Vermintide 2 opts for a three-act plot, complete with opening crawls, returning characters, and an overall campaign finale - but it often feels more disconnected than tight, 4-mission campaigns. It’s peak “environmental storytelling”, showered in graffiti and diorama corpses, but it worked. Despite continuity between then, each campaign's real strength is largely in telling a distinct story of what happened in this particular zombie-ridden corner of America. Left 4 Dead’s B-movie horror aesthetic was fantastical - and for all it’s plot exposition, Vermintide’s environments don’t evoke the sort of stories one pictures in the empty hospital corridors of No Mercy. (Related: I was absolutely not prepared to hear the phrase “glaikit mayflies” in a videogame.) Listen, Zoe, I love you and your pals but I’ll never tire of Kerillian’s passive aggressive derision, or how Satlzpyre’s every line-delivery lands. Gear, talents, and all that good Destiny-esque stuff certainly helps on some level - but even as far as personalities go, I might prefer the Ubersreik Five to our old gang of survivors. We all had our favourites among the survivors, and in time they became sufficiently “meme’d” (pills here, anyone?). There’s an attachment to your character on a level that I never felt in Left 4 Dead. Meanwhile, a good chunk of Vermintide’s special monsters fit the “Rat holding a big gun” niche - although Chaos Warriors and full-on Boss fights mix things up at times, I’m largely waiting for a character to call out what we’re dealing with. Left 4 Dead’s maps rarely allowed you to get lost, and each monster had such distinct silhouettes and barks that players were never in doubt about what was coming to mess them up. That Valve level of clarity is often sorely missed. Granted, the additions make Vermintide a far noisier game than Left 4 Dead ever was.
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Add to that a full RPG-lite tree of classes, combos, and abilities, and getting a team in sync with each other becomes an absolute joy. Axes and swords might have made it into Left 4 Dead 2, but Vermintide manages to give them character - blocking values, swing speed, sweeps and smashes, there’s enough to give you that “I get it!” moment when you figure out a weapon’s strengths. There are just so many ways to bash rats and rotters in the Reikland. It was tense, it was hectic, and it was bloody fantastic.īut it wasn’t perfect, and Vermintide’s genius is in capitalising on Left 4 Dead’s weakest areas rather than building on strengths. Campaigns ramped up in intensity, leading to all-or-nothing finales. Specialist infected types worked hard to separate the party, and lay in wait to punish those straying from the flock. With the AI director working overtime behind the scenes, the action was always pitched at just the right intensity, keeping survivor parties on their toes through lulls in the action, and then signalling onslaughts with audio cues. I can think of worse starting points for your new game than Left 4 Dead. With both series now/still on their second games, let’s look at how Vermintide ran with the legacy of Left 4 Dead, while managing to forge its own identity. The four vs the world setup and the UI were highly reminiscent of Left 4 Dead, and what are Gutter Runners and Pack Masters if not reskinned Hunters and Smokers? But there was much more to that game than swapping out zombies for skaven.
That is, until Fatshark’s rowdy rat-smash, Vermintide. But as Valve haven’t really been in the business of making games for a good few years - hopefully, that’s about to change - and while it felt like Left 4 Dead was going to change the world back in (oh no) 2008, for a long time nothing filled the rotten hole where my heart used to be.
Valve’s “28 Days Later with your friends” infected my life for a good year, and a bigger, better sequel one year later only strengthened the disease. I’d wager most folk around these parts devoured Left 4 Dead back in the day, just as I did.
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