No More Room In Hell 2 Succeeds In The Zombie Genre’s Most Important Way
Sometimes people talk about zombie games with an air of fatigue, like they’ve had their fill and are ready to ignore the concept, but you’ll never catch me sounding that way. I play as many as I can find, and in particular, my favorites in the zombie genre tend to share a common trait that I find extremely important. I recently got to play about 90 minutes of No More Room In Hell 2, an open-world, first-person co-op zombie game for up to eight players, and it scratched that vital itch in the way I’d hoped it would. No More Room In Hell 2, like many of the best zombie games, presents a desolate and desperate world. By pulling no punches, it’s immersive in all the right ways.
No More Room In Hell 2 (NMRIH2) is a sequel to a cult-favorite zombie game that’s been on PC since 2011, hiding in the shadow of Left 4 Dead. Like the original game, and so many others, this sequel is Left 4 Dead-inspired, though it’s how it diverges down a path of its own that reveals the game’s best qualities. Played on a huge open-world map that blends thick forests, ranger cabins, firewatch towers, and a massive power plant that serves as the level’s end goal, each of a game’s eight players spawns alone with a few supplies nearby, a few points of interest marked on their map, and the full world to explore.
Watching zombies bust through the windows when I was already barely holding it together was like something right out of a Romero movie.
But exploration must be done carefully and with great consideration for every action. In my time with the game, stamina was quite limited, especially in combat, where I could only get in about four swings with my metal pipe before I had to retreat while I caught my breath. Early on in my demo, as I scoured picnic tables, outhouses, and campgrounds for flashlight batteries, ammo, and medkits, I carefully crouched, lights off, around small packs of undead. My time in the original game had primed me to expect an unforgiving experience, and that kept me from having to learn that the hard way early on.