Zombies might be a familiar theme in gaming, but an asymmetric multiplayer FPS certainly isn’t. The reality of Left 4 Dead colliding with people’s expectations was clear enough at the Munich playtest we attended recently, as Germany’s finest videogame journos shrieked in fear and delight. The survivor and infected teams were clashing on a previously unseen and remarkably intense new scenario: the Farmhouse. Rabid zombies came screaming out of the cornfields, and over-excited scribes punched the air as they managed to score an infected kill against the well-armed survivors.

The core of the game is easily understood: playing as part of a team of four armed survivors of the zombie apocalypse, you fight against AI-controlled waves of basic zombies and rather more potent boss types. You have to stick close to your buddies and covering fire between the FPS quartet is the only way to stay alive. What’s most exciting about this latest showing, however, is that the game now has the boss-infected, or the player-zombies, fully implemented. While gamers can choose simply to play an AI-populated scenario, they can also elect to have players come in as the zombie boss characters – a rending, leaping hunter, the exploding, vomiting boomer, and the nightmarish behemoth of the tank. As these beasts, players can see unique routes through the level, available only to the infected, and have a constant outline of the survivors’ positions in their vision. Playing as them, you begin to feel quite predatory.

Full story: next-gen.biz