After seeing Valve’s latest release it really makes me wonder what is happening to a company that for a while were the innovators in first person shooters. While the sound and the graphics are pretty good, they both have some elementary flaws that that just unacceptable in today’s technology (more-so about the graphics than the sound).

I might as well get the sound out of the way first. The sound could have actually earned a perfect score if it wasn’t for one very annoying thing, but before I get to it I want to cover the good aspects of the sound. The gunfire, explosions, zombie sounds, music, character voices, etc. they are all pretty much perfect. They are combined excellent, and under the correct circumstances they can actually give me chills. However, every single time that any of the 4 characters reloads their weapon they let the rest of the team know. While that seems like a great idea at first, considering that in each level you fight somewhere between 500 to 1000 zombies, it seems that every 5 to 10 seconds someone is saying “Reloading!” After a few hours of gameplay the “reloading” comment felt like nails being dragged across a chock board.

The graphics also had the potential to almost be perfect, but Valve managed to screw that up too.

Once again, I will start with the positive feature found in the graphics before I move to the negative aspects. First of all I have to say that I was very impressed with the shadow effects featured in Left 4 Dead, especially the way your flashlight is able to cast the light in the darkness.

Another very impressive feature is the grain-effects that you can add or subtract from the graphics until you find your ideal setting. The grain-effects really help create the movie atmosphere behind the game. While cutting the grain-effects to 0 will make the game look much more video-game-like, increasing the grains makes it look much more movie like and for some reason it makes the zombies look way more realistic.

The fire and the explosions also look great and so does the zombie movement animations. The levels don’t look too shabby either, and Valve was able to combine the colors in the game perfectly to give a dark, gloomy, chilly look to the game. But… But not all is perfect. The game’s physics are not in sync with the graphics all the time. I have seen way too many body parts going strait through solid objects, especially walls and doors. Such a flaw once in a blue moon does not bother me, but when that flaw is encountered time and time again it gets tiring; very tiring. That is not the only physics vs. graphics flaw either. The 4 survivors seem to float over open spaces (to a certain degree). I was on a floor with a big busted whole in it. Dropping through the whole was my next destination, but as I approached it I realized when I looked at my feet as well as at the other survivor’s feet that we were floating on empty space. Eventually when moving right in the center of that whole we finally dropped to the floor below us. If things like that don’t bother you then disregard the points that I deducted from the graphics, but if you’re a perfectionist like me, those flaws will drive you insane.