The longer you’re in the spit, the more damage it does, so you’d better get out of there sharpish. Obviously, she spits, and her saliva splatters across the floor, hurting any survivor that’s caught in it. You remember in the first game when you could hide in a cupboard when a horde was coming? The Spitter is there to stop that from happening. The Spitter is a brilliant way of halting the survivor’s progress and/or getting them out of a room.

It then jumps on you and, true to its name, rides you into something dangerous, whether that dangerous thing is Spitter goo, a Witch, a rather large drop or a lot of fire. It’s about as tall as your legs are and is surprisingly hard to kill whilst it zig zags towards you making a high-pitched almost-laughter sound. The Jockey is another new special that is quite brilliant and terrible. It’s clearly designed to split up the previously-safe group tactic of, well, staying close together in a group by charging through you, and it works brilliantly. The Charger is a terrifying enemy, though that could be because I never see it coming before it’s slammed into the wall next to me holding Rochelle. The new special infected are a great example of that. It’s also got the added bonus of Valve looking at how people play L4D and adding stuff into it to compensate. Valve themselves have said L4D2 is what L4D would have been if they could’ve just ignored the risk and gone for it anyway. You might say that L4D didn’t need to be priced so highly, and I might agree, but some people are saying that L4D2 shouldn’t be, at which I respectfully ask them to be quiet. It turns out they did, so then Valve started making the sequel. Valve didn’t want to waste money on making the full blown idea they had (which later became L4D2), as it was a huge risk, so they made a scaled down version of their utterly brilliant idea to see if people would enjoy the zombie-related coop.

You could say that Left 4 Dead was a testing bed to see whether or not the L4D style of play would be popular. Then I read why Valve were doing this, and I got all excited. However, when I found out that L4D2 would be releasing a mere year after release, I didn’t quite know what to think. I was a huge fan of Left 4 Dead, as you probably guessed from the multiple zombie-related articles and the new feature on Thursdays, which I imaginatively titled Zombie Thursday (I missed it this week – blame exams).

Left 4 dead 2 review