A couple of weeks ago @therealflaws asked me if I wanted to play Left 4 Dead 2 and I found it hard to say no. I used to play this game all the time back in the day when I was in junior high. I played the first game for a ton of hours and the second for even more.
As you can see it's been 10 years since last time I played. What really surprised me was that there was 15,000 people playing it when I checked a couple of weeks ago. At the time of this writing there's almost 21,000 people online playing the game. I guess it's just a timeless classic that can deliver some none stop fun.
And honestly that's what it felt like as I booted it up. I didn't feel like the game had aged at all. Graphics are decent and the gameplay is really smooth. One thing that was weird was that it didn't have a run or sprint button. You move at one set speed and can only sneak or crouch to go slower. I don't think I've played any kind og FPS game in recent years that doesn't have a sprint button. That really got me a couple of times when I was trying to escape a group of zombies and tried to run away while pressing SHIFT. That just made me slower seeing as that's the button for sneaking.
What I really like about the game is the simplicity it has. You don't get to choose any loadout or anything like that. You don't have any levels or a kind of progression to worry about. You just choose which map or campaign you wanna play and you get in there and just use whatever tools the game gives you. There's no meta or anything stupid that people can exploit.
It's also really refreshing to play an online game that doesn't utilize a battle pass or something similar. It doesn't bring any of that FOMO that games does these days. Instead of feeling like you have to play so you can finish your battle pass or get this and that reward in time you can just play as much as you want, when you want. You come back to the game because YOU want to and not because the game wants you to. That's one of the biggest issue I have with many modern games. I guess it rakes in the cash though.
So me and @therealflaws set off to play through the many campaigns. We did the first one called Dead Center. It takes us through a mall to try and escape town and run from the zombies. I had forgotten much about the campaign but there's some parts that's just impossible to forget. Like the level where we have to go get the coke for the gun store owner or fill up the car with gasoline. They're both such adrenaline rushes.
There's also a ton of parts that I've forgotten. Even a big load of game modes, which I guess some of them might be content added after I left the game. There's several multiplayer modes where you play against each others and some players can even be the zombie to try and take down the survivors. That sounds pretty cool. There's also a pretty standard survival mode where the goal is to just survive however long you can. I guess it's no wonder they've added new content seeing how popular the game still is.
I streamed parts of our sessions yesterday and you can check out the VOD of that here. We're about to jump back in to continue the campaign so feel free to join us on stream or come play with us if you want. We hang out over in the Hive Gaming Community Discord Server where it's easy to reach out to us. It would be cool to have more people to play with. Preferably someone better than @therealflaws so I don't have to carry all the time. Just check out these numbers:
Join me on my stream
I'm about to go live on my stream. We'll be picking up the campaign where we left of yesterday. We played through the first part and got almost through the second before hitting a bit of a wall at the end. We need to fuel up a generator so we can lower the bridge out of town. That has us running around the map for fuel cans while being pummeled by a ton of zombies. We're gonna blast through that wall today. Just need to stay clear of those hard hitting tanks.
I'll be live for 1-2 hours today.
I stream only for fun and because I can. Feel free to stop by and say hello. My gameplay sessions are saved as VODs for 14 days.
All screenshots in this post are taken by me.