Love letter to Yu is a one-off map that is going to live rent-free in my head, and maybe you will feel the same. At this point, I'm just going to say it that my interpretation of L4D2 maps is that they are virtual tours, a liminal walkthrough of childhood places around the globe. Just a pretty Valve-approved campaign map where you go around killing zombies is not gonna cut it anymore. We've got (in unknown order) Zheng Cheng, Yama, Cambalache, Pesaro, and now this.

It reminds me a lot of (and gives away a strong Chinese vibe similar to) Zheng Cheng. It has imprints of cultural love and appreciation. As a Vietnamese, it's like reconnecting with a cultural root. Historically Vietnamese and Chinese share a lot in terms of culture. There came a moment in the cafeteria where I just stared at the food text trying to recognize what dish it is. Of course, Vietnamese culture isn't the same as Chinese, I couldn't recognize the dish despite it being oddly similar to one I eat often. I hope in the future we'll have some appreciation for Vietnamese culture too (there are still a lot of dedicated L4D2 players after all).

This map is relatively easy. There are many horde events; however, don't know if I'm going easy in Advanced difficulty, but it never gets overwhelming. I'd say that these events were quite exciting.

The biggest downside of this map is that there isn't much gameplay variety. The finale is a writeoff, anyone can just camp at the corner with the mounted gun. Tanks appeared too often for a single level, thankfully these encounters are relatively easy as the confrontation zones are often barren i.e. no obstacles or horde. THere are also performance issues on my machine. On most maps I enjoy a stable 30 FPS, but for this one there have been frequent dips to 20 and even stutters. Thankfully I never met out-of-memory issues, unlike Lockdown Chapter 2 and Day Break.

So you can see why I can't give this map a perfect score, there are problems that the creator must work on. But it's still an enjoyable ride. So it's a 7/10 for me, for now. Let's see how things will change in the future!

Thanks for reading this review :)