Like the game wasn't insane enough already

Nov 24, 2009 20:31 GMT  ·  By

Left 4 Dead 2 is barely out the door and we've already seen the game receive some official, as well as some unofficial, new content. The official support from Valve is represented by the title's first patch that comes to fix several of the multiplayer issues it proved to have, while the modding community has already found a way to import the single-player campaign from the original L4D into the its sequel. True, it may be complicated and definitely an elaborate mod, considering all the work you have to do yourself for this to work, but it's a nice, early addition to the game, anyway.

We're going to see a lot of new mods for the title as soon as Valve releases an SDK, but, until then, another strange, home-brewed take on the game has been found on the net. Some of its more fanatic and tech-savvy fans have managed to enable and run through a 16-player co-op of L4D2. Originally designed for four players, as one might expect, the game gets pretty hectic and very confusing with four times as many players. What should have been a handful of survivors has turned into an army, and the infected are now the ones on the run.

This outlandish take on the survival-horror is a few more things besides frantic and fast-paced. Downright ridiculous would be a very god way to describe the experience, as you have 16 players armed to the teeth plowing through the waves of zombies. Four times as many human players as it was intended make the infected become outnumbered on some occasions, and watching everyone take turns around the weapon table to resupply, or huddling together to fit in the safe house is simply delicious.

They look a lot more like the infected themselves, as a mass of identical models running around chaotically, bringing destruction to everything around them. Something that might be a lot less fun, though, is without a doubt the friendly fire, as players will more often be incapacitated by a trigger-happy, mob-blinded gamer than by the hordes of infected themselves. Still, it's definitely something worth watching. Two gameplay videos can be found here and here.