No More Room in Hell 2 resurrects a legendary Source mod as a hardcore co-op zombie FPS
If you didn't have a gaming PC in 2012 like me, there's a decent chance your first reaction to a zombie shooter called No More Room in Hell 2 is "Wait, there's a first one?" I'm just now learning the story of the original No More Room in Hell: That it was a co-op survival horror Source mod directly inspired by George Romero's films, supported eight players, eventually got a standalone release on Steam, and that it friggin' ruled. PC Gamer named it Best Mod of 2012, and the free game is still updated by volunteers over a decade later, most recently in June 2024.
A sequel has been in the works from the original team of modders since 2016 under the name Lever Games, but last year that team was gobbled up and absorbed into Chivalry 2 developer Torn Banner Studios, given "quadruple" the resources, and grew from a small team of part-timers to over 40. This is no part-time project anymore. No More Room in Hell 2 takes the original's claustrophobic Objective maps and blows up the scale—8 players, one huge map, and missions that can be tackled in any order.
Hopping into an early play session with Torn Banner and other press, I wasn't prepared for how unlike Left 4 Dead these games are. I've sunk hundreds of hours into co-op shooters, but never one that traffics in survival horror scarcity. NMRIH2 has no checkpoints, safe rooms, or infinite piles of ammo. A full magazine of ammo was a rare treat in my two playthroughs of the Power Plant map, the sole map included in early access for now. The pitch-black night makes flashlights a requirement, but batteries are finite. Map resources aren't duplicated, so what excess gear we could find in sheds, abandoned houses, or car trunks had to be split among the group.
Torn Banner made it clear that NMRIH2 is more of a game about avoiding zombies than fighting them, and I figured out why pretty quick: It's got the slow, lumbering type of zombies that are simple to avoid in small numbers, but they multiply constantly and never really give up the chase.
Unlike Left 4 Dead, Helldivers 2, and pretty much every co-op shooter I still play with friends, I can't just hold down the trigger until the horde is gone. Melee attacks are slow and a single zombie can withstand three to five thwacks, so it wasn't feasible to fight more than one at a time. Ammo is so precious that spray-and-pray is a luxury I couldn't afford, so I planted my feet and lined up headshots. Even then, we could never really "defeat" the zombies outside our door, just carve a gap in their ranks large enough to squeeze through.
These guns couldn't behave more differently from their Source engine predecessors—they're weighty, loud, and their muzzle flashes light up the whole room. They're properly dangerous, which made it all the more important to remember how many bullets I had left in the chamber. The Chivalry DNA is noticeable in the elaborate ways bullets can unmake zombies: punching fully-modeled holes through their heads, chests, and tearing skin at the point of impact.
Player fragility with an emphasis on resource management are distinct qualities in a time when most co-op games skew toward one of two extremes: let players be badass mercenaries with kills counts in the hundreds, or strip away all means to fight back until you're Phasmophobia. No More Room in Hell 2 is somewhere between—like a collaborative Resident Evil mission. That's pretty neat, but it's also frustratingly unfinished. Just about everything in the preview build I played was rough: melee impacts feel delayed and inconsistent, performance was worryingly poor on my RTX 2080 Super (an aging card, but still well above the average Steam user), several guns' animations flipped out every time I pulled the trigger, and both of my matches ended early because of bugs.
Torn Banner told us the version releasing on Steam October 22 has bug fixes I didn't see, but I'd still prepare for a bumpy ride. This is just the beginning, of course: the studio's roadmap includes planned performance improvements, more weapons, zombie types, maps, a second game mode, and loads of other stuff. It's not really clicking for me yet, but No More Room in Hell 2 has the makings of a co-op shooter that my friends will play for years to come. I trust that Torn Banner is in this one for the long haul.