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After 4,899 reviews, No More Room in Hell 2 has a Mostly Negative rating on Steam, yet is somehow the most fun zombie horror experience I’ve had this year. Its launch has been rough and bug-ridden, even by early access standards, but the Mostly Negative label paints an inaccurate picture. NMRiH2 isn’t a house; it’s a foundation. If you try to move in now, you can’t expect plumbing and lights. That said, the foundation here is so fresh and so fun that I have found myself returning time and again to brave the bugs. Here’s what’s going so right and so wrong with No More Room in Hell 2.
Gore and Glitches Galore
No More Room in Hell 2 is an 8-player co-op action horror game. Everyone starts scattered and with nothing but a pipe, a handgun, and a few bullets. You must scavenge for supplies, find one another, and complete a series of objectives before escaping. Die before extraction and you lose the Responder you’ve been leveling up. Permadeath injects an element of genuine horror into matches when it looks like a rogue swarm might drag you under. No More Room in Hell 2 is messier than Left 4 Dead but scarier too, especially in the beginning of matches, when you’re so ill-equipped.
Before you can properly judge the game, however, you must brush aside a thick and cloying film of bugs. Zombies’ brains chase after their bodies like dutiful dogs. Two of your teammates don’t have bodies: they’re just floating heads with guns and flashlights, a terrifying abstraction of the survival horror experience. Not only do these minor issues happen way too often but they’re also accompanied by much more serious problems such as critical events not triggering or key items not spawning, meaning the mission you just sank 20 minutes into is now impossible to complete. This is rough early access.
My Current Favorite (Not Quite) Broken Game
No More Room in Hell 2 is a work in progress. If you’re expecting a polished or content-complete experience, you will not get it here. That said, it’s eerily compelling, both solo and with friends, and I struggle not to recommend it. The climb from impoverished isolation to gun-toting squad membership is irresistible, and when early deaths shrink your ranks, your strategy must shift to accommodate. Trapped atop a truck, bashing away zombies as a red haze fills my sight, listening to my friends’ shouts and gunshots, wondering if they’ll reach me before my muscles give way — those are intense Romero vibes.
It’s not too early to play No More Room in Hell 2, but it’s too early for some kinds of players. Until it receives some necessary patches and content updates, the fun you’ll have is proportionate to how much jank and dysfunction you can endure. Maybe someday it’ll have that Silent Hill 2 polish, but we aren’t there. In the meantime, I’ll be scavenging bandages and shotgun shells in the ruins of a burning church, staving off the apocalypse one disembodied head at a time. No More Room in Hell 2 is now in early access on Steam.
