Left 4 Dead
BANGER · Shooter · 2008
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 7h
- Value
- $1.43/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 128 MB, Shader model 2.0, ATI 9600, NVidia 6600 or better, 7.5 GB of storage. Windows only.
From Valve (the creators of Counter-Strike, Half-Life and more) comes Left 4 Dead, a co-op action horror game for the PC and Xbox 360 that casts up to four players in an epic struggle for survival against swarming zombie hordes and terrifying mutant monsters.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2019 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. It has been discounted 71 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 9 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 12 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 9 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is better reviewed than 98 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Left 4 Dead 2 ($9.99, scores 98) beats it on value, while it beats Killing Floor 2 ($29.99, scores 66).
The math says it holds its tier up to $59.88, and you are being asked for $9.99.
Steam's global achievement data says about 4 percent of players ever finish it. On a 7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 799 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 16 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written June 2024 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 592 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 92 percent of the 9,468 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 16 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 7 hours; clearing it takes 59, which is 8.4 times the campaign.
It came out 18 years ago and 774 were still playing it at the last check.
The drop-off
62% start to 4% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 7-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
774 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
While left for dead 2 is essentially a direct upgrade, this game is still awesome and I can appreciate what it did to pave the way for left for dead 2. The characters, maps, and everything are just some of the best valve content especially since they were brought to left for dead 2. Even if you went through the lfd1 content in lfd2 still give it a try or maybe go for some achievements.
absurdly good looking for a game from 2008 every other mission when playing multiplayer the game crashes and i get an out of memory error for some reason, this did get better by using only valve servers instead of unofficial ones, but it still crashes here and there banger game tho these zombies move comically fast
Still a zombie classic! I do believe It has better stuff than the second game (Left 4 Dead 2) for e.g. the versus point system, or like the environment is scarier. Anyways, a classic!
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Left 4 Dead scores 97/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/500/left-4-deadThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.