The Left 4 Dead 2 demo hit the marketplace early today for those who pre-ordered with certain retailers. The demo is online and offline co-op and every gametype is locked, but campaign. I was expecting the L4D2 demo to be short; Indeed I was correct. There are only two chapters from the Parish campaign to play. Let’s not be fooled though, it was the best two chapters I’ve played in L4d history.

Valve managed not to make this game a Left 4 Dead 1.5, as they did quite well in bringing in new gameplay, weapons, infected, and over all inventory. You can find all the L4D1 weapons in the demo, but why would you want use those when you have newer weapons to choose from? A new form of grenade I found interesting was Boomer Bile. A container filled with boomer bile that will affect anything you throw it at, causing a horde of infected to attack it. This would be a perfect example of how to kill a wandering witch. As for some new medical items, you get an adrenaline shot. What this does, is it makes your ears seem like they’re muffled, but the point of this is to rapidly increases your speed for a duration regardless of low health. Another fun item are the shock paddles. These let you revive dead survivors and is limit to one use. This can be useful when a Tank slaps you around silly and you need to get away from it ASAP. The Melee weapons were also a big help. At first, I was resorting to them as a last ditch effort like a pistol, since the melee weapon replaces the pistol. I found myself going around corners with a melee weapon rather than a projectile weapon. The melee weapons do wonders.

The old infected are still in L4D2. Mind you there are new clothes, new infected alert, and attack sound effects. The new infected consist of The Jockey(my fav) that rides you into danger or whatever tickles its fancy. The Rusher is no tank, but has a powerful rush that will send you flying a few yards and grab a hold of a survivor to pound them to the ground until it’s dead. The Spitter, is an infected that campers will despise. As she spits acid that will force you to leave any narrow hallways or areas. When you kill her, she leaves a minor puddle of acid which you need to be careful of you kill her right in front of your eyes. The Wandering Witch isn’t a new infected, but we can say an upgraded version of the original witch. This witch wanders around crying and is more easily startled making her a more effective killing machine.

The audio was quite pleasing. The feeling this time around is as if you were actually shooting a real weapon and getting the satisfaction of feeling like you’re actually clobbering infected with a guitar or any other melee weapon. As for the graphics you can easily tell they are much cleaner and just nice to look at. Let’s not forget the gore and dismemberment. You can clearly see the bones and the inside of the infected bodies when you shoot them. The controls being about the same as the 1st game, they do feel a bit more solid.

I really didn’t think it was possible to make such drastic improvements to Left 4 Dead, but Valve does it again in upping the anty and pleasing us with the best zombie killing game out there.