Circuit Jerk

I picked up Left 4 Dead 2 again yesterday and found that the magic I was trying to convince myself of, just wasn’t there. I wanted to love this game. To play it as much as I played the first one, but honestly, I’m burned out now. L4D2 just isn’t as fun as the first one.

This isn’t saying that there wasn’t progress over the first game. The Melee weapons are a welcomed edition. Valve did some interesting things with the environments, such as Heavy Rain filling itself with water and vision becoming nothing during the hard wind.

Overall though I miss the confining environments of the city in the first game. New Orleans is too wide open. The claustrophobia of a parking garage or the mocking and seemingly wide open spaces of the rooftops are welcomed to giant land areas where you often just have to follow the perimeter to find where to go next.

Just like Resident Evil, I miss having a lack of options. As much as I like to say “I’m a rebel a loner. I break all the rules.” It’s not true. I need parameters. I need to adhere to the strict rules of the environments. Take away my ammo and guns. Besides, who the hell owned this many grenade launchers in New Orleans?

I miss Francis. Ellis comes close to filling that gap, but he’s more of a cute yokel whereas Francis hated everything. If the DLC coming is correct, we could possibly have both Ellis and Francis in the same game. Now that would be spectacular.

Having objectives is a great idea, but it’s still just pushing buttons and waiting for rescue when you break it down. Make me find some keys. I want to solve a few puzzles. I know why this isn’t in the game. The average Xbox Live gamer doesn’t want those puzzles. They want to connect and hit blam blam. Let me tell you, Resident Evil Outbreak was an awful game, but it wasn’t awful because of the puzzles. The extreme load times and slow network connection killed that idea. But when you’ve got  two people searching rooms for a key, while the third person nails boards over the entrance, and the forth person starts breaking down the exit door, sweat runs down your face. You can’t easily manufacture that sort of suspense and fear.

It’s something that’s largely missing from online gaming. Give me a puzzle heavy game that I can play with Neil and a large amount of the population snubs it.