Rather than being a first person shooter (like Left4Dead, as the title tries to imitate), Left2Die uses top-down visuals familiar with anyone who has played a dual stick shooter before.

Left2Die (Universal: $0.99) 

“Left2Die is Everplays take on the classic zombie survival formula but adds a heaping dose of style, unockables, single player missions, and online competitive and cooperative multiplayer in deathmatch and survival modes. ”

Presentation

Thanks to this viewpoint, you get a nice overview of your surroundings. Although the game isn’t going to be setting any new benchmarks when it comes to graphics, the overall presentations is nice: nice graphics (personally digging the shadows created by having street lamps in an otherwise empty environment), and the soundtrack complements the game nicely. There are multiple types of characters, weapons, zombies, and locations.

Controls

When it comes to controls, Left2Die is just average. It’s a dual-stick shooter, which means you’ll use the left stick to control movement, while you use the right for shooting. Apart from that you’ll have an array of buttons, for things like reloading your weapon, shifting between your weapons (primary, secondary, and special), etc. The reason I say the controls are average isn’t just because they are the controls we’ve come to expect from the genre on iOS, but because the controls had a few hiccups while we’re playing. While they weren’t flawless, it didn’t stop us from enjoying the game.

Gameplay

Left2Die includes a 60-level Mission mode, and an endless survival mode for single player. The 60 missions are spread out through 3 environments (Diner, Store, and Farm). Although Left2Die has a single player portion, the multiplayer is where it’s at. You can choose to play with a Game Center friend, or a random player.

You can also choose if you want to do co-op mode, or go into death match mode. Although the single player portion is just fine, once you try out the co-op there’s no going back. Personally I had a blast trying to kill zombies as long as I could with random players on Game Center.

The  more zombies you kill the more money you get ,which brings me to the other cool part about Left2Die. Using the money you pick up you can buy a ton of stuff up, such as new characters, upgrades to your existing weapons, or just buy new weapons altogether (the laser sword is off the chain).

Conclusion

While the singe player portion of the game didn’t stand out to me, what did impress me in Left2Die is the multiplayer portion, which is something that I wish more dual stick shooters on iOS would implement. And although the game has IAP, you can easily earn the in-game currency for new stuff by playing, without having to spend another dime. I recommend you grab Left2Die, and convince a friend to pick it up (and if not, play against a random player). 7/10