 million subscribers that the vast majority of gamers play online. This couldn't be any further from the truth as the many developers are learning that casual gamers have become the dominating class, which has led to Nintendo's domination in video game sales for the past two years. Most gamers just do not wish to play some random kid in Europe or some 13-year-old kid from Wyoming dropping f-bombs like the Allies in WWII.
And let's face it here! How many times did we wish Resident Evil games were co-op? Especially Resident Evil 4 or the Outbreak series? Zombies are fun to kill (again) and maim but doing it with a friend can be such a (non-gay) bonding moment for us guys.
Enter Left for Dead.
"LFD" was primarily advertised, and hyped at the latest E3 summit, as the great zombie co-op game not just online but offline as well. Based almost primarily on this (that and I love playing as Vietnam veterans), my little brother and I saved up for this one so we could finally kill mass hordes together rather than one at a time while the other sits there patiently twiddling his thumbs. We brought it to our home, put it in and were immediately taken in by the mass sound interacting with our Yamaha home theater. It was, for a lack of a better term, really loud.
We loved the introduction screen, which pretty much summed up the entire game: run, shoot a lot, help others, heal, run some more, shoot a lot more some at special bad guys, revive fallen team member, heal, run a short distance and get to "safe" point and prepare for round 2-4. Simplistic, yet incredibly entertaining. The levels are equally simplistic as the linear environments make the path to follow as easy as the aiming system, which is dead-on accurate. There were many times when zombies would spill through a doorway and were quickly stopped because I took the Microsoft approach of "point, click, and hold" and their advance halted as quickly as it started.
To me, this was a little disappointing as I was hoping for a more Resident Evil experience where you hoarde ammo and supplies in a true survival horror environment. Instead, generic piles of ammo will refill your entire stock as many times as you wish (at least in easy and normal difficulty). Medical kits are a little more sparse and healing requires you to spend about ten seconds without being interupted.
However, this is not to say I did not enjoy it. The gratuitous level of violence, which would make Terrintino retire since he cannot possibly achieve that level of awesomeness, was entertaining. It was also great to see who got the most head-shots and did the most damage to the special villains. The sounds and asthetics also stayed true to survival horror as you could hear the groaning of nearby zombies and the crying of special villains known as witches. Be weary of them as they are NASTY.
LFD's greatest plus is the promotion of team work over one-man-army super soldiers. More often than not, first-person shooters promote the one-man-army mentality by having one person go up against legions of bad guys and emerge victoriously without so much as a scratch. There have been very few (Brothers in Arms, Full-Spectrum Warrior, Conflict: Desert Storm, etc) that promote team work over solo runs but LFD makes, what I see, at the largest leap forward. There are monsters that will lunge one allies and another person must "save" them by fighting off the monsters either on top of them or dragging them off. Other times an ally is required to either revive or pull another ally from dangling over a ledge. Unless the player is unprecedently good, a player cannot survive without help from his/her allies.
The teamwork AI is balanced very well as allies will call enemies as they appear, provide fairly overlapping fields of fire, and assist you when possible. There are some glitches where they will not help you but the majority of the time they will. Co-Op wise, this really promotes teamwork and communication. While playing with my little brother, I would make sure our fields of fire would overlap and we'd cover each other as we'd move. He'd be on point with his shotgun on the left while I provided automatic fire one step behind on the right.
Now, this game does have one or two flaws.
1: The co-op was, initially, a pain to set up. Took us five minutes to set up but after that, no biggie.
2: There are some glitches pertaining to jumping. There were some times, when we were supposed to jump over obstacles but could not due to getting stuck in the environment. We have, so far, managed to get out of every one of them but when you're being swarmed by literally over three dozen zombies it becomes a matter of life and death.
3: There are some serious glitches pertaining to saving your allies. While fighting on the roof of the hospital my character was thrown by a "tank" character and left hanging over the ledge, awaiting for an ally to rescue me. HOWEVER, it was at the very beginning of the level where you are to jump off and not get back up so you could not retreat further into the level. Unfortunately for me, my friends had already jumped down leaving me stranded and waiting to die. Fortunately, a spwan point for survivors was nearby so they could instantly respawn me. This happened one more time to another ally. Such glitches should be avoided.
All in all, LFD is a great offline co-op. I always thought blowing up zombies would be a great way to promote family values such as friendship, loyalty, togetherness, and love of infinite ammo. :)
A solid 95%. 5% docked for glitches, lack of a backstory, lack of a Resident Evil experience, and lacking weapons. They needed way more weapons.
"They're not ALLOWED to be so fast!" March 10, 2009
Michael J. Tresca (Fairfield, CT USA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
If you think about it, the zombie survival genre has a lot in common with first-person shooters (FPS). Granted, it didn't start out that way - Night of the Living Dead was more focused on the survival than the zombies, and with slow-moving zombies our protagonists could run right past the hordes of undead. With fast zombies all the rage, most prominently on display in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, the distinction between zombies and hordes of mooks is even less apparent. Its surprising it took this long for someone to finally make a FPS that's just about killing zombies.
===========
"I'll see peace back on Earth if I gotta murder every one of these bastards with my bare g-ddamn hands!"--Bill
===========
Left 4 Dead takes the FPS genre one step further and makes it a four-player team (the "4" in the title is no accident) that can be played co-op, online, or even multiplayer teams of four survivors vs. four player-controlled zombies. Divided into chapters and presented like a movie, the action starts immediately with four zombie survival stereotypes: the combat-weary war veteran (Bill, voiced by Jim French), the white collar black guy (Louis, voiced by Earl Alexander), the tough-as-nails biker dude (Francis, voiced by Vince Valensuela), and the hot chick (Zoey, voiced by Jen Taylor). Their goal is simply to survive by fighting their way through wave after wave of zombies, with the occasional super-zombie thrown in to spice things up.
That's it. That's all there is to Left 4 Dead.
And yet that simple summary doesn't do the game justice. Just as Gears of War revolutionized how cover and reloading was handled in FPS, Left 4 Dead is first and foremost a perfected multiplayer experience.
===========
"Look on the bright side; even if you guys die, I'll still be really handsome!"--Francis
===========
Friends can take over one of the four characters at any time, and if they're idle too long, the computer takes over. Players vote on everything, including when to skip boring sequences like summaries. And yet combat summaries are there if the group is so inclined, ranging from headshots to number of zombies killed to the amount of damage taken.
For the players who are fond of running off and being a hero, Left 4 Dead forces group teamwork: Smoker and Hunter zombies pick off loners and are a death sentence for the victim unless comrades come to his aid. Idiots who run off by themselves are dead meat. Witch zombies, which attack whomever disturbs them, forces the team to stop and think about what they shoot. Even death isn't permanent - players reappear in safe houses as survivors (who just happen to be exact copies of the original cast) so that everyone can get back to doing what they love most: killing the killed.
Left 4 Dead is light on back-story, but that's not important to the multiplayer genre either. There's enough graffiti on the walls to figure out what happened, which in case you didn't guess already, involves people getting infected and becoming zombies. What makes Left 4 Dead even sweeter is how it embraces all its zombie tropes, from the levels (escape from a hospital, from a cabin in the woods, from the top of a skyscraper) to the characters (are all reminiscent of zombie movie tropes), to little touches like how the perspective shifts to black and white when a character is about to die - shades of Night of the Living Dead!
===========
"Mister, if one of us gets killed out here, I'm gonna shoot my way in there and beat you to death with my gun!"--Louis
===========
Even the zombies themselves behave like bad actors. Although they can move fast when they sense prey, they die in all kinds of glorious and inglorious ways, stumbling as they lose unlife and limb. They can't even open doors, instead tearing at it with their bare hands.
The voice acting is superb, including the refreshingly confident yet feminine voice of Cortana from Halo 3, Jen Taylor. The dialogue is hilarious - Zoey's rant about "fast-moving zombies" is priceless. And there's even a Game Master-like AI Director who determines when and how to ramp up the tension against the players, precipitated by the appropriate horror-style music.
Left 4 Dead is so good that it's replaced my weekly Gears of War 2 games as the co-op game of choice. Look for Talien if you want some help surviving the zombie apocalypse.
===========
"I just can't get over how FAST they all are, it's not even fair. I'm calling zombie bull$#!+ on that, you know? They're not...ALLOWED to be so fast." --Zoey
===========
Great Game November 25, 2008
Ryan H (Chicago, IL)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Yeah, if you like zombie movies or zombie anything, this is what you're looking for. You won't be disappointed. Very nice job to the makers of this one. When is Left 4 Dead 2?
Pros:
-Literally like watching Dawn of the Dead except you are in the movie
-If you liked Dead Rising way back when you'll love this even more
-AI is superb, different every time you play
-Multiplayer is the BEST! You MUST work as a team or you die. That simple.
-Never felt my adrenaline flow like in this game.
Cons:
-I'd like to see more maps.
-Could use a little more variety in infected. Only one tank.
Great Multiplayer Fun December 6, 2008
j-rob-82 (Virginia)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
This is one of the few games that I have bought and since I had 1 game to pick for Christmas I decided to go with this one. My 1st thought is if I was not on XBOX live I probably would not have wanted this one just for single player. Even though I found I liked the single player its more getting from point a to b (like multiplayer) with no story and no side anything so its escaping from locations. Even though the single player is fun I just don't think I would have spent 60 bucks for just single player unless I can get a lot of hours out of it. I don't get to play on Live except usually weekends and a couple week nights but I think its great being on teams and everyone taking care of each other, usually anyways. I love co op so this game really appeals to me and split screen makes it even better.
The graphics are fantastic and crisp and gameplay is absolutely fun with zombies running at you it reminded me of Counter Strike with crazy zombies which I guess makes sense given the company that made it. The sound is great and I like the way the characters tell you when they are healing or reloading to let you know who to watch after. Just the sounds the creatures make are great and a good job has been done with this game. The single player A.I. bots are kind of annoying simply because I found they didn't act too much like a real player which is a minor unless you play single all the time.
This game is more a love or hate since I have not heard too many in betweens. Renting is actually what I recommend to do 1st for any game unless you know for a fact no matter what anyone else says you will like it.
This is probably one of the best multiplayer co op games I have ever played. Its just plain fun and usually unless you are in an annoying group, people play all the way through the campaigns and stick together. This is from what I have seen even though I am sure people do skip out when they die or something but this is what I have seen when I am on Live. I found it lots of fun to set up in a location like a house or building fighting off the horde and sometimes it can get hilarious with your companions. The infected fall into overuse in campaign mode and it can get tiresome fighting the same enemies over and over but the so called director usually keeps it fresh. The only bad thing is just same enemies all the time and the horde of zombies are overly simple to kill. I laugh a lot when someone disturbs the witch and she chases them down but thats just me. Another great mode is versus, though it can be annoying to where the infected can spawn to attack the people pretty much anywhere nearby its still great fun. I like to play serious when I play but I also have fun so the game modes thrilled me to play. I hope there will be downloadable levels and stuff later b/c I don't know how long this game will keep me in the current modes. Its fun but I don't know how long the same enemies and same levels and choice of weapons (which there aren't many) over and over will last.
I don't really use the mic so much on XBOX live but I enjoy listening to people talk and since I tend to have more a quiet nature. I do talk during this game since I found it is kind of essential to do so and it tends to be more fun that way. I also like to find people who play as a team so when I played with this one person who kept running ahead of the rest and dying I got pretty annoyed.
Me personally I will say don't miss this one but the hard thing about games is what I love you may hate.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 246
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. shop2world | |
![Official Xbox Magazine [with DVD] (1-year)](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00005QDWQ.01._AA75_PU_PU-5_.jpg)
