Played the demo today and I have to say that I was not that impressed. I think that I like the first one better, with its dark lighting, tight spaces, sweet sounds, and the sense of "fear" and the great environment that it portrays.

The first game was fun to me because it was the most authentically "scary" zombie game I had ever seen. Playing it almost nightly with my close friends made it that much better. But by the end, it felt to me like every "campaign" was essentially the same experience with a slightly different skin and slightly different level design. Not only didn't this make things feel a bit stale by the end, it really only had a few campaigns in all, repetitive though they may have felt, and my final opinion putting the game down was one of disappointment. The feeling was buffered slightly by my knowledge of Valve's commitment to its other multiplayer-focused games like TF2 and the years of gradual improvements it saw.

That little bit of "good will" was tossed out the window at E3 when they announced L4D2. Even if it was the kind of radical improvement on the original that would warrant a sequel (it's not), it's coming just over half a year after the original's release. That means Valve either had begun work on the sequel long before the original was even out the door, which I doubt, or the steps to get from L4D1 to L4D2 wouldn't be all that great.

From every single thing I've seen or read about it, L4D2 is firmly in the latter category. Every gameplay mechanic, every jumpy thing I loved, and every repetitive, miracle "Director" spawned pointless horde that I grew tired of seems entirely intact from the original, and the only thing this "sequel" adds is more, MORE, MOAR:

• More polygons
  
• More weapons
  
• More uncommon common enemies
  
• More locales
  
• More gore

I'm sorry, but simply dogpiling more of the same onto an already borderline formula just doesn't make me want to spend a full game's price. Hell, I'm not sure if I'd play them if they were just free content updates to the original! It's just four players moving from segment to segment while mindless zombies are "dynamically" thrown at them. Occasionally you'll even get to a quiet place where you very conveniently have to hit a switch, button or other trigger, and then the horde arrives.

Look, I'm not disputing the fun I had with the original. Looking back, it felt like five campaigns with only minor cosmetic differences. I have no interest in replaying them over again, and even tinkering with all the above elements doesn't, in my mind, make for a new experience worth more of my time.

You might be tempted to respond, "Oh well, your loss, you're entitled to your opinion," to which I answer that just as some like Giller began this thread to post his reasons for buying it, I'm posting my reasons for not.

There is NOTHING entirely new about the game except the melee weapons. they are not worth 30 bones I don't have.

Do you think saying that makes me regret my post? Feel bad for being wordy? Or do you just think that anyone who's response is separated into paragraphs is asserting some kind of intellectual superiority, and it makes you feel better to "put him in his place" by stating explicitly your decision to ignore what he took a greater than average amount of time, or words at the very least, to put together?

Don't worry, the questions were rhetorical; I don't really care whether you reply to or even read them. But suffice it to say I've become increasingly ambivalent of late with regard to these forums. The lack of direction, the sophomoric atmosphere making me think twice before using "big words," it's a death spiral to the lowest common denominator of discussion with which the Internet has long overflowed.

FRUSTRATION!

I've absolutely loved being a part of the site, and for a while it felt like a worthwhile community. But lately it's become filled with apathy and obscenity. There are certainly bright spots, but you could take the people here who treat others in the forum with respect and maturity and it would be a tiny fraction of the purported "929 registered members." Even if you could separate the wheat from the chaff, what you'd have wouldn't be a community, but a tiny, exclusive club. I mean no disrespect to those people, and it saddens me that this site is the only place that happens to have connected us. I appreciate your friendship.


Summary for the "tl;dr" crowd: Ta.