SaltHell Park

Title: SaltHell Park
Link: https://www.gamemaps.com/details/3418
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=121225704
Author: Hypnocyst
Survivors: L4D2
Notes: N/A

SaltHell Park is a very substantial five-map campaign that, by the author's own note, takes place in the Victorian Saltwell Park in Gateshead, UK. The campaign is absolutely fantastic, with an uncommonly high level of detail, even among the best campaigns, and at all times feels like a real place, affords great gameplay, maintains the L4D2 feel, and is even well-optimized. SaltHell Park really feels like a passion project for the author, as an extremely high level of care is very apparent from the opening cutscene to the end. Even the way music transitions and easter eggs are hidden through the campaign speak to the author genuinely wanting to put out something of a high level of quality.

On my most recent playthrough of this campaign, I was happy to learn that there are also alternate paths, at least in the first map, of which I wasn't aware. The first map looks nice, if a bit desolate. One of the jarring things about the first map is a bit of a change in the color overtones, which can give a little bit of a disconnected feel as the color correction changes from location to location, but overall this isn't a big deal. The first map mostly deals with suburban homes and includes a sewer, until it eventually opens into a large parking space overtaken by the military. The dispersal of weapons, items, and ammo is just right here, forcing players to rely equally on primary and secondary weapons, but providing just enough items here and there to keep things fun. I'm not totally sure how I feel about the alarm house (it feels a little weak), but having that be the weakest part of the campaign isn't really a mark off, and it only means it can get better.

The second map leads into the park proper, and there seems to be equal parts with grassy areas and large industrial structures, including huge crates and a crane, and an exciting gauntlet event when opening up a couple of large gates. I'm not sure what any of the machinery is for, but oddly enough, the level design is so compelling that it doesn't really call attention to itself while you're playing. There's a great match between the level of detail in the park and streamlined gameplay. Again, resource distribution feels constantly fair and might even be a bit more lax than it could be, but in either case it doesn't get any complaints from me. The gauntlet event at the end is quite intense and is something I look forward to when starting the map.

The third map has a lot of variety as it takes players through various courtyards and a boat ride. Unfortunately this is where I see most players have commented on crashing. It seems due to a memory page pool problem, and since the problem is so consistent with where it takes place, it seems that, even if it was never a problem for me, maybe this could've been resolved for a few other people. In any case, the level of detail is consistently great here are there's a mix between some suburban and forested areas in a convincing combination here. The boat ride is nice, although probably not necessarily needed for gameplay purposes. It's probably true to real life, so in any case it has that going for it. A downed plane makes an appearance, as does some gauntlet running, and it's sort of on the gauntlet here that I scratch my head as to why this is here. It's fun, no doubt, but if I had to take out one gauntlet event to make the others have more impact, it would probably be this one. Although it's easy to criticize when not mapping. The third map is overall pretty fun but the boat ride is probably the most memorable part, while the other sections are simply not as memorable.

The third map is where things get truly great. The level of detail is amazing, and even more amazing is how compelling the level design is. Players are lead through a sprawling green park, with highly detailed trees, bridges, and a hedge maze filled with witches. Following the path along, the survivors duck into some underground tunnels, where they finally climb out to another side of the park by some ambulances. This takes them to some kind of factory, where there's a holdout event where an explosion causes a huge horde to arrive as you wait for the fire to die down.

In the past, this holdout has caused me some trouble, but either time or the author's revision has made this a lot more manageable. As it stands, this event now seems perfectly balanced, and it's very fun to play. Unfortunately, it seems that the horde always stays behind you, as progressing forward kind of doesn't have a lot of infected in your path. The ending is a bit weird, as it has the Jimmy Gibbs car knock over a lamp-post into an alarm car. This lamppost has actually killed me before (unintentionally on my part, I might add), so I'm now always aware to stay out of its line of fire. The horde caused by this alarm is unexpectedly large, so it might be a nuisance that comes out of nowhere for some players. However, by this point you should have all the weapons you need to deal with them.

The fifth map is the finale, and it starts in a greenhouse before the finale holdout itself, which takes place in and around a crematorium. There's some voice acting that actually isn't terrible, and I think for some reason or another, the way to signal the chopper is by burning some corpses, making ash rise into the air. Talk about a morbid-themed rescue signal. In any case, it's original if nothing else. This finale area is tough but doable. It used to have double-tank spawns, but the author fortunately listened to feedback suggesting he scale it back and make it only spawn one tank per wave. This is in fact exceedingly rare, an instance of a map maker listening to feedback and revising his campaign for the better because of it. The tanks end up punting players off the roof with ease, which is why the double-tank spawn is too much.

Once the rescue chopper has arrived, a bridge falls, opening the way forward. There's still a gauntlet part to reach the rescue helicopter, and in my opinion it's the perfect length to make it challenging but still fair. The rest of the map still has the same high level of detail, even if some of the military emplacements look a little derivative from the very end of Cold Stream.

 

Difficulty: SaltHell Park is almost perfectly balanced, with a steady but fair rise in difficulty from the beginning to the end. The finale is the most difficult part, as it should be, but with a bit of coordination and with nobody separating themselves, it should be more than possible to complete on the level difficulty most players are comfortable with.

Final Verdict: SaltHell Park is extremely good. It feels realistic, facilitates incredibly fun gameplay, and has a super high level of polish throughout the entire five-map span. Plus, it's is very much replayable with its nine hidden gnomes offering up easter eggs to those who can find and shoot them. Just about the only things that set this back slightly are one unmemorable gauntlet part in the third map, a little bit of an overly drab and dreary atmosphere, and the geometry of the building in map 4, which when scrutinized looks a little basic. That's it. I've intentionally held off on going into detail because the campaign's quality speaks for itself. Highly recommended.

Rating: 4.7/5.

Dead Vacation L4D2

Title: Dead Vacation L4D2
Link: https://www.gamemaps.com/details/22050
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522692588
Author: Attributed to Markus Niklasson (Manneklint?)
Survivors: L4D1
Notes: The finale has an unindicated insta-kill zone.

Dead Vacation is a substantial five-map campaign based on the game Dead Island. This L4D2 version is a port of a version originally for L4D1. As far as I can tell, the original author is Manneklint. I'm not sure if the attribution to Markus Niklasson is a reference to the person who ported the map or if that's Manneklint's real name. In any case, this L4D2 version seems to get pulled for some reason, and doesn't appear to be officially supported by the author. As such, the inclusion of L4D2 items or infected may have not been the author's intention. You can also tell that other people have had a go at the campaign, since the chapter titles are not the same as the original's.

Dead Vacation has some great locales and lots of good development, even if the L4D2 port isn't by the original author. It has a surprising amount of variety and well-developed environments, and the maps are very heavy with props thrown everywhere. It definitely gives a feeling of abandoned locations since there's a lot of detail. Buildings are composed realistically and there's a noticeable amount of polish on everything. At times, the lighting is striking in effect. Directionality is also generally fairly clear, while both offering a lot of areas for the player to explore and also naturally leading the group forward.

The first map begins with, in my opinion, a somewhat odd choice. The survivors are in a helicopter with a turret in it, and the turret just doesn't feel like it was meant to be in a chopper. It's not immediately clear why the survivors leave, although there's a bit of voice work where I assume this is explained. Honestly the voice work isn't very good in this campaign, so at least it's kept short here. At the start here, the survivors go through some small town buildings and a supermarket, and I found this part to be probably the least compelling. The buildings and alleys are all given a decent amount of polish, but they're fairly nondescript and aren't memorable. I mean, there's nothing necessarily wrong with them, it's just that when people think of this campaign, they don't think of the first map. Combat in the stores is fairly standard, not being too easy or too boring. Luckily it eventually takes the survivors into the sewer where things start to look a lot more unique to this campaign. After activating a couple of levers, the saferoom is open.

The second map takes place almost exclusively in the sewers, and in an extremely unexpected twist, the sewer level doesn't suck. In fact, it actually has a lot of variety to how it looks and plays. The map starts with a brief cutscene (I'm not sure why), but after that opens up into quite a few different sections. One of them forces the survivors to blow up a barricade to progress, triggering a horde, and it's likely that the team will encounter a witch and/or a tank down here. The lighting is especially note-worthy, throwing shadows in very interesting ways throughout the map.

At the end of the second map, the survivors climb out of the sewers and arrive in the Ramsey, the hotel from Dead Island. This is where the campaign really gets to its most iconic, at least before the finale. The third and fourth maps are very substantial, perhaps even being longer than the first two, which were already pretty lengthy. There is a metric ton of detail around the hotel. The map will take players through various corridors, broken elevators, a huge but dimly lit kitchen, industrial back rooms, and the iconic swimming pool, spa, and sauna for which the campaign is probably most well-known.

I'm summarizing these locations briefly, but they're all quite large compared to most campaigns. You're likely to take a beating in at least one of these places, since they are each very extensive. The third map ends after running up some stairs and following hallways and office rooms on a floor above the swimming pool. The difficulty had been slowly ramping up so far, and it's going to get noticeably tougher in the fourth map.

The fourth map begins with the survivors needing to reboot four computer servers to open the way forward. This action calls a large horde that hits hard, and could give players a tough time as they look for the servers in the computer room. Thankfully they're lit with a cold blue aura so they shouldn't be too hard to find, and they're not too far from each other. Proceeding onward, the survivors go through a large parking garage, which can easily spell doom if a tank spawns down there as well, as any car that hits a player will cause them to go down immediately. Without exaggerating, one bot (Francis) actually died three times in this map alone (on Normal difficulty), which should say something about how unforgiving this map can be.

After the parking garage, the path twists and turns around some familiar hotel hallways until it eventually leads players into the flooded basement. By this point, you're probably going to be short on ammo and supplies, so thankfully they're around, however, you need to go around to find a staircase in order to traverse an odd setup of shelves and boxes. This makeshift ladder feels a little contrived but it gets the job done. There's a rescue closet and ammo nearby, anyway. However, on previous playthroughs this had been a real source of aggravation, since smokers and jockeys tend to dominate here, separating survivors across a very inconvenient amount of distance and water. 

 

Upon rising out of the basement, you'll find yourself needing to defend a hotel lobby while waiting for an elevator to arrive. The special infected will attack at a much higher rate than usual, so this part can be aggravatingly difficult. This is kind of where throwables will prove their usefulness, especially bile jars (and then using a molotov on the piled-up horde), as you have to keep the survivors from getting pinned. Honestly this feels like the difficulty ramped up just for the sake of it, but it can be done. There's not much past the elevator except for a saferoom that sort of reminds me of the last Dead Center saferoom.

 

Now we get to the issue with the fifth map, the finale. This map isn't inspired by Dead Island, but instead feels much more inspired by Die Hard. The holdout takes place on a rooftop with a helicopter landing, somewhat like No Mercy's finale except a lot larger. There are places to fortify, such as placing a turret and barricading three walls (which is basically the same as not barricading anything at all). Gut instinct says it makes the most sense to hold out in the interior bunker section by the medkits and ammo pile (where you can fortify some walls), and this is probably true. However, you can really easily get fucked over here by the outro, which will straight up kill you for staying down there. 

I found this out the hard way, by having a total party wipe by staying down there for both waves. In reality it seems you have to know this going forward, since a helicopter will crash into a building, causing it to fall on top of the building you're on, which in turn will kill players if they occupy any place in about half the rooftop. So we decided to stay outside for the entire finale just to avoid this. This turns out to be very tough, since it's very obvious that the special infected spawn at a much higher rate than normal. This is most easily managed by staying inside, of course, but again that's not really an option if it's only going to lead to instant death. Outside, smokers and jockeys can separate survivors very easily, so it might take a strong group dynamic to react accordingly and not have everybody die. 

After the two waves of tanks and after the building collapses on top of the roof, the rescue chopper arrives and there's a really awkward final bit that's required to actually get rescued. The helicopter drops down a ladder, which you can only reach by running through a bit of fire and jumping to. I thought this was a bit over the top, and can be an unnecessary cause for a last-second death for no real reason. This sort of thing might seem epic to an author, but it just comes off as needlessly stressful, especially after a narrow escape from death with the higher special infected spawn rate of the finale and the building collapse. It's not impossible to do, but if you do an incorrect crouch-jump, you can just fall to your death.

 

Difficulty: Dead Vacation L4D2 is a challenging campaign, sometimes because of the infected, once because of a gimmick with the map itself. It gives a steady stream of supplies, and may even provide tier 2's and laser sights somewhat early on, but it steadily ramps up its difficulty through the course of the five maps. The finale is the culmination, with a ton of special infected that can seem bordering to overwhelming. It's not impossible, but various aspects that can lead to swift death mean regular players should first play this campaign on Normal to know what they're in for before attempting higher difficulties. Inexperienced or new players shouldn't be ashamed to try this on Easy.

Final Verdict: Dead Vacation L4D2 is by and large a very good, substantial campaign that, for the most part, captures a great sense of the environments and gameplay feel of L4D2. However, in my opinion, it feels significantly tainted by a couple of bad choices in the finale, and in fact the finale is probably the sole reason as to why I don't play the campaign very often. With its cheap trick of a building unpredictably falling on the building, it feels like it gets a total party wipe without trying. The rest of the campaign is very strong though, and it definitely has a strong level of polish throughout. It's just a shame that the finale has to bring it down for me. I feel that a bit of revision to the ending could make this a lot stronger. However, it still has lots of memorable locations and gameplay, and it's long enough to provide a lot of good fun. Recommended.

Rating: 4.2/5.

Farmita:Summer

Title: Faramita:Summer（彼岸：夏）
Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2006964004
Author: 彼岸花
Survivors: L4D2
Notes: This is a somewhat puzzle-based campaign with exploration elements.

Faramita:Summer is a single-map Chinese campaign that feels like a decent first effort by a mapper. As with a few other Chinese campaigns, this starts off taking place in some kind of dorm room or apartment building. The setting seems somewhat based on a real-life place, but the design is more free-form. The first thing you'll notice is that there's a long intro cinematic that shows you first lying in a bed on your side and then looking up at the ceiling. This intro is long enough to give special infected a chance to spawn in the moment you do.

When you're able to take control, you'll notice that everyone takes a significant chunk of damage at the start. Everyone will have 36 HP, which is kind of an interesting idea, but in practice it doesn't play out so well when you're either playing with bots or you have players who are get annoyed if they don't start at full health. It's only kind of a pain because the bots tend to heal in this range, so when they find a healing item, they're going to use it. It could also bring about a bad start if you get unlucky with a spitter in close quarters. Fortunately there are supplies close by, however, you're going to have to look around for them.

Going into this campaign blind, the first thing I did was go to the basement where there are some basic supplies (a magnum and pump shotgun), as well as objects you can interact with to boost your health. A shower replenishes about 10 HP while cooking vegetables (using a refrigerator, frying pan, water, and picking the vegetables) boosted me by 80 HP all the way up to 125, so it's worth doing some interaction to get your health up. This is one of the main features for the campaign, which is finding objects to interact with, objects of course that aren't highlighted.

To escape the dorm section, you need to climb a staircase, find a ladder, and place it. It's a bit confusing to figure out how the author intended you to use it (you need to press use to not only pick up the ladder but also place it in the right spot and climb it). Proceeding forward, there are some larger rooms with beds, a truck, a bathroom, and a locked door. This was the most frustrating part of the campaign for me, which was finding out how to open the locked door. There is a crowbar in the truck that you absolutely need to press "use" on. I was running around for ages trying to break, jump on, and press use on everything until I stumbled upon the crowbar that doesn't function like a typical crowbar but is instead needed to progress. There is a hint in the map's Steam Workshop page description that tells you about this, but I wasn't going by that and on the basis of the campaign alone, this needs to be indicated better.

When you open the door you can go outside, and it feels like a breath of fresh air and almost like a regular campaign. After breaking down a few barricades you'll run into a new area that has a highlighted image of five gas cans, indicating you have to run around the new outside location to collect them. The five cans are located in disparate places, and fortunately you only have to press "use" on them, you don't have to bring them back to the spot like you would with normal scavenge cans.

The cans tend to be somewhat hidden, so you'll need to do plenty of searching to find them all. This was probably the second most annoying part of the campaign. When you have three or four of the gas cans and you're running around to find the last asinine place where the author hid it, it's annoying to say the least. Probably the most obscure location in my opinion is one that's hidden behind a gate that isn't immediately apparent you can open. For some reason there was also a hidden something or other in the grass that you can use, which says "What does it do?" but it wasn't really clear if pressing use on it did anything at all.

After collecting all five gas cans and igniting the path, you have a two-wave holdout. It's odd but the bots were surprisingly effective in the obvious holdout spot (on top of a truck by the ammo pile), since it takes a couple of seconds for any special infected to get to from that point, and the bots can get kills relatively well. The tanks approach from the opposite side of the fire so they tend to ignite themselves quite easily. All in all it's a relatively easy ending. 

Difficulty: The hardest part about this campaign is also its most annoying, which is in finding out what to do. There generally isn't enough of an advantage for infected in most places for them to pose much of a challenge. It's significantly harder to deduce how to open the locked door and to find out where all of the gas cans are. Although it starts off by putting survivors at a disadvantage, resource distribution is on the more generous side, with more medkits than usual. As it's a single map, experienced players may want to choose Advanced to start.

Final Verdict: Faramita:Summer isn't a particularly bad campaign, but it doesn't have much of an appeal to me. The aesthetic and design is simple and it feels lacking. More importantly, having to press "use" on absolutely everything to figure out the way forward may be fun for some people, but not for me. The most fun part was actually killing zombies, either in the side areas while looking for gas cans or during the holdout. Both instances don't really justify the aggravating time trying to figure out how to progress. There are even campaigns that take place in Chinese dorms and schools that have better gameplay. Skippable.

Rating: 2.3/5.

Witch House

Title: Witch House
Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1997522619
Author: ThePaleOne
Survivors: L4D2
Notes: This is more of an experimental campaign than a traditional campaign.

Witch House is a short, single-map campaign that is a fair attempt at making an escape room, a sort of haunted house of sorts, complete with a basement dungeon. The goal here is simply to escape. There are no infected to speak of, and in reality no actual enemies either, at least none that I found. However, the map does use themes and enemies (such as witches and common infected) as NPCs.

At the start there are three difficulties to choose from. These difficulties give you time limits to figure your way out. Chances are, if you aren’t so godly good at puzzles that can immediately predict a puzzle’s solution with 100% accuracy, you’re probably going to want to choose Easy because that bypasses the time limit entirely. Then maybe you can return to figure it out under an actual time limit. If you do choose a time limit, then you periodically take poison damage, and when time's up, everybody dies. I do feel though that there’s enough here to explore the different areas at a leisurely pace above 15 minutes, so I don't see the time limit as anything other than an additional challenge when you've figured it out once, unless you really enjoy puzzle challenges.

Some of the gameplay elements used in this campaign are interesting. For instance, once you use certain melee weapons to break open pieces of furniture, they'll break, leaving you with no weapon. It seems that there's a script that the campaign uses whereby it eliminates your secondary weapon slot. I think maybe only one other custom campaign leaves you without any weapons whatsoever, and it's not a feature frequently seen in mutations. Luckily, there are no enemies and eventually you will find weapons later on anyway, so it's nothing to worry about.

The campaign is dark as you would expect, and very heavy on the puzzle elements. It's not really all that difficult to figure out what to do, as usually the objects needed to progress are highlighted when you approach them. However, there are things like false walls, hidden objects, props to search through that aren't highlighted, and furniture that needs to be broken with specific objects, so if that's not your cup of tea, you can probably already predict if this is something you'll want to try out. Also, reading the information regarding this campaign, it seems that there are additional rooms with locked doors that I wasn't able to figure out how to open, so there are definitely bonus secret areas that are harder to figure out than others. 

This is definitely more fun with friends, and I can anticipate this one being really dull and frustrating played solo if you don't like puzzles or you're not good at them. The parts of the map that might frustrate people are things that need to be interacted with, which the game instructor doesn’t mention.

Difficulty: The difficulty in this is based entirely on the puzzle-solving. If you opt to go with a time limit by choosing any difficulty other than Easy, you'll probably find it at least somewhat challenging to get out of the escape room before you die, although it's probably not impossible to do on Normal if you have a full group of players. The difficulty chosen in the lobby shouldn't matter at all.

Final Verdict: Overall I liked the look of this and I liked the variety in the rooms, but figuring out where to go occasionally devolved into trial and error, and pressing “use” on everything. There are no infected here so it’s not really a challenge in the traditional sense of L4D2, but it can be good to play once for a change of pace. And everything worked, so at least it’s beatable. Decent for a one-off.

Rating: 3/5.

De inferno snow edition

Title: De inferno snow edition
Link: https://www.gamemaps.com/details/22133
Author: Valve, Alex Zen
Survivors: L4D2
Notes: This is a port of DE_Inferno, CS_Italy, and DE_Prodigy from Counter-Strike: Source. The finale does not work and requires a manual quit to the menu.

De inferno snow edition is the second in a pair of CS:S ports made by Alex Zen, both of which are fundamentally unfinished campaigns. This snow edition is the second one, which consists of two maps, DE_Inferno, CS_Italy, and DE_Prodigy. The porting job here is somehow not as bad as the regular De inferno campaign. Ported by the same guy, this version includes a third map (De_Prodigy), adds a layer of snow to the maps, some Christmas trees, snowmen, and a snow effect to the screen, making this actually one of the only Christmas-themed campaigns (other, better ones being A Baltic Tale and Innes Road Rash Christmas Edition). 

This time around, it seemed as though the bot nav was a little bit better, and the ambient setting with the change of skyboxes made the maps seem a little bit more appropriate. It actually felt kind of decent, more so than the previous De inferno campaign. Maybe it was because I knew what to expect, but this is still not what I'd call a good job. There’s still the big problem of the gigantic file size and missing textures in the second map. Plus this campaign uses CS’s fire particles, which don’t render properly in this game so fire looks weird.

The other big problem is that the finale event doesn’t work properly so there’s still no way to finish this campaign other than to quit to the menu. There is a radio, but it doesn't work properly. The first time I activated the radio, nothing happened. When I went back through the map a second time, it did spawn a horde and a tank, but nothing after that. I think the porter might be capable of making the train doors open and have that function as the rescue area, but I don't think he is well-versed enough in Hammer to make the train actually move.

As of right now, the only new map, the third, is vastly bigger than it needs to be, since the finale area is pretty much right next to the saferoom. Plus, if you go exploring, you’ll find things you’re not supposed to see like a dev texture that says “trigger,” and of course the second map still has missing textures, which is bizarre considering how many textures this campaign includes. In general, the only draw to this campaign might be playing the maps for nostalgia, trying something Christmas-themed, or playing a custom mutation.

Difficulty: I have the same criticism leveled against these maps as I do for the maps of the previous campaign, De inferno campaign. Neither common infected nor special infected pose much of a threat in these maps and again there aren't events to make things challenging.

Final Verdict: The porting on the CS maps here feels only slightly better than the previous job with De inferno campaign, which isn't saying much because that campaign had a huge problem with both maps being impossible to complete for different reasons. At least here it's possible to complete the first two maps. Still don’t get it unless you want to play deathmatch with friends or some mutation in CS maps that are unjustifiably big. If the finale worked and if the .vpk only included materials required for the maps, I could see this as being a standard, albeit mediocre campaign. Not recommended.

Rating: 1.93/5.