Me and my mates got this game after playing it on a mates computer. Campaign is very simple and great at LAN's. Run around with three other survivors, trying to get to the next check-point and ultimately finish the chapter (of which there are four). A large amount of team-work and communication is very important as you will need to rescue your mates from Hunters, Smokers or Witches and protect them when they are vomited on, heal each other and rescue each other if one dies. And, of course, avoid teamkilling each other.

Towards the end of each chapter, you will inevitably have to 'hold out' against a horde of zombies/tanks. This is where you and your friends must be strategic, picking your positions and sticking to them. A tank will come through and mess everything up, and your group will experience several 'wipe-outs' trying to kill him.

Once you've completed the campaign, there's not much else on offer. You can retry it on expert. Or you and your mates can duke it out in versus mode.

This game is a lot of fun. It is extremely cooperative and blasting away zombies is very satisfying. Also the statistics at the end of each chapter reveal all. But it's limited replayability (both single player and online) suggests to me that this game will primarily be pirated and played at lans. This is unfortunate because it really is a lot of fun. But, for most people, not for the price Valve is asking.

For years now, I've been hankering for a decent zombie game. Not like Doom or Half-Life, with the zombies only playing a small part in the overall action, or like Stubbs the Zombie, with it's clichéd moans of "Braaiiinnnsss" and a seemingly abundant source of internal organs, or even the Resident Evil series, because the really started losing the atmosphere when they left the city in favor of a more 'exotic' setting. No, are real, bona-fide zombie game, with just you and a few others in a rag-tag bunch, fighting not to save the world, but just to escape and survive.

Left 4 Dead delivers spectacularly. Not only does it emulate the atmosphere and tension of a Hollywood zombie flick, the loading screens present themselves as teaser posters for a new zombie movie, replete with tag-lines and cast and crew blocks (those things at the end of movie trailers. I don't really know what the technical term is).

And the cast itself is typical Hollywood fair, but in a good way. The Survivors all have a reason for fighting, and this only serves to enhance the feeling that you're really in a zombie pandemic, fighting for your life. Bill is Vietnam Veteran who wants nothing more than a gun in his hands and an enemy to fight; Francis is a misanthropic biker who uses the outbreak of The Infection as an outlet for his repressed rage; Louis was an IT consultant at a multi-national corporation, who identifies a little too well with the zombies (cubicle, drudgery, etc, not a hunger for the flesh of the living); and Zoey is a college student who spent more time watching horror movies than doing her homework (although it appears she studied the right subject after all!). This rag-tag bunch of "heroes", thrown together by fate and united by a common goal, serve as the player characters for you and your friends.

Which leads me neatly to this paragraph. The gameplay, while technically common in the First-Person Shooter genre, re-enforces the feeling of you being there. However, the game mixes it up in a way that can only be described as revolutionary. See, the game has no set spawn points for enemies. Instead, the game's AI program, dubbed 'The Director' by developers Valve Software, assesses player performance and adjusts accordingly. So, say if you were killing hundreds of zombies without breaking a sweat, the Director will ramp it up by putting more zombies in areas beyond your field of vision, come running in and overwhelm you whilst some special zombies either tie you up, spew on you or claw your face off. Speaking of which, whenever me and my co-players heard the sobbing of a Witch, we would freeze up and instantly switch into what we dubbed 'Witch Mode', where we would turn off all flashlights and enter every room SWAT-style, with one of us at the ready with a molotov cocktail to torch her ass. And at the end of a chapter, when the dreaded Tank zombie showed up, he would be promptly set ablaze and filled full of holes, but usually not until he had pinned whoever happened to be playing as Bill at the time.

And you don't even have to play as a Survivor. In Versus Mode, up to four players can take control of random Special Infected (Boomers, Hunters, Smokers, and, once per round, a Tank) in order to impede the progress of the Survivor players. Unfortunately, Versus mode requires at least one player on each side, so you can't load it up and kick some Survivor butt when you're offline. Aside from that, the game is almost perfect.

All in All, Left 4 Dead is an all-around solid game, a great co-operative multiplayer experience with dynamic pacing and engrossing atmosphere, let down by the lack of extra campaigns. But wait until Valve releases the planned Downloadable Content. It'll be sweet.

Review in 5 words: Buy Left 4 Dead!