Left 4 Dead Demo Review

I pre-ordered Left 4 Dead through Steam and got myself an early access to the demo. Here’s my review on the game.

I started preloading the game (roughly 3.8GB) with full download speed, though my poor friend using Starhub only managed to download at 2KB/s. Anyway, after waiting a while to decrypt the game content and updating the game I successfully launched the game. Main menu looks like this:

The main menu interface is quite different the other standard Source Engine games. But all-in-all the options are almost the same. One thing nice about it is that you can view your friends playing the game at the menu, so that you can join their games easily.

I tried hosting a game of three, including myself. However once the game starts one of my friends got disconnected and the game performance was terrible, with major shuttering. After many tries, my friend managed to host the game successfully and off we go.

Another annoying thing about joining games is that there is no option for you to choose which lobby you can join. Sometimes I get matchmade into a lobby where most players are actually on the other side of the world. Hopefully Valve could fix it before the full retail release.

The two missions in the demo were great, but short (that’s why it’s a demo). The game in overall was quite easy with the Normal difficulty. Perhaps I should try a new game with Expert difficulty in the future. Probably the most fun part is that whenever the instructor tells you not to do something (eg. disturb the Witch), someone will eventually end up doing it, which gets the group kinda in trouble with hordes of zombies coming to us.

I wished the full retail is out, two levels is too short.