Left 4 Dead Preview

Harry Hill makes an uncredited cameo appearance...

In terms of other pick ups, you'll also get access to painkillers - which give you a temporary, fading health boost - and a choice of two thrown weapons. Highly-explosive pipe bombs make a beeping noise as they are thrown, attracting a large crowd of zombies before blowing them sky high, while Molotovs are better for a quick attack on a monster or an approaching crowd. As with all Left 4 Dead's weapons, you'll have to take care when using these things: friendly fire is a constant issue, and chucking a flaming bottle into a confined space is likely to result in burnt faces and several pissed-off gamers.

Whatever armament you choose, you're certainly going to put it to good use. We played through the whole of Left 4 Dead's first two scenarios, and found both stages to be absolutely littered with brilliant moments. 'No Mercy' sees you running through office buildings and city streets until you reach the towering mess that is the local hospital, while the significantly tougher 'Blood Harvest' forces you to fight your way through a rural rail yard to an abandoned farm. Both stages had a decent mix of indoor and outdoor scenery - we particularly enjoyed the moment we were forced to step into a mist-swept cornfield. As soon as we saw this place, we knew it was going to be trouble - it looked far too evil for its own good. We were right too: within seconds we had lost our comrades. Zombies seemed to be coming from every angle, and it was impossible to tell who was friend and who was foe, such was the volume of people running between the eerie crops. Eventually we climbed atop a tractor, a move that helped us to find our pals, and then the best way to escape.

It's moments like these that we enjoy the most about Left 4 Dead - situations that force you to evaluate how you're going to make it to the next safe house. There's a palpable sense of panic to the action that rarely surfaces in other action games, and you'll get a real rush from suddenly pulling off a move that saves someone's ass. It's not scary in a psychologically disturbing, Silent Hill-kind-of-way, but it does frequently create some really intense scenarios. It is this sense of desperation that draws you in, that makes you really feel that you're battling to survive a nightmare.

As far as intensity goes, you'll find that it doesn't get any better (or worse) than the stand-off battles that end each scenario. Here you'll have to defend a set location for a set length of time until a rescue chopper can land - and believe us when we say that the Director will do everything in his power to stop you making your escape. During the play test, it took our team of embittered hacks no less than four attempts before we finally fled the hospital roof. Each time we tried a different tactic: on one go we tried to band together on a small roof near the helipad, but found that we were screwed by the need to run to a nearby shack to collect ammo. On another attempt, one survivor took control of a mounted gun emplacement while the rest of us covered him - but we found ourselves too exposed in the open: A smoker snared us with his tongue and hauled us across the map, and our buddies were far too busy to save us. We were all killed, falling one by one, until the hoard had overrun us.

We don't recommend Left4Dead if you have a nervous disposition

In the end, after three failed attempts, we came up with a plan: the four of us called for a the helicopter, tooled up on guns, and then squeezed into a small storage room with only one point of access. We even shut the door. "Maybe they won't find us!" said one of my colleagues, hopefully. Well, they did. They smashed a hole in the door, then pulled it away entirely - but the combined power of four blazing firearms was enough to keep them at bay. Indeed, our efforts turned the doorway into a sort of bullet-powered meat-grinder, with hundreds of bodies and lakes of gore spewing all over the place. To be honest, we're almost a little concerned about how efficient this tactic was: it worked pretty well in the Blood Harvest stand-off too (even if we did botch the job when the chopper showed up). If hiding in a cupboard is always the best way to beat the stand-offs, it might hurt the replayability of those battles. This would certainly be a shame, because as you can probably tell - we got a real kick out of playing Left 4 Dead with three chums.

At any rate, these thoughts were far from our mind when our chopper finally arrived at the hospital. Together the four of us journos made a heart-pounding dash for the landing pad, exploding zombie faces as we went. The writers from GameSpot and Eurogamer made it in safely and started firing back at the Infected; we were next in line, and were half way there when a cry went up - the guy from IGN was in trouble! We started back in his direction, M-16 blazing, but he was totally surrounded. "Go!" he yelled. "Save yourself!" We hesitated for a second, feeling the pangs of our conscience - and then something tried to bite our arm off. We sprinted back to the chopper. As we lifted off, we watched sadly as the crowds swarmed over our team mate. Sorry buddy... you're Left 4 Dead.

Left 4 Dead is due out for PC and Xbox 360 on November 7.