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.