Do you remember all the hype that was built up when Spore was first announced? When it was released it didn’t really fulfill our expectations.  Do you remember when Force Unleashed did the same thing?

Well do you remember all hype that Left 4 Dead generated when that was announced?

If you’ve already played the demo then you know where I’m going with this. Left 4 Dead matches up with all the hype and it’s about time something did this year.

Left 4 Dead sets you up with four different movie scenarios. As one of the four characters (who are all identical with no special individual features, lame) you and your group are trying to be rescued. You do so by moving from safe house to safe house until you can find a way to contact the people who’ll rescue you. This is the basic idea of every “movie,” so it can get a little boring. This is where the Director AI kicks in and spices it up some by dynamically changing where Infected are, when they decide to random bum rush your group and where health, guns and ammo will appear. Speaking of guns and ammo…

You would think in a city/forest infested with zombies that you would have more of a choice in weapons than a pistol, a machine gun, shotgun and later a sniper rifle. Sure you have your grenades, a Molotov and a pipe bomb, but use them once and you don’t have them anymore.

At the beginning of each campaign you start off with your pistol that has unlimited ammo, either a machine gun or shotgun, and a medkit. You pick up grenades along your route in various locations but usually not one for every player. Plus you can only carry one of them. As you make your way through the campaign you’ll eventually find a second pistol for dual wielding and an upgrade for your current weapon. You’ll find a combustibles like a gasoline tank or a propane tank lying around that you can shoot to make it go boom and a chain gun where you have to hunker down for a few minutes waiting for some kind of obstacle to get out of your way while the Infected beat you to a bloody pulp. The chain gun however is absolutely useless during the points because it overheats like every ten seconds of continuous fire.

The number of weapons you can use becomes monotonous after running each campaign a couple of times until you’re doing something absolutely absurd like hitting all the Infected with your rifle butt the entire campaign. (I haven’t tried it but it’s on my list of things to do.) Variety is nice and they give it to you by letting you upgrade your choice of machine gun or shotgun to either a machine gun with better accuracy or a shotgun that can pump out shells faster. But a little more variety than that would be nice. Plus I feel like something is missing in this zombie world.

Think back to all the zombie flicks you’ve ever seen. Yes, all of them. They had one thing that Left 4 Dead doesn’t have: a melee weapon. And not just hitting with the end of your gun. Where are the bats? Where are the swords? Where are the chainsaws? How gratifying would it be to slice and dice your way through a group of zombies Kill Bill style? Your answer: very. But then you would have a friendly fire problem where people are accidentally hacking off your limbs instead of the zombies which brings me to my next point.

You have the choice to play through the campaigns either by yourself and three NPCs or with three other people. Sometimes I wish I had the NPCs when I play online because they definitely won’t shoot you in the back (literally). Valve had the great idea of making the game realistic by having friendly fire on. This causes a problem when you have a jerk who has a happy trigger finger and is continuously firing his machine gun/shotgun at everything that moves, including yourself. If they shoot you enough times, you’ll become incapacitated and fall to the ground helplessly until someone helps you up.

The NPCs will always help you up. Real people? Only if they’re a team player. There will be times where players will want to be the hero of the group and run off by themselves or with another buddy leaving you to fend for yourself, and that gets kind of hard when L4D focuses on teamwork.

NPCs will also never purposely set off a car alarm that attracts a million zombies to your location for yucks.

Okay, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find things that are bad with this game. Left 4 Dead has a huge amount of replay value thanks to the Director AI and despite the idiots and jerks who try to ruin the game for the rest of us. I’ve been waiting for a co-op game that actually forces you to work together instead of “Master Chiefing” your way through the levels.

It’s a very good online co-op game and because it’s online there will be (hopefully for you Xbox users as well) patches along the way to deal with the repetitiveness with either a new campaign or more weapons.

Though I wish they could patch the stupid people online.