L4D2 is here and it’s better than sex!

After months of waiting, and hardcore practicing on L4D1, finally it’s here.  The game that somehow improves on the genius that was L4D.  More zombies, more gore, more weapons & more special infected.

The difficulty has certainly been ramped up in this one… on a full play through last night, normal difficulty, realism off, only 2/3 of us survived all 5 campaigns… strangely it was the same 2 every time. Yes @fatmankev I'm looking at you with your female boomer fetish.

One level had us walking through a witch infested sugar mill… and when i say infested i don’t mean the standard 1 maybe 2 witches, i mean we encountered at least 8, and as it was set in the day, they’re walking around making it MUCH harder to avoid them.

The special infected, now joined by the Spitter, the Jockey, and the Charger work together far better.  So many times we were jumped by 3 different specials at one time working as a team to screw you over. For instance, near a witch, a jockey will jump on you and ride you into the witch causing you to startle her… think you can back into a corner and punch to survive? NO! Apart from the stamina bar now appearing in ALL game modes, the charger and Spitter are there to stop this completely.  Stay still in a corner too long, here comes a Spitter hocking up acid at your feet, the longer you’re in the acid, the quicker you take damage, you can easily be incapacitated in under 10 seconds.  Maybe a charger will get you, running head on into your corner scattering your team and grabbing one of you repeatedly slamming you into the ground until either you or he is dead.

The director (now Director 2.0) is dramatically improved, it will change the level design depending on how you are doing, it will change the weather (Hard Rain campaign, heading back to the boat the storms force you to stick together or lose each other.  Storms = Horde btw, Heavy rain, reduced visibility, flooding which slows you down, and hundreds of zombies).

Thankfully we have new weaponry… melee… I’m a huge fan of melee kills anyway and one of my first achievements in L4D2 was the “decapitate 200 zombies with a melee weapon” achievement.  The Katana and Machete are fantastic for slicing through hordes, and the frying pan is so satisfying!  The only one I'm not keen on is the night-stick, it just doesn’t feel powerful enough (in fairness, it is accurate, i would rather take on the zombie horde with a Machete or Katana than a nightstick anyway).

So our first full play through was awesome despite the power cuts during 2 campaigns forcing our Xboxes to reboot.  We will be doing another quick run through a couple of campaigns tonight before the pub, and then to test it’s drunken appeal afterwards…  More soon.  For reference the players were Gazmo81, Fat Man Kev48, and Vryolaka.  Waiting for Deadly Dink and BennyK23 to join the fun.