Review: Not one but Two Evil Eyes

Valve decided to make Left 4 Dead go the way of Team Fortress last week by way of highlighting some deserving custom campaigns. Two Evil Eyes is the first of these, so I decided to take time out of playing Self-Loathing Mode Iron Man Expert to test out the newish six-level campaign.

The only way I can sum this up is “Left 4 Dead: Greatest Hits”. As I ran through the campaigns six whole levels I couldn’t help but notice that it all seemed vaguely familiar. Familiar as in, “Hey, I remember that crescendo event in Left 4 Dead 1 where you have to start the van to have it crash through a wall! And that one where you have to shoot the gas cans to burn through the barricade! It’s like seeing old friends!” It was at this point that I realized that these events, that were so shamelessly ripped out of Dead Air from the first game, were juxtaposed pretty poorly into the flow of the campaign. The aforementioned gas can event was the worst of all of these homages. After hitting it with a melee weapon (which said it called the horde, but actually did nothing) then shooting it with my AK, it merely bathed the whole area we were standing with flames, incinerating every zombie that came in and winning the award for Most Disappointing Recreation of a Crescendo Event. No, wait, that’s the boat one. I get those two mixed up.

The setting is a bit of a mixture between the first half of the Parish, Hard Rain Death Toll, and the first half of Swamp Fever. This makes it a rather odd amalgamation of settings and set pieces, with suburban towns blending in with swamps and then the rather bafflingly short thunderstorm on the fifth level. It can’t be explained very well, and it does little to draw away from the fact that this entire campaign seems to be a hodgepodge of the creator’s favorite areas.

The mapping, though impressive in parts, really leaves something to be desired. It could have benefited immensely from custom props, but instead it merely borrowed everything from other campaigns: the crashed airliner from Swamp Fever, the whole bridge from The Parish, the yacht from The Passing, and–oddly enough–the ‘Welcome to Riverside’ sign from the first game. Some portions of the campaign are quite well designed, but it’s completely overshadowed by the parts of it that don’t work very well. Not to mention the developer-added tips, which really sparked all of my complaints with this map.

The most glaring of these so-called tips are in the second level. As you’re walking out of the saferoom you’re greeted by a tip that says ‘health pack over here’, which doesn’t go away until you actually go over to that out-of-the-way area. Upon walking in front of the health pack, a gigantic boulder rolls down the hillside, flattens the house the pack is next to, then continues to jovially roll for a bit until it parks itself in front of a ladder. This boulder ended up incapacitating two of my teammates. Awesome.

The second of these tips has to do with the factory area. Well, saying it’s an area would be a tad bit of a stretch, as all you do is run in, press a button and run the other way. But upon pressing the button, a notification pops up saying ‘go here, the gate is open’. Unfortunately for you, it doesn’t let on where you’re supposed to go after you press the button.  It’s little niggling details like this that sour the experience for me. Not all of the campaign is bad, but the bad bits tend to outweigh the good bits until it turns into a mediocre mess. It’s rather short and not straight-forward, especially for six levels, and some of the balancing is off, because every melee weapon I came across was a chainsaw.

But I imagine that this would be leagues more fun in Versus. It’s filled with many little causeways and catwalks that are just screaming for Chargers to run down, and there was, at least for me, a tank or three on every level. It’s just very dull in Campaign mode and brings nothing really interesting to the Left 4 Dead table.

You can download the campaign over at L4DMaps.net. Valve’ll have the servers for it up until next Thursday (August 26th), so it shouldn’t be too hard to find a Versus game for it.