Heaven can wait review by l4dmods.com 9/10

Subject: Heaven can wait review by l4dmods.com 9/10 Sun Oct 11, 2009 12:47 am

Russian mapping god, Romka, brings us this wonderfully crafted five chapter campaign: Heaven Can Wait. The campaign is so far, one of the most difficult campaigns we have ever had the opportunity to play... and that's a good thing. This campaign must be the most accurate simulation of a zombie apocalypse to date and we enjoyed every nail-biting, pants-soiling moment of the entire campaign. We started off playing on the Expert Difficutly... 2 hours later, we ended up barely surviving on Easy...

We thoroughly enjoyed playing Heaven Can Wait three times today. What I enjoyed the most, was how hard it was to survive to the end of each chapter and let me tell you, these chapters are LONG! What makes this enjoyable is that the crescendos aren't your defacto push-button-camp-corner crescendos and for first-time players, you won't know what happened until it's ontop of you making bolognese of your intestines. All the current maps and campaigns out there are too easy and those that are harder to finish are just boring. Heaven Can Wait is everything but...

Francis, Bill, Louis and Zoey find themselves in the middle of the woods at an airplane crash scene. The plane left a long wake through the forest and as our heroes follow the wake of the crash, they walk passed pieces of the plane that broke off during it's crash landing. The debris from the plane make for easy hiding locations for the infected and you can expect them coming from any direction at any time.

Move quick, stick together and you find yourselves at the side of a country road complete with trucks and cars (all abandoned) and a large cornfield as well. No clear indication of which way to go will leave the exploration up to you. Witches spawn at very random locations here and because of the fog, you can't see her clearly. Don't just shoot any silhouette you see or else you might end up like we did. Shooting the Witch and running for our lives. Pretty soon, you will arive at a gate that leads to a farm house. The gate is locked though. Walk around, explore and you will find some supplies, but be careful, these supplies come at a cost. If you make it passed the farmhouse, you made it to the saferoom. Congratulations. This is where the walk in the park becomes frying in the pan.

The long chapters, coupled with amazingly awesome crescendos result in intense battles and you can expect to have up to 3 Tanks make an appearance. The four Survivors manage to land themselves at a classic American diner and roadside motel combo While you are here, take not eof the detail in this part of the chapter. Each room is accessible and are fully furnished with on-suite bathrooms! Clever lighting shows our Survivors where to go but before you get there, Army trucks pass the diner, making a hell of a noise and calls the infected for dinner. The once deserted roadside motel becomes flooded with infected and your first crescendo for the chapter starts.

When the area has been cleared and no infected remain, continue with your epic journey. Next up is the sewers. Some players have complained about a framerate drop but we didn't notice any. A short trip through the sewers and into the swamps once again infested with infected. The swamps are really loaded with detail. There are many trees which make it difficult to see the infected. I felt pretty brave rushing through this part of the chapter and had my ass handed to me several times. Proceed with caution until you reach the little riverside dock. Inside you will find some supplies. Here Romka leaves exploration to the Survivors again. Giving no clues to which way to proceed. First, we thought we should swim to the other side of the river. That idea failed and we started at the motel again. Look around, there's a cave somewhere hidden between the thick bushes and trees. Follow the caves and you end up at the shallow end of the river where it's safe to cross without the help of a lifesaver.

Cross the river and you will come across the most creepy looking cemetary ever. Be prepared to shoot it out with one of the largest hordes I have ever experienced in Left 4 Dead. As soon as you venture into the cemetary, you startle a sleeping flock of birds. They fly off making a noise and again calling attention to yourself. As you are in a cemetary, it's only natural to assume, these birds have awoken the sleeping dead. If you make it out of here alive on your first run on Expert Difficulty, you are one skilled team. We failed countless times and switched over to Advanced Difficulty. After about 6 retries, we finally managed to make it to the Funeral Home/Morgue/Church. Romka really put a lot of thought into this and you can see how it all folds into eachother. First you're at the cemetary, then you walk in to the Morgue where they prepare the dead for the funeral and then you walk into the church sporting a coffin with a dead chick inside... Yuck!.

Exit the Funeral Home and you're in the streets running through a suburb. Again, light guides the Survivors. Through the house and some backyards and broken walls and you're in the nearby supermarket. Odd enoug, there aren't any supplies at the supermarket, but there was a Witch waiting for us. You exit the supermarket via breaking some windows and take a cautious stroll down the street. At the end of the road, the Army and Police have blocked off the road by means of a deep gorge. You are left with only one choice: Find a way through the buildings surrounding the street. The buildings lead you through a maze of broken walls and abandoned apartments until you reach the rooftops.

From rooftops, the Survivors' valiant struggle for safety and freedom now places them with a real problem. The next hurdle to overcome is a parkade. This parkade has loads of cars and each of these cars has an alarm. Yes, every last one of them. My stupidity once again surficed into public appearance and I cleverly dropped a pipebomb into the parkade, thinking it will kill most of the infected in the parkade. Well, it did kill some, but all the alarms went off calling an endless stream of infected our way. This part of the campaign is the first Left 4 Dead campaign to have a gauntlet in it. The horde only stops once you reach the other side of the parkade. You can also, play it careful and try not to shoot any of the cars, this of course, is much harder than you think and we failed a few more times trying to reach the other end.

Once through the parkade, you come across a construction site. You are now offered a choice. You can either enter the contruction site or continue down the street and find another path through the apartment complex. Both path lead to the same ending. We tried both and they were both really fun to play.

Eventually, once you have decided on which path to take, you end up at one of my favorite locations: City Hall. The City Hall is a great piece of eye-candy. We encountered another Tank here and with luck I managed to escape the Tank, bleeding out and only 1hp left. Explore City Hall and eventually youll find the Mayor's office. What's even better, there's a secret passage behind the bookshelf! I know! AWESOME! The secret passage leads to a broken elevator and a seemingly endless set of stairs. I didn't count the steps, but they were a lot. After you reach the bottom of the staircase, you come across the Mayor's own personal secret emergency escape train! AWESOME! Call the train, fight the horde and take the train to

The train takes the Survivors to a secluded army base. All over the place you'll see tanks (not the infected kind) and trucks and army barracks. The base must have taken forever to create. It looks amazing. A short trip through the army base and you come across blast-doors on the side of a mountain. This is what the Survivors have been looking for. Behind these blast-doors lies safety in the form of a bunker for VIPs. In here, everything needed to rebuild society awaits.

Press the button to open the doors. The doors start to open very slowly and after a few minutes, you wil be able to enter the bunker's lobby. In here, a minigun and some supplies are available. The fight is not over yet, so prepare for more waves as a second set of blast-doors start to open. Red lights flood the interior of the entrance and the HUGE doors start to open. Once open, you get inside and wait for the elevator to take you down into the depths of the earth, where you finally will find salvation. Or so we hope...

It was a really great game and the fact that the chapters are so long and difficult really made it worth while and satisfying in the end. This campaign is not meant for those who like a quick game or those who have a hard time playing anything on Expert Difficulty.

Heaven Can Wait presents original crescendos and locations like City Hall and the Army base really shows the amount of work that went into this campaign. The finale itself wasn't really unique, but the exit strategy surely was. Overall, this campaign is really long and very difficult, but we do not feel that this is a bad thing. Left 4 Dead has a large audience each with their own taste and preferences. We liked the fact that this campaign was neigh impossible to complete. It scores 9/10 from L4DMods.com

link for the review: http://www.l4dmods.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=239:review-heaven-can-wait&catid=2:news&Itemid=13