It's all the rage to review demos, these days, so let's have a go :D

Left4Dead is the zombie-apocalypse multiplayer first person shooter from Valve, creators of such awesome stuff as half life and portal and so.

When I first started it, my thoughts were "Awesome Intro Movie is Awesome" (really, I'm weird), and the awesome intro movie IS awesome. You can probably find it on youtube, it's full of zombies and has a tank and a witch and a guy who looks like he should be dead because he's 95 and still smoking.

Like firebird, I decided to have a bash at singleplayer first, to grab the ropes. I set it to expert, and was on my way!

It's fun. Really fun. Fast Paced, tactical (well, on mulitplayer), zombie-killing action. You get a shedload of ammo, infinite ammo for your pistols (though who'd use them if you have a shotgun), and right clicking performs a melee attack.

An individual zombie dies incredibly easily, even on expert, and so the action is right for a zombie shooter - there's frigging tons of them.

The much touted "Director AI" is just a fancy way of saying "It spawns zombies randomly", and while this may not sound that great, it does mean that each game really is different. You might have one game where you only see 7 zombies, and all of them are pre-killed, or you could see a game where you're fighting for your life against a huge tide of zombies and tanks (a tank is a frigging huge zombie, the one time I saw one it took out 2 of the guys on my team, it damn near got me, too). So yeah, pretty awesome.

The graphics are "ok". They won't blow your mind, it's no Crysis, but that has the upshot of meaning it will, pretty much literally, run on any PC that will run hl2. It manages to look really good, considering the requirements, I imagine due to Valve's fantastic art design, which means it'll probably still hold up several years from now (while crysis looks shit compared to CrySomething)

So yes, I am giving this a score of 60 digits out of a possible 64, it's great fun, but relies entirely on multiplayer, the silly lobby system is nothing compared to a real server browser (and OK I know it's there), and is nowhere near hard enough. Advanced and blow are being renamed to "emo mode", the enemies self harm.

Much better review.