Left 4 Dead
In the co-op shooter Left 4 Dead you take on the zombie horde as a team of four, while an AI called the Director decides when it hits and where the supplies are. A campaign runs from safehouse to safehouse and ends with a stand until rescue arrives. It takes 20 to 75 minutes, depending on difficulty.
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It all started with Terror Strike, a mod Turtle Rock made for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Four players as terrorists planted a bomb and held off endless waves of enemies. Valve was in no hurry to publish it until Chet Faliszek, who worked there, championed the project. In 2023 that prototype accidentally shipped inside a Counter-Strike 1.6 update.
Playtests cut a lot of what was planned. There was an infected in a straitjacket who ran off and screamed to call the horde, but players couldn't work out how he functioned. His horde-calling power went to another infected's vomit. A huge city with many routes left testers lost, so it was split into two campaigns.
Reviewers praised the replay value and the focus on co-op, though one wanted more maps and another an overarching story. Players leave 96% positive out of 58,732 reviews, and critics give it 89 on Metacritic. By our Recommended Score it is #78 of 4,736 games.
Liked it? Try Left 4 Dead 2, which later absorbed all the first game's campaigns, and Killing Floor, another game that grew out of a mod, where you buy guns from a trader between waves.
System requirements
Minimum 1 GB RAMiSteam Deck PlayableMin & recommended
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| OS | Windows® 7 32/64-bit / Vista 32/64 / XP | Windows® 7 32/64-bit / Vista 32/64 / XP |
| Processor | Pentium 4 3.0GHz | Intel core 2 duo 2.4GHz |
| Memory | 1 GB | 1 GB |
| Graphics | 128 MB, Shader model 2.0, ATI 9600, NVidia 6600 or better | Shader model 3.0, NVidia 7600, ATI X1600 or better |
| Storage | At least 7.5 GB of free space | — |
From the game’s Steam store page.
