Like its predecessor, Left 4 Dead 2 is a sort of hyper-violent personality test masquerading as a cooperative zombie survival shooter. If you want to know which of your mates you should trust with the water bottle after shipwrecking on a desert island, simply invite them over for a bout and let the game’s dynamic challenge factor weasel out hidden traits and flaws, profiling each player in sickly green strokes of undead gore.

Where other shooters are static, unreactive structures, brittle sandcastles awaiting the casually lobbed football of human intervention, the Left 4 Dead games give exactly as good as they get, altering the quantity, quality and positioning of enemies, weapon drops and obstacles in response to player behavior. Lone wolves will be pounced upon by terrifying cat-like Hunters, cowardly hangers-on showered in Horde-attracting vomit by repulsive Boomers, layabouts lassoed and dragged off by elusive Smokers. After half an hour’s play, you should have a lot of stories to tell and a couple fewer names on your Christmas card list.

Among the game's "Uncommon Infected" are clowns, who can summon the mob.

The Jack-Daniels-swigging sequel is a personality test in another sense, however. Its aim: to divide the gaming population up into those who are prepared to pay a full 30-40 quid for incremental advances on a formula, and those who aren’t. Calling it a glorified expansion pack is several steps too far, but if you’re one of those deeply misguided, patently untrustworthy and smelly individuals who somehow wasn’t blown away by the first game you should probably think twice.

Left 4 Dead 2 introduces us to four new Survivors – slack-jawed teen Ellis, hard-bitten gambler Nick, wannabe TV producer Rochelle and big poppa Coach – and five new campaigns, set in the humid fastness of a post-apocalyptic Deep South – a more colourful environment than the temperate Pennsylvanian suburbia of the first game, and no less abundant in memorable landmarks, from crashed passenger aircraft to mall-top concert arenas. Campaign formats are the same: the first four chapters challenge the Survivors to get from Safehouse to Safehouse with all limbs/organs intact, and the fifth culminates in an all-or-nothing battle against the ravening Infected while rescue takes its sweet goddamn time arriving.

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Care for ketchup?

Weapon Drops are short, sharp homilies to new, old and upcoming FPS weapons. If it blows shit away plenty good (and sometimes even if it doesn’t), you’ll find a corresponding entry here.

There’s a certain psychology to playing a survival horror game. It’s not enough merely to kill your foes – you have to truly butcher them, dispose of them in a manner vastly more unpleasant than the manner in which they might dispose of you, and thus in some way “cancel out” their scariness.

Good workmen shouldn’t blame their tools, but not every weapon is up to the task. Pistols are like little ice picks upon the alpine cliff of a zombie’s horribleness. Shotguns are agreeably messy, but it’s over in seconds. Sniper rifles are far too detached. Chainsaws though? Chainsaws fit the bill nicely…

Unlike most digital homages to Bruce Campbell’s spine-severer of choice, Left 4 Dead 2’s chainsaws actually have drawbacks. In a game which makes such tactical play of audio, brandishing a noisy internal combustion engine isn’t always the wisest move. You might have marginally more chance of taking down a Witch up close, but you’ll be less likely to detect the eerie little vocal sample which heralds her presence.

These home improvement tools cum massacring implements also take a few seconds to start up, so don’t swap to one when there’s a Charger inches from your nose. Although if you pay close (well, closer attention) you’ll notice that good old Valve has “accidentally” built in a work-around – melee attack while hefting the ’saw to skip the warm-up period.

Best used when defending a doorway or other chokepoint. Just hold down the trigger/button, sit back and watch the guts spatter till the fuel runs out.

Video tutorial below. Review this week.

Got a gun, machete, shark-crossbow hybrid or other weapon you’d like to see featured? Let us know. Thanks to John Walker over at RPB for the pic.

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The once populous combat arena of Winter 2009 is an echoing shell. A few notable action franchises still circle in the shadows, IPs like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Pandemic’s plucky original The Saboteur, but the vast majority have migrated to the over-subscribed stomping grounds of Spring 2010. There in the centre of the unspoiled, uncontested sand stands the usurper, M16 dangling absently from one hand. Despite contentious server support and pricing decisions, Modern Warfare 2 seems to have won the struggle for Christmas revenue before it even begins.

But has it? There are inhuman shrieks from the auditorium, a confused surge of rotting bodies against the barricades. Left 4 Dead 2 has had its own battles to fight on the road to release, against Australian ratings boards, disgruntled fans and over-sensitive US newspapers, and the Infected are in no mood for further upset.

The face-off between Valve’s necrotic B-movie homage and the military shooter’s military shooter turns on more than their simply being released a week apart: the two games are in most respects polar opposites. So which one should you be taking home with you (or at least, which one should you be taking home first) come mid-November? Let the tournament begin…

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