Left 4 Dead 2 Mac Impressions

I was apprehensive when I loaded up L4D2 for the first time on the Mac platform this evening. I was less than impressed with the Portal port that emerged on Steam a few months back; the framerate was slow compared to how it ran on a windows partition on the same machine, and overall it looked a lot less polished than its PC counterpart. Considering the game was originally released in 2007, I would have thought that two and a half years would have been enough time to ensure the Mac port was up to scratch. Apparently not.

Left 4 Dead 2 dropped for the Mac last night, and I was eager to see if it matched up. I recently deleted the Windows partition off my MacBook Pro as it was playing silly buggers, and the thing I missed most was L4D2, the only game I really play with any regularity on the PC. It took over 24 hours to drag down all 12GB off the overloaded Steam servers, but I finally got it, tweaked the settings to the way I remembered having them, and joined a game.

I'm happy to report that Valve seem to have gotten the hang of porting the source engine to the Mac platform. I'm sure keener eyes would say that the framerates are still lower and the effects slightly less detailed than the PC version, but to my eye it's a near perfect port. I'm getting smooth, consistent framerates (aside from a few seconds of glitchy lag in the first few seconds of a match) and the game looks as good as I remember, if not better. I was also pleased to see that the original 4 campaigns had been expanded to 8 (including the first from the original game). I'm looking forward to playing through all the new content comfortably on my Mac. Hopefully this is a sign that Portal 2 will be as good a candidate on Mac as on PC when it arrives next year.