Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Cold Front (Part 1)
My complete review of Cold Front
Well I played through the campaign solo on Advanced and this is what I have to say.

Pros:
+ The campaign is incredibly well detailed. Lots of custom sounds, textures and models to compliment the snowy environment of the campaign.

+ The campaign is very well constructed with almost no issues finding my way around with 1 kind of major exception (more on that in a bit).

+ The voice acting in map 3 and the finale is very well done. This is a major difference between this and a lot of the other "custom" voice acting done in certain parts of the maps. That being said, I'm not sure why custom voice mods for Bill in particular conflict with this campaign as none of it really seemed to be present in the mod.

+ For the most part, supply distribution is well done with a couple of exceptions which I will also get to in a bit.

+ I love the soundtrack of the campaign. There isn't so much to be overwhelming like with campaigns such as Dead Before Dawn DC but there is just enough to feel unique.

Cons:
- I did have one major point of being horribly confused on where to go within map 4. When you begin crossing the rooftops, there is a huge open area you can get down to via a ladder. This area is open and it seems like is a place that would allow you to continue through the map, however this is not the case. The true path, is to continue along the rooftops and cross using an air conditioning unit and a detached train car to cross over to a bridge with a train track on it. This isn't very well illustrated aside from one arrow on a piece of ply-board which you wouldn't see unless you went this way first. Heck, the only way I found out about it myself was when a tank spawned in and came from that general direction after spending about 5 minutes wandering in the wide open red herring of an area. That could use with either some fine tuning to the direction.

- As much as I love the custom snow storm that was adding into the campaign for immersion, it is very irritating gameplay wise. It downright blinding which became a problem during a couple of points during my playthrough. I had a horde and a tank spawn during these storms which left us blind and in a wide open area in unfamiliar territory which almost led to some bad situations.

- This might be a bit of a nitpick, but I was never fond of snow-filled campaigns and there is a reason there are no snow themed campaigns in the main campaign pool. The problem is that the survivors are simply not dressed for this kind of weather. Imagine running through a vision-impairing blizzard in what looks like below zero temperatures with three of the four survivors wearing T-SHIRTS. This can break the immersion a little bit for me.

- Within map 3, there are WAY too many ammo spawns. It felt like every time I turned a corner, I ran into another ammo spawn which made conserving ammo a none-issue which for me, is a con. I like the idea of being forced to switch up our weapons in order to be able to sustain our ammo supply. On top of that, throughout the entire campaign, like with Dark Carnival, I only ever found ONE bile jar throughout and that was in map 2. I get the feeling this was done intentionally as well for the con I'm going to be talking about next.

- The finale seems to be a talking point for a few people which I will bring up here. I like the idea of combining different types of finales together into one finale like The Last Stand did (combining holdout with scavenge). However, just like with The Last Stand, the running finale combined with the holdout finale featured in Cold Front really isn't balanced very well. The running part of the finale is incredibly long and if it wasn't for the fact that I had saved a bile jar since map 2 (and didn't find ANY others I might add), I would have had a hell of a time trying to get through it, and this is only on Advanced difficulty. There is a tank within the running event right before you get to the holdout area which isn't easy to fight with a horde right on your heals. And to end it all off, while the holdout part of the finale only has one pair of hordes to fight, it has two tanks that you must fight off which is a real pain in the ass after just barely making it through the running event. And during the holdout, one of my bots got death-charged over the side of the bridge where the helicopter comes which left us with only three survivors who were already hurt to fight off the two tanks. I can't imagine what this would have been like on Expert. I probably would have made it to the holdout...barely but most definitely would have been killed trying to deal with the two tanks as I did take a couple of hits fighting them off. And considering how hard it was to get to THAT point, I probably would have stopped playing right there.

Overall, I love this campaign. I can definitely tell a lot of people put some serious time, effort, and love into this passion project and it is certainly the best campaign we have gotten in a couple of years now. I can also see that there were some fans of the original Dead Rising creating some of the custom textures I saw in mall map. However, there are cons to it, the biggest one being the incredibly unbalanced finale. My advice would be to add some more bile jar spawns either within the running event itself, or in map four to save before the finale begins to make getting through the running part a little bit more fair and make the holdout event in the end a bit more survivable. I'd overall give the campaign a solid 8.5 out of a 10 which I would definitely bring up if the finale gets balanced a bit. I'm glad to see JaiZ and the other creators really put their individual talents together to make one incredibly beloved campaign by me and hope to see more in the future!