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Left 4 Dead 2 Screens And New Features
If you haven’t played the demo, normally I would say sucks for you. But this is one of those games where the demo is such a brutal tease, you crave the game. You want it. You toss and turn at night dreaming of zombie outbreaks. You wake up in a cold sweat wondering, “was I dreaming?”
Left 4 Dead 2 features 4 new main characters, Coach, a high-school football coach, Rochelle, a news reporter for a local television station, Ellis, a mechanic, and Nick a gambler and conman. The new group of zombie killers will start their journey in Savannah, Georgia and end in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Head past the break for screens and excellent new game features. • Over 20 new weapons & items headlined by over 10 melee weapons – axe, chainsaw, frying pan, baseball bat – allow you to get up close with the zombies.
• New survivors. New story. New dialogue. Left 4 Dead 2 is a huge sequel that offers up new details of the zombie apocalypse and introduces four Survivors, each of whom has expansive dialogue and interesting background stories. The game leads these “Survivors” through the southeastern region of the US – from Savannah, Georgia thru the bayou country, and climaxing in New Orleans’ French Quarter.
• Five expansive campaigns for co-operative, Versus
and Survival game modes. In direct response to player feedback, L4D 2 will be a larger game than its predecessor, featuring:
1. Five co-op campaigns vs. four in the original
2. All five co-op campaigns playable in Versus mode at launch vs. two in L4D.
3. Survival mode included at launch vs. offered as DLC for L4D.
4. Plus an all-new multiplayer mode.
• An all new multiplayer mode. New multiplayer game mode tailored for competitive play.
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You can check out a pretty sweet video on Xbox Live explaining some of the new multiplayer modes. A new multiplayer mode will be known as “Scavenge”. For instance in one, you have to find gas cans scattered about the level to fill up a generator. While you’re doing so, the other team acts as the special infected trying to stop you.
Left 4 Dead 2 comes out November 17th for the PC, and Xbox 360. If you go on Steam you can pre-order Left 4 Dead 2, and buy Left 4 Dead as a package and you save 15 dollars on the 2. You can get them both for $65.00 which is a great price considering the Xbox version will be $60.00 alone.
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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