The inquisition in between

I was sick to death of Left 4 Dead. I think I still am. Playing a game four or five nights a week for a couple of months in a row will do that to you. Obviously. Night after night, safe-room to safe-room, pipe bombs and pounces, pistols and puke: it all got a bit painful by September.

I figured Left 4 Dead 2 would be more of the same, and to some degree it is. It's still all about "point A to point B," and the inquisition in between. The survivor bots are still assholes, and the game is still mostly intolerable when playing with strangers. Any game that discourages you from killing the one thing that's annoying you most has a lot to answer for.

There's light and heat in this sequel, however, and it throttles you straight away. Everything has been upgraded: the Source Engine, the level design, the sound, the vampires, the difficulty, the trees (yes, the effing trees), and it's almost dumbfounding when you start to realize how much the new array of stuff changes things. I thought I could just adapt and assimilate - applying the competencies I developed in the first game to the second, tweaking them slightly to account for the cricket bat. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Predictability between rounds - a core failing of L4D1 - has gone right out the window. Valve didn't escalate the difficulty by throwing more zombies at you, or giving them rocket launchers for arms. No, they opened up the terrain. They vastly reduced the number of accessible right-angles in the geometry (i.e.: good luck finding a corner). They created three new specials whose sole purpose is to separate the survivors with ruthless efficiency. And they made weather ... a monsoon with a mind that looks so menacingly real, you understand immediately that it wants you to die.

So yeah, L4D2 is hard. An early Spitter can have you reaching for your health pack three steps out of the safe-room. A Charger can knock you into next week. Oddly enough, though, the Boomer still feels like the linchpin of the infected attack. The consequences of being blind and covered in gooey demon pheromones are much more dire in these circumstances. These days, Shiva stacking puts you on a timer (of doom). Oh, and the Director hates you. It hates you like you kicked its food and peed on its dog. The moment you start to feel good about your progress, the Director flips the switch for Relentless Mode (TM), and things go south at the speed of stupid.

In the midst of all the evolution, the one thing to truly love about the second game is that it constantly forces you to make choices you don't want to make. Do you wait for the next ammo pile, or do you drop your ass-kicker with the laser site in favor of a lesser weapon that actually has some bullets? Do you grab the chainsaw for its (very temporary) close-range lethality, or do you stick with the magnum with its longer range and infinite ammo? Which incapped teammate do you save first, and when do you just leave them all and bolt for the safe-room? How you answer those questions - and a seemingly infinite array of others like them - goes a long way towards determining whether you stay alive for the next 90 seconds. It's intense and maddening and orgiastic in equal measures, and I usually stop playing more out of exhaustion than anything else.

There are, of course, a number of peccadilloes I could mention, but they hardly matter in the grand scheme of the Great Southern Apocalypse. In one year, Valve managed to elevate the game I used to love to a level I did not expect, and I just don't care about the rest of my gaming library right now. Good on them.