About

Welcome to my review of all the custom campaigns for Left 4 Dead 2. This blog came about quite late in my experience with Left 4 Dead 2, after writing nearly 300 pages of reviews for over 500 campaigns. I had the idea to create a blog that could better document my reviews and possibly better serve as a point of reference to people interested in trying out campaigns for this game.

I first began playing Left 4 Dead 2 in 2014 and since then have been playing it quite regularly. I always enjoy looking at the different kinds of custom content for games, and I took it upon myself to catalogue every custom campaign for the game. Having done so, I figured it was my duty to play through each campaign and provide a review for it.

Upon reading my reviews, you may come to determine that I have a certain preference for particular maps. Being a reviewer and therefore a critic, the thing I look at first and foremost is the end product itself. You may think that there are many things I may overlook, such as effort teaching oneself the developing tools or particularly bad behavior, but at the end of the day, what I'm reviewing is the final product. My responsibility is to make an assessment about the end result, namely the campaign. The rest isn't of concern to me except in very special circumstances. Even in those cases, they don't help to inform me of a decision regarding the criticism of the maps, even though they may provide an interesting context to the campaigns being discussed.

Very quickly, I can give a list of things I look for in a campaign. The best maps will have:

  • intricate, large-scale, and original level design
  • careful attention to detail with regard to architecture, lighting, enemy placement, texture alignment, and resources
  • a consistent theme, tone, or atmosphere with variety provided therein
  • an immersive environment and a feeling that the survivors are really there
  • unique and interesting events
  • a logical progression in difficulty
  • a rational and coherent progression of environments and locations
  • obstacles that are challenging yet realistically overcome
  • usually a clear goal or destination in mind
Even if it doesn't have any of that, a decent campaign should have proper functionality, meaning good bot navigation, no missing textures, no glitches or bugs, no floating objects, no broken stats, and (ideally) full compatibility with user add-ons.

On a more personal note, I enjoy maps with a constant sense of forward progression. By their very nature, maps that aim to do this must be linear, but the best maps will disguise their linearity. I absolutely hate having to stop forward motion in order to hunt down a hidden object like a key, and I also generally hate backtracking, running around in circles, and putting things on other things in order to unlock the next area.

A little about me. My name is Olde. I've clocked in close to 2000 hours in Left 4 Dead 2, I've released over 50 addons for the game, and I've played through nearly every single custom campaign for this game. If you find a campaign that is not on this list, please send me a message with a link to the campaign and I will review it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog and please let me know what you think of it.

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