Is Left 4 Dead fundamentally broken, yes or no?

From my experience: yes.

Why?

Because a coop group of survivers is basically unkillable if they just follow this very simple rule: stick together. No matter what you do as infected, you have to actually speculate on them making a mistake if you want to take them apart, and eventually take them down. But that doesn’t really happen when the group of survivors sticks together like super glue.

What’s even worse is that this even holds true for Tanks. The Tank itself is relatively harmless unless the other infected use the confusion created by the tank to pin down two survivers at the same time. But that doesn’t really happen very often. Indeed, i’ve seen it happen only once or twice. You can deal out a little damage but it’s really hard to take down a group, or even a single survivor for that matter, if the survivors actually work as a group and react promptly to any pinned teammates.

Then there are those exploits the survivors use. Sitting in a corner and just repeatedly punching Zombies is ok … i guess. But for example sitting underneath the sloped access way to the heli pad on the final level of the first campaign – this just sucks. The survivors can crawl in there and from then on they are fracking invulnerable! This isn’t the only map exploit but it’s definetely the most abused one by the survivors. But the infected have their share of exploits, too! Anyone ever noticed a door being blocked by some kind of machinery? The infected can just attack and hence push large, heavy objects to block passages. This just sucks. The game basically ends at this point, only – it doesn’t.

I believe Valve should seriously consider fixing these kinds of map exploits as well as giving the infected some more leverage or diversity. Why not enable the witch as playable character? It’s not as strong as the tank but it could also add some more of the confusion that the tank creates.

As fun as it was the few times when both teams where equally disoriented when playing the survivors, i’ve seen these types of teams less and less and more often those teams that are glued together and actually care a lot about their team members, reacting promptly to any threats. However, it’s not so much fun for the infected now. Taking out a team of survivors feels like something that happens by sheer luck, not teamwork.