Greetings and salutations, blog readers!

Hot on the heels of the review for Crash Course on Left 4 Dead campaigns, we are back for another campaign review, this review is over the campaign: Death Toll.

After the gang leaves the truck yard in their Dawn of the Dead style van, from Crash Course, they end up abandoned in the woods, to fight their way through to a boat rescue.

Starting by Riverside Pennsylvania, in the woods, by the road, the group gathers up basic equipment, and head towards an evacuation, first at a church, then a lake house.

The level starts on a turnpike, with a tunnel and crashed cars ahead of them, where the characters can go down and across the area the bridge, now destroyed, had covered, and take a ladder up to go through the tunnel in the road. After the tunnel, you end up at a dead end and several flights of stairs, which bring you to a generator room, and back outside to the wilderness. You climb up a small hill, and end up a safe room.

Chapter two takes you into the sewers, and is just a tight quarters that you imagine smells like poo.

The sewers suck, but at least the safe room has some fun graffiti, as all the rooms really have.

So the characters head through the sewers, where you end up in a weird chamber where more guns and ammo are, and then you can take some tunnels to work your way out, to another trigger event, where you have to open some gates which trigger a horde from the alerts, which isn’t too hard to deal with. Once the gate opens, you can cross and get the crap out of this awful, smelly area, to a man hole or broken staircase up and out into the woods, where you then find a safe room in the back of a caboose which acts as a safe room. Really, I like a lot of this level, but I don’t like to sewers much, and when you do the first two levels, the back half of the campaign feels boring, and by the time you play Blood Harvest, nothing seems original.

This safe room after chapter two is where I normally start the level, as I like to play “Church on” mode, which means I open up with the third chapter.

The chapter opens up with a train yard, which forces you up and around a building area, you take a long road to a small shack where offers some supplies. I tend to take the path on the right through a building where better guns normally spawn, and I get a bettergun then the starter weapon I get from starting the level here. The road, past the shack, break through a house, and go out the back, taking a long road to the last military outpost place that the survivors think may be safe…the church.

The last survivor, someone who was bitten after making the mistake of trusting someone who claimed to not be infected. This survivor with his trust issues decides to ring the bell to make the characters “prove” they are uninfected, or just kill them. This trigger event lasts until the character turns into a zombie, and you can open the door, and kill the dude who has now turned into a hunter, smoker, or boomer.

This chapter ends, and you are in the safe room, ready to start the next chapter. Personally, I think this is a great first chapter for this level, because the actual first two are kind of shitty.

The next chapter opens with the overrun town of Riverside, where you have multiple options on how to traverse the space, the space being mostly monotonous street scapes, but again, city scapes can be boring. Frankly, for me, it is hard to blame the game for being monotonous when like…that’s how streets look.

You make your way through an office building and have to trigger a super annoying horde event, this one, in the second ported version, forcing you to not just “wait it out” but to instead have to fight through a couple blocks, traversing rooftops, to get to the safe room. This run is trash, and can be a pain in the ass, but also, can be fun. If you have the right ammo, throw-ables, and timing, this run can be a well executed run. When done improperly…it can be a cluster fuck.

Finally, however, you make it to the finale, where you have a bit of area to move through first, which, sometimes offers a Tank, which gives the finale an option for a third tank in the finale level, the first coming before the finale begins. Please note, the finale is triggered by summoning a married couple in a boat to your rescue. This couple insists on only rescuing people who are armed, and we learn in the Left 4 Dead comics as well as some character dialogue in the next chapter that the couple stole all their weapons, which accounts for why they don’t have weapons at the start of yet another level.

Back to the finale, before your weapons all get jacked by awful dishonest people. You have a big space with lots of options on where to hold out against the hordes when you do finally arrive to the boat house, and, as per usual, after two Tanks, the rescue, this time in the form of a boat, pulls up. Depending on where you have chose to ride out the hordes, you run to the boat, and hop on the ship, to make your way out of this campaign, living to see another day.

Overall, it is a good campaign with some fun moments, but I do tend to start it on the third chapter. “Church and on” mode, I rank this level a solid four, but if you make me play the first two chapters, I give it a solid three. Three, for the chapter you should begin the campaign with.

Let me know if you agree or if you don’t, and remember that even with a “harsher” rating, I still love every single second of this game. Except the end of The Sacrifice.

Thanks for Reading!

❤️

Abbi

PS- If you want to buy a copy of Left 4 Dead, you can click this link, and at no extra cost to you, you will receive the game, and I will receive a percentage. Huzzuh to all.