So, just played through the demo level.
-It's short; like half a L4D level short. Kinda makes you wonder about the amount of new content in the full game
-New weapons are awesome for the most part. There's far more variety (to a point). Instead of the standard Uzi, there are two types, there's multiple pistols, and you can get an AK as well as the regular assault rifle. That said, nothing all that fundamental changes. They do behave differently, like the AK has a far slower firing rate than the old rifle in exchange for far more power, but in the end it's still all kind of the same. They're also more spread out, so you don't just find a group of four weapons sitting there, you might find an auto-shotty sitting with a magnum, or a guitar and sniper rifle. Kind of mixes it up a bit. The gore and dismemberment is cool, but nothing like it should be as far as I'm concerned. I want to shoot off a leg and see a zombie still coming at me...it didn't happen.
-Melee weapons suck. As mentioned, you lose your pistols...which are better now. At first I thought they were really cool, but it gets old fast....especially when all of them behave exactly the same from what I could tell. They're all one hit kills, which is pretty dumb, and it's kind of limiting in that if you use them you're going to get shot a lot because you have to be close enough to get the shit swarmed out of you. Could be cool if you could have them and pistols at the same time, but between the two, no idea why you'd pick them. Run out of ammo and you're fucked.
-New infected are pretty cool. The body armour is a cool aspect and a lot of the infected don't just run straight at you..they kind of zig zag. New Special infected are hit and miss. The chick that shoots acid might as well be another boomer because the effect is the same; see she's about to do it, run away, kill her, and stay away for a couple of seconds. The Jockey can lead to some cool moments, like when it jumped on some players back and almost ran him straight into a Witch. The Wandering Witch is an improvement (hope they keep the original though) because you HAVE to kill her more often it seems. Finally, the Charger is pretty cool. You just catch of glimpse of it and then the guy next to you is tackled, up against a wall and having the shit kicked out of him.
-The levels are the same as you'd expect, but there was a new cool event where you had to exit this door and run to shut down an alarm. It was like a gauntlet and until you shut the thing down they just kept coming. Not sure how I felt about the level being in daylight though, kind of just made the zombies seem silly. The new path thing is something I obviously can't really comment on, but to me it seemed like a chain link fence was really just thrown in the way, meaning you had to go over twenty feet and go through a house instead of an alley most of the time. Lame if that's all it is.
-There were a fair amount of new items. New grenade (Boomer bile) made the zombies attack whatever you hit with it. Good for taking down a tank or distracting a horde I guess. There were adrenaline shots (like painkillers I guess), a defibulator (replaced a med pack but not sure on what exactly it did), and pipebombs absolutely rule now.
At the end of the day, I won't be picking it up...scared me off more than anything. I didn't feel any different going through this than I did going through Crash Course - cool that it's new, but nothing all that fresh. I don't know how Valve convinced those guys from the boycott that there was enough to warrant a new game here; going from the demo it's just an expansion.
