No More Room In Hell 2 is a unique three-act take on co-op zombie slaying
Or, how I learnt to stop worrying and love the zomb
Hello! As you're reading this the embargo for No More Room In Hell 2 previews has just passed, so please excuse the slightly later newsletter. But as a consolation prize, enjoy the real meat of the newsletter, which is hot and fresh opinions on a co-op game I've been buzzing for since it was revealed back in June at Summer Game Fest.
Now I've played it, and I'm still pretty excited. There were enough bugs in my playtest that it's clear the Early Access release on October 22 is going to be a foundation for the team at Torn Banner to build on rather than a polished product, but there's enough here to give a decent taste of what the game is about.
I'm also trying out a radical new section called "out this week," and you will never guess what that entails. As always, thanks for reading. Share the newsletter around if you like it, and get in touch with me with your feedback, comments, and general grumbling by mashing the reply button.
No More Room in Hell 2 wants to have its cake and eat it. Equal parts horror game and co-op action shooter, the most compelling part of the game is that it promises both a full horror experience and firefights against zombies coming at you on all sides, in every round. Presuming you er, don't get mauled by zombies before you've met anyone else.
Death is permanent in NMRIH2, and while you can increase your player level through killing zombies and picking up useful survival supplies, the actual perks and appearance of your character will be randomised each time you jump in based on who you're playing. It makes death hit hard, but also rewards players with some persistent progression.
It fits the vibe of the original games. No More Room in Hell was a hard-as-nails Half-Life 2 mod that has been in development since 2003. It handles the zombie apocalypse more realistically than Left 4 Dead or World War Z. It's full of good ideas, but sort of janky in the way that mods from the time often were. A solid core idea wrapped around fanservice and janky textures. Source mods, if you came to PC gaming after 2010, were sort of like if Fortnite was developed by a group of teenagers and had no concept of tonal consistency. One of the default characters in No More Room In Hell for example was Patrick Bateman, and another was Walter from The Big Lebowski.
Regardless, it was easy to overlook because this was a game where one player will be clutching a torch while another takes out the nearby zombies with a sledgehammer, knowing that messing it up will screw things up for the entire group. NMRIH2 successfully manages to replicate this feeling, where one of you is just sitting there clutching a torch so everyone else can see who they're fighting.
NMRIH2 seems faithful to these ideas and spirit – furthering concepts in some places – while the only thing (currently) missing is the original game's infection system. This left you quietly dying after a bite, tossing up whether you want to tell your teammates you're a ticking timebomb, or keeping schtum and hoping you find a cure before you turn and start attacking your allies.
Still, the infection system is already on NMRIH2's roadmap, and it has tricks of its own. There are three different stages to each game of NMRIH2. This is because of my favourite conceit of the game. Each match starts with the eight players scattered around a huge map clutching nothing but a revolver, a torch and a pipe. There are (up to) seven other players out there but until you find them you're going to have to survive by yourself against nearly impossible odds. Welcome to the survival horror stage.
The Survival stage
Fire a gun in NMRIH2 and you'll draw in every zombie for miles around. Go in swinging with a melee weapon and you'll find yourself quickly out of stamina and easy pickings for the zombies lumbering around you. Fighting, then, is often a last resort as you sneak around grocery stores and churches trying to pocket supplies.
Most of the zombies you'll fight are sluggish but persistent, following you at a leisurely pace as you move through abandoned cars and industrial estates. The trouble often comes inside as you try to move inside where the good loot is. The slow-moving zombies are excellent at filling doorways and windows, clogging the vital arteries you need to get back out to safety. Alone this can be a death wish, and while a pipebomb or shotgun might clear them out, you're still making things worse for yourself as the noise will draw in zombies nearby.
Your goal in this phase is often two-fold. You want to get yourself a decent weapon and some medical supplies and this might involve clearing out a few of the marked objectives on the map to do so, depending on how brave you feel. Mostly though, you're playing to try and find someone else. Voice chat is handled in-game (and I'd encourage all players to mute their Discord to get the full experience) and you can hear people within a certain range, but it's more likely you'll hear an explosion or some gunfire and take off running, hoping to meet your new friends before they meet their end. Do this and you can hit a button to team up and see and hear each other at any range for the rest of the match.
The Guerilla stage
Each friend is a substantial force multiplier and in early engagements you'll feel unstoppable with a team behind you. I was playing a press and streamer session that had a bunch of streamers in, so the case was that I often was somewhat unstoppable with them behind me, each of them crack shots.
However, ammunition and healing supplies remain scarce. The Guerilla stage is when you're rolling in a duo or trio and fairly armed. You can definitely take a fight, but you're still trying to conserve supplies and look for more allies. The trick is in picking when to engage and when to go in with melee weapons or skirt around zombies to minimise risk and maximise supplies for later.
Here the focus is on finishing objectives to get access to saferooms filled with loot. Get lucky and you'll find assault rifles or even a hefty M14 to do battle with, alongside plenty of ammo. Zombies are functionally unlimited and seem to be constantly spawning around you, so fighting everyone is inefficient, but as your confidence grows and you finish objectives, you'll either naturally run into more players or - more likely based on the matches I played - you'll gain access to the power station at the middle of the map. A voice on your radio chimes in whenever someone else has managed to finish a task, so you might fight you're not the first to make it into the power station, but if they are you'll need to fight through the swarms of zombies to lift the lockdown on the powerplant and open every entrance.
Melee weapons aren't going to cut it here, so with this you enter the final stage of NMRIH2's zombie-themed metamorphosis.
The Big Damn Heroes stage
Depending on how tooled up you are when the power station cracks open, this is either the Big Damn Heroes stage or the Aliens Cooling Tower stage. I tried this with a single-shot shotgun and just one other player and it was hell on earth, but often when you arrive here you'll be joined by everyone else with the firepower or skills to survive this long.
This is when excrement truly hits the fan and everyone comes together to try and reset power in the area, something that - for reasons I don't fully understand - is essential. By now you'll be burning through ammunition and putting down every zombie in sight. Resetting the power involves flipping switches to get gauges in the red zone, which would be pleasingly tactile if not for the fact that every zombie within a kilometer is slowly shambling up to take a bite out of the back of your head as you're puzzling it out.
These little minigames make this feel more like a true co-op experience as you try to enter a computer code, flip some levers or reset a system while your teammates hold down the fort. You see these in the other phases too, but it's here when you need to do them all under pressure. There's no time limit here, but your dwindling supplies will often impact how long you can afford to survive, and the zombies won't stop until the power is rebooted. With a little luck or a lot of pipebombs you'll make it through, dust yourself off, and then get ready to drop in again. Alone.
This structure means there's a constant ramping tension to matches and the fun is in the dizzying elation of sneaking past zombies that could have killed you, or the ragged edges you'll feel as cortisol floods into your body as you enter your fifth successive firefight in as many minutes. Few co-op games manage to properly capture horror because it's hard to maintain a spooky atmosphere when you have 8 players running around. Similarly, horror shooters like GTFO that have managed to scare the shit out of me often feel underwhelming when you finally cut loose because the artificial limits and systems that create fear also limit player's power. Here, by stripping players away from their co-op buddies and forcing them to work things out for themselves when individually they're at their weakest point, Torn Banner Studios creates a terrifying situation that's going to ensure players are ecstatic when they finally find a pal, whether that's a close friend in a private game, or even a total random in a public match.
I'm keen to see how it lands on launch next week, and hoping to convince some friends to give it a go with me.
Out this week
This is only looking forwards, and we just started, so please also bear in mind that Starship Troopers Extermination just came out last week. I wanted to mention it as I've not talked about it elsewhere and have a deep and abiding love for the franchise. I played a fair bit during Early Access and enjoyed it.
- MechWarrior 5: Clans - October 17
- Sniper Killer
- Killing Time: Resurrected - October 18
- No More Room In Hell 2 (early access) - October 22
- Zero Sievert (1.0 release) - October 23
Gibs
- I played DayZ's Frostline expansion for PC Gamer. It's cold and annoying, much like England currently.
- Delta Force has a weeklong demo as part of Steam's Next Fest. I played the playtest earlier in the year and this demo seems to be similar in terms of content, although there's a pretty solid armoury that every player has access to from the jump. You can do silly classic shooter stuff like this:
Delta Force (TIMI, Unreleased)
- When Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches next week, PC players are going to need a terrifying 102GB of space just to play it. I'll... start clearing out Crusader Kings 3 saves I guess.
- Special thanks to Robin & Pat, who are my first subscribers to buy a year-long subscription. I haven't worked out what comes at the supporter tier yet because the newsletter is still finding its feet, but I appreciate the subscriptions a bunch. It lets me devote a little more time to working on each newsletter. I'll probably have a supporter tier with more added perks in the new year.
- Happy Brat remix week to those who celebrate, and you really should be celebrating. I've also been listening to Jai Paul's Str8 Outta Mumbai a bunch so you can have two music recommendations this week.