Left 4 Dead: Crash Course
DLC for Left 4 Dead
Crash Course is the first DLC campaign for Left 4 Dead. According to Valve it is meant to bridge the gap between No Mercy and Death Toll. Crash Course is the shortest of any Left 4 Dead campaign and contains only two chapters. Crash Course begins shortly after the events of No Mercy. The helicopter rescue pilot from the Rooftop Finale succumbs to the Infection and Zoey shoots him in mid-flight. The helicopter crashes in an industrial area outside of the city of Fairfield in Whitney County. Starting from next to the helicopter crash site, the Survivors traverse Fairfield's industrial landscape. Initially there is no firm clue about their destination until they make reference to a truck depot and discuss the town of Riverside where a military evacuation center is reported to be. This plan obviously foreshadows and contextualizes the Death Toll campaign. At the truck depot they discover an armored truck mounted on a workshop hoist which must be lowered before they can board and escape. Activating a generator for this purpose triggers a finale horde attack. In another act of foreshadowing, the generator stalls partway through the battle and one survivor must run out and restart it: the same problem occurs in The Sacrifice except the survivor who volunteers is certain to die.
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This review contains spoilers
When Left 4 Dead came out, it was a new concept for me. Fully rendered 3D zombies and a series of stages to progress through with your friends, in order to be rescued. I had so much fun with this game and its original concept back then, inspired many other games to follow the same or a shared format.
In Left 4 Dead, you play as one of four characters who, as a group, need to travel to an extraction point from where they are rescued. There are a lot of maps to choose from and each map consists of five levels.
On your journey you come across hordes of infected and, every fifty steps or so, one of the three special infected this game has, appears and tries to make your life miserable. Those three are the Smoker, which uses his long tongue to reel you in and choke you, the Boomer (no not a sixty year old man with forty grandchildren), a bloated fat sack of pus that explodes on you, covering you in goo and attracting other infected, and the Hunter, a hacker-man type dude in a hoodie that jumps and claws at you with the most deafening screech. You find scarce resources like health packs and pills to keep you going, and later on, you find some better weapons.
In this DLC, Crash Course, you play trough a new campaign, consisting of two levels. Your rescue helicopter crashes and you are searching for a means of transport. You come across a abandoned workshop and need to prepare a truck to make your escape. You need power however and need to keep generators running until the truck is ready and you can finally get yourself to safety.
The action is intense, and the tension builds up when you are almost there or your whole team is down, and everyone is depending on you. This feeling is enhanced on higher difficulty levels.
The graphics in Left 4 Dead are dark and grim and fine to look at. The animations are a little sluggish and zombies dying, do so in a scripted motion. When you encounter the Witch for example, and you pump her full of shotgun hail, she casually falls down to the ground on heir knees and dies. She should be flying to the nearest planet in a “realistic” situation.
The sound design is excellent. The grunts of the zombies, the ambient music and weapon fire, all sounds very good.
The Crash Course DLC was cool and intense, altough I thought it was a little on the short side.
Definitely recommend it.