After Synysters ‘Nothing Special’ and ‘Untouchables’ rants about the Left 4 Dead achievements, I have to push in and say that Valve have continued their ridiculous achievements well into their next game of the series, Left 4 Dead 2.

‘The Real Deal’ requires that you complete an entire campaign on Expert difficulty with Realism enabled. Now, completing a campaign on Expert difficulty is so stupidly difficult anyway, but having to do the same with their new ‘Realism’ feature enabled is not even worth trying. Realism mode in Left 4 Dead 2 is meant to give the player a more ‘realistic’ gameplay experience. With this mode enabled, weapon drops and ammo are no longer highlighted for you, neither are your fellow survivors, making it a lot easier to get lost from your group and also very hard to find more ammo or better guns. This mode also means that one hit from a witch enemy will kill you outright, oh, and there’s no revives. If your character dies, you’re out of the game.

If the Witch sees you, she will kill you!

Bearing in mind that on Expert difficulty anyway it only takes about 2 hits from a zombie to kill you outright. The zombie hordes come with savage frequency in numbers well in excess of 20 to 30 zombies in each horde. The levels aren’t massive so there’s rarely anywhere to run and these zombies will take a good few shotgun shells to kill them. So if you run out of ammo, or even have to reload during a horde, you will die.

I tried this once. I managed to get about 10 metres up a walkway and got massacred during the first horde, only killing about 2 zombies.

I’ve not tried it since!