Crash Course Revives Left 4 Dead
By Dan Birlew | Posted September 29, 2009 in Game Reviews | 2 Comments »Crash Course is available today on Steam and Xbox Live. However, this additional campaign adds only two new levels to Left 4 Dead, albeit hard ones. (The main campaigns all have four levels.) The expansion is free for owners of the PC version, but costs Xbox gamers roughly $7.
Crashing is the easiest thing about the Crash Course expansion.
Though it appears at the bottom of the campaign list, Crash Course takes place between No Mercy and Death Toll. Apparently the helicopter that rescued the survivors from the hospital rooftop crashed in a warehouse district, and the players must now navigate through the buildings to the bridge.
Placement of more propane tanks and gas cans makes things more explosive.
The first level takes place in a series of virtually indistinguishable parking lots and warehouses. No kidding, sometimes you enter a new area and think “Whoops, we got turned around,” because it’s so similar to the previous area. Same thing with several of the warehouse interiors. Things get more interesting when you find a tanker truck smashed through a fence above a road running under the bridge and have to descend to the road below. Crossing under the bridge, you then have to navigate up to the top street and fire a howitzer to destroy the barricade preventing you from crossing the bridge. This signals the horde, and you must fight them off. Luckily a mounted machinegun is there to help. But the interest soon fades after you cross the bridge and descend into yet another warehouse area. Luckily the safehouse is just inside the nearest building.
Zoey agrees with me that this parking lot looks just like the last parking lot, which looked a lot like...
The second stage takes place in…another series of warehouses and parking lots. By this point I started to question whether Valve was trying to say something about the blandness of American industrial districts, or perhaps just trying to make navigation harder since the expansion is only two levels. Fortunately the second level does end in a rather desperate and difficult attempt to keep a generator going long enough to lower a monster truck to the ground. As the hordes swarm the area, the generator goes off a couple times and must be restarted, forcing all the players to the ground for easy pickings by the next wave.
The scenery gets a little more interesting as you approach and take the bridge.
Crash Course is a fun but short campaign sure to renew interest in Left 4 Dead before the sequel arrives this November, even though it really adds nothing new. But how much merit these two short levels really have on their own remains to be seen. As for Xbox owners, I really can’t recommend spending money on this download. The PC version is currently 50% off on Steam, so for just $14.99 you can get the full PC game (which plays some great community-made mods, by the way) and the Crash Course campaign instead of paying $30 plus $7 for the same deal on Xbox (minus the mods).
Tags: Left 4 Dead, review, video games
Is it just me or were there WAY too many drops? It just seemed like every time I turned around there was another set of second-tiers, a pile of molotovs, or some pipe-bombs.
It just seemed a little too much like a “gimmie.” But hey, it gave me an excuse to dust off L4D!
Oh yeah, there’s no shortage of assault rifles, assault shotguns and hunting rifles to find. And they appear right away in the stage, so I can’t help but think they wanted you to use them instead of the standard loadout. I spent most of the levels with an assault rifle and full ammo, which made things much easier. Still, that generator action at the end of the second level was quite difficult, and it’s really hard for everyone to survive in online mode.