Left 4 Dead 2 at PAX

ilikesanta from the Gaming Steve forum attended PAX and did a write up about the new L4D2 game:

I played LFD2 at PAX today, here’s my report.

I’m excited for this one to come out. They were showing two levels and I got to play the Carnival Level of the Dark Carnival campaign. The other level leads up to the carnival. I believe we were playing on normal difficulty, but I’m not a 100% on that.  My team had made it with out too many problems where I saw other teams get completely wiped out. So it plays just like LFD1 so there is no awkward adjustments to be made when playing. The new melee weapons are awesome. When you grab one it replaces your pistol so you can switch between your melee weapon and your main gun with ease, but when you get downed you drop the melee and pull your pistol. I picked up a Katina and was slicing zombies left and right. At one time I got three zombies with one slice. I also saw someone take a hunter in a single slice.

I saw all the new special infected. Spitter: She was a little harder to pick out in a crowd. She spews out bright green acid, so it’s obvious where not to go. She spits out enough acid to fill a small room, like the area in front of the elevator in No Mercy. It only last for 5 seconds before it disappears which seems a little short to me but overall I think it’s a pretty effective attack. Not sure on refresh time. When she dies she spews out a smaller pool of acid.

Charger: This guy is badarse. When he grabs player he will continue running until he hits something (wall, tree, ect), and when he smashes a survivor into the ground it does 25 damage! I saw a charger grab the girl and knock the other to the ground and when they got up and turned around to help her, I was a good distance away from them. I can imagine in versus that a good charger could get a straight shot and run a survivor a good two blocks away. I wonder if he could run them off a cliff? He was also easy to kill (difficulty level?)

Jockey: I like this guy. He sorta acts like a hunter, where he’s low to the ground and pounce on people, but not as far. I had him jump on me a couple of times and i had zero control. Apparently you can shake him off if you wiggle around a lot but I had to get help from my fellow survivors. He did like 3 damage a sec while he was riding me. If he downs a survivor he jumps off and can go straight to a new survivor.

I didn’t see any special common infected other then the clown. Apparently other zombies are drawn to his squeeky shoes, so if he starts running he’ll bring friends with him. I really didn’t notice anything different with him, compared to the common infected but it was only 1 play through. I didn’t see any wandering witches.

Other things i noticed, weapon caches, there seemed to be more of them but sometimes there will only be one new weapon instead of all three. In the level I played, there was a moving panic event, where you start it in one place and then have to move to a 2nd location to end it. I like this, it kept things interesting, but the panic didn’t seem to last as long as ones in the first game. There seem to be a lot wider paths in the levels I saw, of course both levels were mostly outdoors. The new guns felt fine. I heard that survivors can play some of the carnival games. There will be a small mall level in the first campaign. I like that there were more special infected because it wasn’t like,” Theres the hunter (bang) there’s the smoker(bang) that leaves the boomer (bang), then another hunter…” The game can now mix it up a bit. And I think that’s all the info I got from seeing the game. I can’t wait to try Verses when the came comes out.