Who are you?
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.
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.
What's the goal of this blog?
My goal for this blog is two-fold. First, I want to provide a place for people to quickly and easily browse and access all publicly released custom campaigns. Secondly, I want to provide a resource for players who wish to learn more and explore these custom campaigns in much more detail than what most people write.
Most of the time I see comments from players who just want to play the most popular, "best" campaigns, to which the majority of somewhat experienced players reply Questionable Ethics, Back to School, The Bloody Moors, Deathcraft II, Journey to Splash Mountain, Suicide Blitz 2, and One 4 Nine. Sometimes Urban Flight and Fall in Death make it onto the list, but otherwise almost every single time, those are always the campaigns cited. While those campaigns are for the most part enjoyable enough, I don't think that any of them are nearly close to being the best, and such cursory lists are also extremely limited, since there are over 500 campaigns and only the same five or six are the only ones that get cited.
Why should I read your reviews?
The thing to keep in mind with any form of criticism is the person doing the critiquing. You will no doubt come to understand that I have a certain preference for maps of a particular style. You will also probably disagree with me in regard to how I evaluate the quality of a campaign, but I have tried to be as objective as possible in my description. Therefore, while you and I may disagree on whether or not such a map that requires a lot of backtracking and key-finding is fun, what we won't fundamentally disagree on is whether or not the map does in fact have a lot of backtracking and key-finding. You can read my criteria in the Reviewing Process area for more information.
Personally, I enjoy maps with a constant sense of forward progression that don't incorporate artificial difficulty (e.g. constant hordes plus fifty tanks in a row down a corridor), or limit the player's movement. 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.
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.
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.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog and please let me know what you think of it.
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