Fairfield Terror (L4D1 Beta No Mercy) is an excellent recreation of the original Turtle Rock Studio/Left 4 Dead 1 Beta ‘No Mercy’ campaign. Complete with custom remade versions of the original assets, voice lines, sounds, etc. As well as the original dark lighting, filter overlays, glitches, issues, and all.

The attention to detail is excellent, with Fairfield Terror even including the Beta Alarm Car, and even allowing you to break the rotating spotlights on the rooftop Finale. Excellent stuff.

Whilst I purely rate Custom Maps based on Quality of gameplay/overall enjoyment and relative Difficulty, if I were rating this map for visuals and atmosphere; Fairfield Terror would definitely be a 10/10. I loved exploring all of the little side areas that were altered/cut from the final version of No Mercy.

And likewise, for accuracy of this recreation compared to the original Left 4 Dead 1 Beta version of No Mercy, I'd have to give Fairfield Terror a 10/10.

Gameplay-wise, however, Fairfield Terror has issues that make it a little worse than vanilla No Mercy overall. Which is entirely logical and understandable, considering that this is intended to be a faithful recreation of a pre-release version of the campaign. However, for fairness' sake, this *will* impact my review and rating of Fairfield Terror, so keep that in mind.

Also note as a frame of comparison, that I rate vanilla No Mercy 9/10 for Quality, 7/10 for Difficulty, and Medium for Length.

Compared to No Mercy, this version of the map has much darker lighting and filters. Which whilst looking great visually and making the campaign feel more atmospheric and spooky, this also makes it harder to actually see and play the game at times.

The Chapter 3 lift Crescendo notably no longer exists, and in its place is an optional Crescendo caused by shooting the gas station’s gas pumps. This effectively means that there’s only 2 true Crescendos on Fairfield Terror, compared to No Mercy’s 3, thus making this campaign easier and less interesting comparably.

There is also more ‘jank’ and glitches on Fairfield Terror, for example there are places where Special Infected can become stuck and take up one of the 3 Max Alive Special Infected slots (lowering the difficulty variably), there are places where Tanks can get stuck and suicide due to Frustration (such as the first Tank on the Finale during our playthrough), the classic glitch of falling through the elevator by ‘Going AFK’ has been faithfully recreated in this version of the campaign, and the Finale helicopter is a physical moving entity that you can get pushed off of/fall out of (which happened to someone on our playthrough). Comparably, No Mercy fixes/removes/changes all of these things, which makes the experience more standardized and streamlined throughout.

And one of the biggest differences between Fairfield Terror and No Mercy, is of course the Finale area being designed much differently.

Fairfield Terror’s Finale is a very easy and standard Defend-Tank-Defend-Tank, just like No Mercy’s.

All of the usual holding and cheese spots from No Mercy exist on this version, with many of them actually working even better than they do in the retail version. There are also even more cheese spots present in this version (many of which are the same as they appear in the original version of No Mercy still present on Left 4 Dead 1).

The Finale area is also much more complex and vertical overall, which results in the AI pathing notably being worse for Common Infected, Specials, and Tanks in some locations.

The spawning locations for the Infected are also less variable in the Finale area, which effectively results in almost all of the Commons attacking from a single predictable area, the Specials spawning all over the place randomly and often having minimal support from the Commons, and the Tanks potentially spawning in areas where they get stuck and immediately suicide due to Frustration (which happened to the first Tank on our playthrough).

Besides these issues, Fairfield Terror plays extremely similarly to vanilla No Mercy, with there being the same Alarm Car locations, a similar number of Witches and Tanks, and similar weapon/pickup locations and frequencies.

Ultimately, Fairfield Terror is an excellent fan-made recreation of the original Left 4 Dead 1 Beta version of No Mercy. However, this includes both its pros and its cons. And whilst I absolutely love the look and the classic, creepy feel of this Custom Map overall, I'd be lying to you if I said that it played as well as the retail version of No Mercy. Because of this, I was originally going to give Fairfield Terror an 8/10 for Quality, but I simply had to bump it up to an 8.5/10 for the visuals, accuracy, attention to detail, and the creepy atmosphere that it provides.


For some other custom flavour variants of No Mercy, you should also check out 'No Mercy Rehab' (an interesting rework that is effectively a sidegrade to vanilla No Mercy, which I previously rated 9/10 for Quality), and 'Reverse No Mercy' (exactly what it sounds like, but with some extra surprise twists, which I previously rated 8/10 for Quality).


For more Expert Custom Map Reviews and ratings, see my full Collection here. https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2252724380