No More Room in Hell 2 early access review – slow-burn cooperative shooter gets zombie horror (mostly) right
There often comes a point in No More Room in Hell 2 when you realise that you’re screwed, and it usually arrives about five minutes before the inevitable occurs. Surrounded by shambling corpses, barricades shrieking under their literal dead weight, you’ll be popping zombie heads with grim precision when cold reality sets in. Maybe it’s the click of your revolver as its ammo runs dry that triggers the revelation, or a fellow survivor you barely know being overwhelmed by the horde. Maybe it’s just the sight of another score of undead stumbling into silhouetted view. Either way, the feeling is the same: you’re going to die, and no amount of struggle will prevent it.
No More Room in Hell 2Developer: Torn Banner StudiosPublisher: Torn Banner StudiosPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now in early access on PC (Steam and Epic Games Store)
In such moments, No More Room In Hell 2 captures the creeping dread of George Romero’s films better than any zombie game I’ve played in ages. Torn Banner’s pitch-black survival shooter stands at the far end of the zombie spectrum from Left4Dead’s frenetic undead gauntlets, a glacial experience that seems almost trite right until it rolls over you. It’s a promising early access debut, although I fear Torn Banner’s plans for the future already risk spoiling the experience.
No More Room In Hell 2’s primary gimmick has nothing to do with its zombies or how they move. This is an eight-player cooperative shooter set on a single, openly explorable map, with you scouring buildings and cars for weapons and equipment before assaulting a central objective (in the alpha’s case, a power station verging on failure). The twist is all eight players start in different locations, spawning on the fringes of the map with nothing but a length of pipe, a revolver, and a barrel’s worth of ammo to defend themselves. The idea is that, as you skulk furtively toward the map’s centre, you’ll encounter other players in dynamic, haphazard ways, leading to daring rescues, organic teamwork, and perhaps even fleeting friendships.
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It’s a wonderful notion. In practice, the predefined spawn points and the heavily formatted nature map design rob the concept of some of its power. Between the spawn points at the edge of the map and the main objective at its centre, there are secondary objectives that house equipment stashes, each of which the map funnels two of the eight players toward. Because of this, you quickly learn when and where you’re likely to bump into other players, which makes the experience more predictable than it initially seems.
