Count me as one of the dedicated fans of the series who wasn't sold on the change of scenery to the Deep South or the new characters. But after playing through several of the campaigns (each taking about an hour), I've actually found myself coming back to those missions more than the original. The four new characters are all compelling and the voice-acting is top-notch (I especially enjoy Coach's banter). Meanwhile, the visuals are a step above the original's, especially when it comes to the character's faces and the gore effects. The missions also feel both refreshing and yet familiar. Trekking through bayous and swamps while confronting specialized zombies like "mud men" provides new gameplay challenges and ways to be frightened. My favorite campaign might be "Hard Rain," wherein the survivors must backtrack through a trailer park in the middle of a flash flood. Featuring changing weathers and limited visibility, just spotting the incoming zombies while you try to make it through the flooding area is tough.

The new modes for Left 4 Dead 2 are also real upgrades for the series. While I enjoyed playing as the infected in the first game, in the second game there are more special infected to play as and therefore more variety in how you can attack the survivors. In addition to versus and survival modes, there's also a new mode called Scavenge. Scavenge basically tasks the survivors with gathering several gas tanks scattered through a specific level and returning them to a central point. The infected players try to stop them. One of my favorite moments was playing as a new specialized type of infected called a jockey. A jockey basically jumps onto the head of a survivor and guides them towards danger while dealing damage to them. On the "No Mercy" Scavenge map, I managed to guide a survivor off the side of the building, incapacitating them as they struggled to get back up. My buddy, playing as an infected hunter, then leapt on any would be rescuers. Pure malevolent fun.

There's also a new mode called "realism" which makes the game much, much more difficult to be a survivor. Headshots do more damage rather than body shots, and if a survivor dies, they don't appear later in the stage but instead must be revived using a defibrillator.

Ultimately, I found that the performance of Left 4 Dead 2 ultimately depended on the connections of the people I played with online. Left 4 Dead 2, while it can be played with just the player and AI, is much more fun with friends. Shouting orders, collaborating on tactics--that's where the game shines. But it's also frustrating when one of the games you hop into has significant lag, costing you valuable reaction time.

Overall, both associate editor David Chartier and I found that the game runs a little bit sluggish compared to the Windows version on the same hardware and settings (he ran it on a 2.66GHz iMac Core i5 with 4GB RAM, Radeon 4850 512MB DDR3). Chartier offered: "The game overall feels like it has a slight case of the Mondays, like it needs an update or two to shake off the cobwebs. Frame rate feels high, but reaction feels ever so slightly off." Reasonable minds can differ, because on my iMac Core i7 the game felt smooth and the frame rates never really dipped. So maybe Chartier is just looking for excuses for his subpar performance on The Hard Rain campaign.