PROS No Mercy environment feels exactly like I'm running around another part of that campaign. Boss placement Interesting concept- starting with Tier 2 weapons but not placing enough for everyone. Long maps Lots of changes from sprawling warehouse/parking lot environments to cramped, dark buildings. CONS Lack of direction- worst in Map 1 sewers (where arrows point in wrong direction) and Map 4 hospital. Bots fight you the whole campaign, not wanting to pick up guns, ammo, health, pills, so they're constantly undersupplied and basically on pistols the whole time. Map 3 sewer event trigger doesn't light up until you shoot the box. Map 4 event is terrible- nothing tells you to shoot the boxes and throw a pipe down there and I only discovered that out of frustrated desperation. Finale is broken- there's no indicator where to start the rescue, and I gave up after searching every room. If there is a finale trigger, then I'd take off just as many stars for not having lit up. Not a single on- screen cue. CONCLUSION This definitely tries to be a harder, longer take on No Mercy, and it nearly gets it right. However, with abysmal direction and bots playing about as good as your grandmother would, this needs a lot of polishing. The original author must have never played this game before, otherwise they would've known that typically you can make things glow blue and give players instructions. But, with a little work, this could be a very fun homage to No Mercy.

I'm going to adjust my initial review. I first thought this campaign was decent aside from the myriad of problems that make it artificially difficult. It does still have the potential for fun, but it’s ruined by a lot of easily fixable mistakes. However, the finale is where all hope for redemption goes out the window. \ Aesthetic: Right from the get-go you can sense this was lazily made. The title card is sloppily put together, with a tagline that essentially says "Your movie's tagline goes right about here!" and the number "16" has a texture on it that jars with the original sign (which itself has that texture problem). I could do a better job in Microsoft Powerpoint. You may see stuff like that occur throughout the map: there was one instance where we saw some saferoom graffiti that was supposed to say "Derek was here" but the texture from another wall clipped over it so it read "Derek was he". The title card itself is erroneous in portraying the correct atmosphere and time of day; it doesn't take place in a misty, grey atmosphere at mid-day, it takes place during a clear night. Now, maps 1-4 are mostly pretty generic yet long maps through a standard suburban campaign at night, with tons of buildings that look very similar. It borrows heavily (in places, steals) from No Mercy. This is fine, but nothing we haven't seen countless times before, and it doesn't do anything as memorable as No Mercy, not even an ultimate goal like the hospital. \ Design: Level design is mostly just okay, with lots of open spaces and areas for exploration. This is at first neat, but there's ultimately nothing to explore. There are no real secrets or interesting areas worth exploring. The doors and rooms all tend to look the same and lack a lot of differentiation, so it’s easy to forget if you’ve already been in a particular room or area. The maps are unnecessarily long too, and there's never any sense of finality when reaching the saferoom because no map ever leads up to anything, it just seems like a haphazard combination of lots of different areas. It can occasionally be difficult to figure out where to go, but usually if you have at least another person playing with you, you two can figure out where to go. Of course, this sometimes entails splitting up, which means someone's going to eventually get incapped, and then it's a race to see if you can find the way to the other person in time. Now we get to the meat of this campaign's problems. \ Problem No. 1: First, as noted by nearly every reviewer, the lack of directionality is a real problem. In campaigns with maps as big as these (the middle three would qualify for the size of two standard L4D2 maps), there need to be sufficient indications as to where to go. As it stands, some places are very open, and while I’m not necessarily advocating for linearity, it is easy to go around in circles because the path to go is yet another generic grey door, or a vent, or a path around a fence, or you have to climb through an ambulance. The entire campaign lacks any reasonable person’s idea of item lighting and hints. The finale is criminal in this regard, but we'll get to that later. It also took us a while to figure out how to open the three garage doors. Then there’s the instance of arrows that clearly point in the wrong direction, for which I can’t for the life of me figure out any justification. \ Problem No. 2: The second issue is the scarcity of resources. Again, when dealing with maps this big, you have to distribute resources (medkits/defib, pills/adrenaline, and throwables) at a decent rate. In the case of this campaign, two maps in a row don’t have any ammo piles whatsoever, including in the saferooms. Weapon pickups are liberally thrown around at a good rate, but you eventually don’t have any choice but to change weapons simply because the author thought it would be a good challenge to not give the players any ammo pile. On the same topic, melee weapons are bizarrely missing from the first map or two. \ Problem No. 3: Another issue is saferoom weapon distribution; as noted before, some saferooms don’t have ammo piles, which is a major annoyance but one can put up with it if there are decent other weapons. Interestingly, saferooms rarely have melee weapons, and one time we spawned in at map 5 because we died at map 4 and didn't want to put up with that map's shit again. But when we spawned in, the bots took the only tier 2 weapons, which were single pick-ups, leaving me with a melee weapon and my friend with a pistol. Then a tank spawned right outside the saferoom. And the bots used the single pistol anyway. This is totally unacceptable and is easily fixable. \ Problem No. 4: Another problem is dumb bot nav and behavior. Most of the time, the bots would follow us pretty well, but they would often refuse to heal us or pick up medkits. I don't know how this happened, but they were exceptionally stupid and got incapped over and over again. While the rescue closets are distributed at a standard rate, we'd often rescue bot Francis only for him to be immediately incapped again. There were other occasions where they just seemed to deliberately move away from us, only to get spat on and stand in the pool of acid because they’re dumb bots. \ Problem No. 5: I was also disappointed in the number of broken objects in the maps, which were unnecessarily misleading. There's an elevator with a keypad that glows but does nothing, a radio that glows but immediately breaks (doing nothing), and a switch in the school that doesn't have an apparent function. Maybe the author finds it absolutely hilarious to be intentionally misleading but it's just childish. It's like me saying "My age is 20...NOT! It's actually 21! You're so gullible! LOL."There's no reason for anyone to not believe the former over the latter, just like there's no reason for anyone to not expect the elevator, radio, or switch to work. It's not fun or funny, it's just stupid and aggravating. If they don't work and they add nothing to the gameplay, then remove them. Same thing goes for the arrows intentionally pointing in the wrong direction. \ Problem No. 6: The map 4 event is compounded by all the previous problems and is absolutely in dire need of revision because of the length of the map, the scarcity of resources, the lack of directionality, the neverending horde, and the possibility of a witch to spawn in the middle of the gauntlet path. This is totally unacceptable and it feels like a troll move. In the sewer, everything looks the absolute same, so it becomes an unnecessary matter of trial and error to figure out which hole to drop down (because this assumes you can tell which room you've been in and which one you haven't) while you have to run through an endless horde without ample resources. The problem wouldn't have been alleviated by much even if we had enough pills and defibs, because it testifies to the unnecessary difficulty spike in that event. The difficulty of an event that spawns endless hordes doesn't lie in the author's creativity because, given enough time, everyone will eventually be taken down. The map designer has to figure out a way to make it balanced yet difficult through the combination of a horde event and the layout of the map itself. \ Problem No. 7: The finale. This is one of the worst finales I've ever played through. Nothing in the school building makes any sense and the only switch that's lit up is the one on the first floor. You have to flip another switch (for what reason I have no idea) on the basement level, which is only lit up when you stand about ten feet away from it. There's no indication that the basement switch needs to be turned on, so you're expected to wander around aimlessly until eventually you find it randomly. The finale event itself is incredibly easy to survive as long as you just stay in the kitchen. But there's the problem of where you go once you've killed the second tank. There is absolutely NOTHING telling you where to go, what rescue vehicle to look for, where it is, or anything. The obvious thing to expect is an airlift at the helipad, but there's no helicopter. In truth, the actual place to go is COVERED UP by a bunch of plywood. I'm not making this up, on the left side of the helipad space is a wall of plywood obscuring your view from a tiny hole in the wall, through which you have to climb in order to reach the rescue vehicle. Mind you, the wall is high and you can't even see the lights of the rescue vehicle behind it. We had to reach an area we obviously were not meant to get to (another sign of lazy design) just so we could actually see that the rescue vehicle existed to know that it wasn't a trick map. We weren't aided by any sound or information, nothing but our dedication to figure out where to go by any means necessary. And what was the payoff for all that? Hardly any ending at all and the old map name (Dead St 13) is there instead of the "new" one, Dead St 16. I assume the author only updated this map in terms of what it says in the menu because it doesn't look like any of the problems addressed countless times in the comments section here had any bearing on this "new" vpk. \ This is a horrible campaign that I would only recommend anyone look at as a lesson in how NOT to make a campaign. The campaign is too long and artificially difficult for its own good. If the author could be bothered to return to this map to put in a lot of time to address these issues, it could have some potential. As it stands, it has too many obviously unnecessary things that hinder the playing experience, like intentionally not distributing ammo piles and not having any reasonable lighting indicating the path, just because. These need to be fixed ASAP, because the way it is now, it's clear that the author is deliberately wasting your time. It's not particularly original or interesting, and it's more annoying than fun. Not recommended to anyone with a sense of self-worth (and if you're reading this, you do, so I don't recommend this to anyone).

Too long. boring. but map is fine and good.

The left 4 dead 1 feeling i search (so rare these times) but ruined by lack of a lot of things. Split levels, add more items, reduce a little hordes and specials and it'll be perfect... I gave up playing at map 4, stuck with 2 wooden crates...

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