No More Room in Hell 2 isn’t your typical zombie experience.
Instead, it’s a slow-paced, horror-induced trek through densely detailed maps that are filled with the ambling corpses of the undead.
It’s a PvPvE co-op extraction shooter, and on paper it doesn’t sound too different from the rest. You load into one of the game’s six massive maps with the aim of looting up as you and a lobby of up to eight people work together to complete a series of tasks in the hope of extracting.
The special sauce of the game is how exposed and weak it makes you feel. The undead are slow, like The Walking Dead, but it’s still easy to become overwhelmed. That’s because gunplay is deliberately clunky – it’s quite reminiscent of the first-person Resident Evil games – so you’ll be agonising over some hopeful headshots.
This is particularly excruciating thanks to limited ammunition. Each weapon requires a specific type of ammunition, so you’ll quickly need to learn the difference between your .45 ACP rounds and your .357 Winchesters.
I loved that there isn’t a constant on-screen ammo counter, so instead you need to examine your magazine to find out how many bullets you have. It’s daunting yet exhilarating to head into a dark building knowing you only have four bullets left. It somehow makes zombies scary again.
Darkness is another big obstacle. You can hold a torch if you wield a pistol or a one-handed melee weapon, but any two-handed weapon will plunge you into darkness – and it really is quite oppressive. On one mission, as I cleared out an underground power station with a squad of survivors, some held up their torches as the rest of us lined up our shots to clear the way.
My biggest drawback from the game, however, is that it’s clearly a PC game first – it’s just come out of two years of early access on the platform.
While a radial wheel to select from your inventory is helpful, it feels quite clunky, and the screen is littered with abrasive UI. Trying to figure out what each button does reminded me a lot of my time with Arma Reforger on PS5.
No More Room in Hell 2 is an immersive and tactile FPS experience that revels in the slow-paced dread and somehow makes each interaction with a zombie feel dangerous. I’d love to love it more, but clunky controls and overwhelming UI make for a rough-around-the-edges console port.
