It was 2 am. and Valve had put out the hotly anticipated "Survival Pack" out for Left 4 Dead. I had been looking forward to it for months now, and I downloaded it immediately after it was uploaded onto Xbox LIVE. I think I've played through enough of the new content to give an opinion on it.

Survival Mode

The DLC first includes the titular "Survival" Mode. basically you fight an endless supply of zombies and hold out as long as you can. If you think it's just the final stage set to another map, you are sorely mistaken. Survival kicks it up a notch by spawning multiple special infected at the same time. You'll end up fighting 2 Tanks at once (assuming if you live long enough), as well as multiple smokers, boomers, etc. The action gets really intense and exciting. But I think spawning duplicate special infected is a tad excessive. Trying to take out 2 smokers at the same time tends to get really frustrating and can be a huge buzzkill.

First is the new map, the Lighthouse. it's relatively compact and well built for survival mode. And it's certainly welcome since the game doesn't have a lot in terms of content. The rest of the maps are just "crescendo" moments from the other campaigns that have been tweaked to accommodate for the new game type.

The biggest issue I had was lag. As of right now, Survival mode is poorly optimized for online play. once the horde came in, my ping would suddenly go to shit. And as of right now, don't even bother playing on the Lighthouse. The server traffic is so high that every time I started a game at the Lighthouse, I would time out and get booted off. But once the initial excitement dies down, and high server traffic goes away, most of the lag should go away. But it's still something to throw out there though.

Versus Mode

The other thing that the Survival Pack includes is Death Toll and Dead Air for Versus mode. Overall these are great new additions to versus mode and will make things fresh again. Though I did find a few glaring exploits (especially in Dead Air) that I don't want to go into for fear of people using them. Besides I'm sure they'll figure it out anyway.

So as of right now, Survival mode is far from perfect. Extreme lag and excessive smoker spawning really suck a lot of fun out of it. But I trust Valve to stabilize it soon enough. And finally getting Death Toll and Dead Air on Versus is great, even tough there are some things Valve can fix there too. I still say think you should download it immediately since it's completely free and at a little over 100MB it won't put a huge dent in your HDD. I think I'm just gonna hold out on playing any more Survival until they iron out all the bugs.