Hands-On: Left 4 Dead’s “Survival Pack”
Rejoice, zombie hunters! The anticipated expansion pack for your favorite undead blaster was made available last night. While blasting mass amounts of Kenyan-quick zombies never gets old, nothing’s wrong with a little freshening up. “The Survival Pack” is a free DLC for all owners of Valve’s Left 4 Dead, adding a new gameplay mode to existing maps, and adding a new one.
And guess what – the goal is to survive. Clever.
The pack opens up Death Toll and Dead Air for versus play, and adds a new small map set around a lighthouse, called Last Stand. Last Stand is a super cramped map that works well for the type of play.
Survival mode uses instances where you manually trigger a horde as its starting point; such as radioing for help at the airplane terminal, or calling the elevator in the hospital. The difference is that instead of continuing on from there, you have to survive as long as possible while being attacked by a bazillion critters. Valve has said that you can take out as many zombies in a fairly successful Survival mode as you do in an entire normal campaign – which may be beneficial for those of you still going after that insane Zombie Genocidest achievement. And who isn’t?
A typical survival game lasts 3 minutes. At least today, when we’re all still getting used to the tactics of the mode. It’s not uncommon to have zombies, one of each special infected, and a tank on the screen at the same time after a few minutes of living. Tanks spawn 41 seconds in, and continue at that rate until you survive for 10 minutes (yeah right), where they start showing up every 10 seconds – ultimately making you have no chance. It’s super mayhem.
Molotovs, pipe bombs and health packs litter the area for every survival fight. It’s up to you to make them work. Healing people can be a real task, because you don’t get much time at all to do so. There are lulls built into the zombie attacks, but you’re usually still cleaning up the last horde during them. It’s the biggest test of teamwork yet from the title, so quit trash-talking over the headset and grow some grapes.
Oh, and if that all wasn’t enough, Valve has made it so that you can’t just sit in a corner and melee the hell out of everything with endless arm-swinging vigor.
It seems PC users can expect the add-on sometime later today. Xbox people, why are you still reading? Bill is being strangled by a smoker, you selfish turd! Go get him!
