More than a spittle bit different

Left 4 Dead 2 has been out for a good while now, so it's probably about time I gave my 10 shillings about it. Unlike the original Left 4 Dead, I Opted for the PC version of L4D2 straight off the bat. My main reason for this is that Valve's track record with keeping their other Xbox 360 titles up to date has not been too great, and also that our Xbox live gold membership finally expired some time last year after months of neglect, and it hardly seems worth renewing it just for a single game.

Left 4 Dead 2 is one of those sequals that feels both immediately familiar and surprisingly fresh. Much comment has been made in the past on the short span between the releases of Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, and that much of Left 4 Dead 2's content could have been made available in the first game through a serious of Team Fortress 2-style DLC packs. While this certainally seems true, and Left 4 Dead 2 is very much L4D plus, the little changes that Valve have made in the sequal do all add up to dramatically change the feel of the gameplay.

New settings and characters aside, the most striking differences in Left 4 Dead 2 come from the new weapons, particularly melee and it's brutal effectiveness at close range, and the hideous new special infected. Probably the most important of these new AI or player-controlled nightmares is the Spitter, an acid dribbling abomination with a horribly distended neck and a deadly area-of-effect attack designed to counter the group camping tactics that survivors used so frequently in the original game.

Another big change that's happened in Left 4 Dead 2 is the way the campaigns have been designed. First of all, many of the campaigns are now significantly longer that Left 4 Dead and a versus match on Swamp Fever or Hard Rain can easily last in excess of 1 hour and 45 minutes. The map design is also far more open with less obvious paths through the level, which has often lead my team to temporarily get completely lost.

Valve seem to have configured much of L4D2 as a more hardcore-friendly experience, one that is tougher, longer and requires more practice. I'm not personally sure I like this direction, as one of the things I loved about Left 4 Dead was it's accessibility and focus on team effort over individual ability, but I suppose Valve (probably rightly) concluded that the hardcore gamers who played the original to exhaustion were going to make up the majority of purchasers and they naturally wanted all aspects, including difficulty and length expanded upon to meet their expectations and skill level.

On balance, Left 4 Dead 2 is almost certainally the better game, but there is a part of me that misses the original's simplicity, accessibility and charm.