It struck me whilst playing through the original Left 4 Dead for possibly the final time on Monday that I really would miss Valve’s first stab at zombie apocalypse survival. Okay, it might have needed a few patches to clear up some balancing issues and yeah, the lobby system is utterly naff, but when playing with a group of mates it is co-operative shooting at its very finest. Plus, who could forget the cry of PILLS HERE every couple of minutes?

We obviously all know the uproar Left 4 Dead 2 initially caused, and that whole petition thing that called on people to boycott it as it threatened support of the first game. If Valve had gone on to present us with something that was merely the first game in a sparkly new skin and in a couple of new locations then in retrospect perhaps this may have carried a little more weight, but as it is we’ve ended up with something that’s bigger, better and a great standalone effort worthy of anyone’s cash. Hurrah and huzzah!

It takes a bit of getting used to, of course. The new bunch of survivors might take a while to become as popular as Bill, Zoe etc, but they’re a personable, amusing ragtag bunch and are as much as a mixture of personalities as the first lot. In particular, Nick and Ellis are great fun as they belt out their random quotes, with the former being a somewhat slick and smooth conman and the latter being a pretty stereotypical southern American who enjoys starting stories that the others never allow him to finish. Poor chap.

The main two modes everyone will be familiar with are Campaign and Versus, the latter of which offers folks the chance to take the zombies’ side against a team of survivors through the usual campaign progression. Campaign mode in itself is enjoyable enough for a few runs, especially now the survivors have a whole range of new stuff to toy around with in their quest for survival.

The most interesting of these are the melee weapons, including such awesome things as frying pans and chainsaws. They do take a fair bit of health off your team if you do happen to blunder around aimlessly slapping things about, but running through a wave of zombies with a crowbar is immensely satisfying. Also, equipping your entire team with frying pans and setting upon a tank is quality stuff, and might end up with you giving yourself laughter cramps.

The selection of guns is bolstered for good measure, with the old favourites now having a few variants. Of particular use is the combat shotgun that can fire off shells quicker than a grumpy teenager can rage quit when his team loses, and the grenade launcher is great fun as long as you’re playing with a team of folks who don’t mind the odd bit of collateral damage now and again when you attempt to blow up a cluster of zombies whilst panic running from a witch. Not that I’d do that of course, and that example is a random one that I merely plucked out of my head.

Ahem.

There are new items too, such as the defibrillator that allows you to revive a fallen comrade and the boomer bile jars that cover things in zombie-attracting goo and are particularly useful against tanks, witches and annoying teammates. There’s even an adrenaline shot available that speeds up your movement and increases your melee damage for a short time, and at certain points during most of the campaigns this comes in very useful indeed.

This is due to Valve deciding to up the ante this time around in terms of drama and set-piece events, which now occur regularly throughout levels instead of at the end of selected ones. The campaigns are also packed full of clever and unique moments, such as Hard Rain in which the first two levels are spent reaching a fuel depot, and then the next two has you tracking back through the level in an ever-worsening storm with flood water everywhere and visibility greatly reduced. Kudos also should go to Dark Carnival and a particularly unsettling section where you find yourself running along a rollercoaster track cutting your way through zombies to try and shut an alarm off. These moments add greatly to the drama, and the increase in good teamwork required makes it a much more rewarding experience.

This also goes for the new special infected, as although getting new types to muck around with seems to flip the balance toward the infected on paper, learning the ways to use each type best requires a decent amount of thought and practice. Where we once there was a nailed-on tactic for folks as they combined Boomers, Hunters and Smokers to great effect to divide and conquer, this time around you’re given an enemy that hurls acidic gob toward survivors in the form of the Spitter (the nemesis of the corner camping folks, as it turns out), a mini-tank that can ram into and carry off someone called a Charger and the little Jockey, who can leap onto a survivor’s head and control their movement, splitting them off from their group.

Using them together brings up a whole wealth of new tactics that can be used. See someone getting run off by a Jockey? Try nabbing the guy who goes to save him with a Charger, or perhaps trapping the other three in a corner with a well-aimed Spitter gob. If the Spitter phlegm missed, how’s about dragging a survivor through it with a Smoker, or pounce someone in it with the Hunter? There’re plenty of interesting combinations to try and while some are more effective than others, the more open nature of the levels means you’ll always stand a decent chance of at least delaying the opposing team while you are at it.

Outside of the tried-and-trusted modes there’s also Survival, which was introduced to the original late in the day and puts four players in the survivors’ boots as they try to cling onto life as long as possible when spammed with endless waves of enemies in a selection of areas from the main meat of the game. Something completely new and based around the chapter-ending gauntlet mission in Dead Centre, the game’s first campaign, is Scavenger, in which a team of survivors must collect scattered petrol canisters from around a small portion of one of the levels to fuel a generator that will keep boosting the amount of time left in the round, whilst a team of infected try their best to stop them. It’s great, hectic fun, and really calls on your ability to think quickly and shoot accurately. Finally, there’s also a mode called Realism loaded in, which can be used on any of the game modes and gets rid of the little silhouette around fellow survivors and makes shot placement crucial to how much damage a zombie takes. It works particularly well, and certainly succeeds in Valve’s aim of making the game more tactics and communication based.

It’ll keep you going for a good while, and promises to be every bit as successful as the first in the very least. This time around, however, things are so much more open-ended that a much higher proportion of the lifespan will be spent experimenting and finding new things, which can only reflect well on the game when we look back on it after Left 3 Dead 3 hits the shelves. It’s an exciting, enjoyable multiplayer game to get stuck into with your mates and it takes what was already a game that did everything it set out to do brilliantly and moves it further ahead without losing that particular feel that we all came to love as the months ticked on.

It’s all the little things that add up to make it feel like that. Okay, so it’s hardly a visual step-up from the first (although it is somewhat crisper), but you now have weapons to spang zombies over the head with, there are special infected types to specifically break up corner camping survivors and the levels the whole thing takes place in across the various modes are well-designed and encourage experimentation. Any concerns that the new infected, weapons and increased gauntlet event frequency would mess up the balanced nature of the game are all swept away within minutes of your first go, and to say that’s a relief is putting it mildly. Good job Valve, afford yourselves a hearty slap on the back and a few slices of lie-free cake.