Left 4 Dead Preview

This is the most excited we've been about a zombie game since Dead Rising

"At Valve we have traditionally built two types of games," says Gabe Newell as he twists his desk chair towards the assembled throng in EA's behind closed doors booth at Leipzig Games Convention 2008. "Single-player games, which are good at character driven narrative, they let you go on an adventure that has a story and a plot and characters. And we've had multiplayer games which are really good at replayability and playing with your friends. Games like Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2.

"What we saw was an opportunity to try and combine these features, to take the social replayability of multiplayer games and the storytelling and sense of an adventure from our single-player games and combine them for Left 4 Dead."

The legendary Valve co-founder and managing director doesn't need to say much more. Generating hype isn't something he needs to work too hard on. Valve's credentials speak for itself - Counterstrike, Half-Life and Half-Life 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2 - all amazing games that have had first-person shooter fans dribbling with glee for years. Nowadays, if Valve makes a game, interest is guaranteed.

And yet there is still some mystery surrounding Left 4 Dead, which seems to us to be a game not quite as high profile as a new Half Life, but more high profile than TF2 or Portal. It almost fits in between, effortlessly exuding confidence and freshness while retaining a certain mystique we're only starting to peel away.

This mystique surrounds a simple question, one we're not used to asking with regards to video games. Just what is Left 4 Dead? The Director has the answer.

"The Director functions like a movie director," explains Newell. "It looks at what you're doing as you play the game. It looks at the performance you're getting, how well you're aiming, what mistakes you're committing, whether or not you're helping the other players, what your accuracy is.

"It takes all of that information and makes a set of decisions. It decides what the pacing should be, how it populates the world with monsters and challenges. It sprinkles health and weapons around the world. And all of this is being done dynamically based on how you and your friends are playing the game."

What this means for you and me is that no two games of Left 4 Dead will ever be the same. Genuinely. The Director will make sure of it.

The Director controls the action

As one of four 'Survivors', you'll be fighting for your life, shooting and running from 'The Infected'. Lots of Infected. They're brutal, viscous, scary and very, very fast. It's more 28 Days Later than Night of the Living Dead. Although the zombies might seem like mindless beasts only concerned with your gory death, they're governed by a higher power - The Director.

The intensity, number and difficulty of 'The Infected' changes depending on what you and your fellow Survivors do in each of the game's four huge movie scenarios. We're playing 'The Hospital', one of these movies, and get a taste of how The Director procedurally generates Left 4 Dead's narrative as we desperately fight for our lives and move towards a distant building and a helicopter air lift to safety.

As we speedily move throughout the grim, pitch black apocalyptic streets of the urban environment the game descends, for much of the time, into an all out gore-fest as we blast away at Infected from every possible angle with our pump action shotgun. It's heart-pounding stuff, and relentless. Indeed the action continues for a good 10 minutes before we reach a safe house, where we regroup and catch our breath.

"Now we need some time to relax," Newell says. "If we kept the game at that constant level it would stop being fun relatively quickly. Now that we're in this safe area you'll see some useful information on The Director as it makes decisions about what sort of experience to create for us, but it's also useful for the matchmaking. So when you're playing with other people it's nice to know, oh this person in addition to having good aim is going to rescue me if I start to fall off a building or I'm trapped by a Hunter, and will also heal me."