No More Room in Hell 2 is a hardcore survival FPS set in a dark and dangerous zombie post-apocalypse. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Everything We Know About No More Room in Hell 2
No More Room In Hell 2 Story Plot
In a city infested by the undead, eight survivors find themselves alone. With no way to escape the city without vehicular extraction, the survivors must work together to call for help.
No More Room In Hell 2 Gameplay
No More Room In Hell 2 puts players into the shoes of survivors scattered throughout a city. Using their wits, communication, and skills, they must find their fellow survivors and work to get themselves extracted from the undead-infested city.
The game will feature proximity chat to facilitate communication. This is essential for immersion, as a reliable line of communication will make it too easy to gather other survivors. It will also feature permadeath to force players to act like they would in real life. With every move threatening to end their runs, precision and careful planning are a must.
Released This October 22, 2024 on Early Access
No More Room In Hell 2 was released on October 22, 2024. According to the developers, the game will be released as Early Access to "open the game’s production and growth so our community of players can join us in the journey." It became available at around 11 a.m. EDT / 8 a.m. PDT.
No More Room in Hell 2 Review [Early Access]
No Reason in Hell to Play This
Ah, disappointment—the cruelest companion when your hopes are high. Having relished the gritty, unpolished yet brutally challenging darkness of No More Room in Hell, I wasn’t just excited for the sequel, I was deadset on it delivering another hardcore zombie apocalypse experience. But as with many sequels to beloved niche titles, it faced a crossroads: either surpass the original or fade in its shadow. Sadly for me, it’s the latter.
No More Room in Hell 2 had big shoes to fill after its predecessor—a slow, methodical zombie survival game built on the Source Engine that delivered brutally fun gameplay well beyond its modest origins. It aimed to stay true to many of the original's defining traits, from its oppressive darkness to its punishing difficulty.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s a lot to unpack here—not that you’ll get to experience much of it, as you'll soon discover. So, charge those flashlights—we’ve got a lot of darkness to wade through.
Let’s start with the basics of No More Room in Hell 2. While it may initially look like a Left 4 Dead clone, it’s far from it. Unlike the adrenaline-pumping race through hordes of zombies, No More Room in Hell 2 takes a slower, more deliberate approach. You’re not sprinting through chaotic stages with an endless swarm on your heels, and your resources are far from plentiful or reliable.
Instead, this game leans more into survival-shooter territory, resembling something closer to Escape from Tarkov than an action-packed FPS like Left 4 Dead 2 or Back 4 Blood.
This is made clear by the game’s unforgiving design: zombies are tougher to kill, visibility is nearly nonexistent, supplies are scarce, and the permadeath system adds a brutal finality to every mistake. Every action you take is a desperate attempt to survive just a little longer, and going on a killing spree is not just unwise—it’s often a death sentence that derails your progress.
To dive deeper into the gameplay, each round starts with you randomly spawning in one of several locations, isolated from the rest of your 8-man squad. Armed with minimal gear—a pipe, flashlight, magnum pistol, and just six bullets—you must scavenge for better equipment as you navigate toward the center of the map. This is where the final objective lies, along with the extraction point that stands between you and survival.
Your first real challenge is the overwhelming darkness, made slightly more bearable by your flashlight. But the light is fleeting, as your battery—and your stamina—are both limited. You’ll have to conserve them carefully while navigating through an ever-growing horde of zombies, hopping from one point of interest to the next in search of safety and supplies.
If you’re lucky, you’ll encounter other members of your squad, allowing you to use proximity voice chat to coordinate and survive together. Certain areas require minor objectives to unlock valuable caches of weapons and resources, demanding both teamwork and skill as you tackle a series of small minigames.
This cycle repeats until you reach the center of the map, hopefully with your squad intact, where the final challenge awaits: restarting a massive powerplant as a swarm of infected descends upon you. Once that’s complete, you can race to the extraction point, end the game, and claim whatever rewards you managed to gather during the run.
It’s an exciting premise on paper, but unfortunately, No More Room in Hell 2 falters in execution. The game's core isn’t flawed—it nails its visual style, game design, and balancing. Instead, the real issues lie in its optimization, matchmaking, and servers, which are so riddled with problems that the game is nearly unplayable, despite its strong foundation.
Both you and the infected often rubberband wildly whenever the server acts up, and just when you need precision most, your attacks will desync at the worst possible moments. The lack of dedicated servers across all regions only makes things worse, often creating a language barrier between squad members playing from different continents.
These technical issues, when combined with the game’s unforgiving difficulty, sensory deprivation, and brutal permadeath, create an experience that simply isn’t worth its $30 price tag. And that’s a real shame because Torn Banner did a remarkable job translating the game’s original gritty charm—born from the now-ancient Source Engine—into Unreal Engine, all while maintaining the same claustrophobic, high-stakes atmosphere that defined the original.
The audio work isn’t bad either, delivering a somber yet visceral soundscape that could have elevated the experience to zombie apocalypse heaven—if only the game weren’t constantly undermined by server issues.
When all is said and done, No More Room in Hell 2 feels far too early in its development to be released. I realize judging an early-access game is a bit like criticizing an uncooked turkey for lacking crisp and flavor, but forget about needing more time in the oven, this turkey hasn’t even been butchered yet!
I’m not sure what compelled Torn Banner to release such an underbaked, unoptimized early-access build, but if they don’t fix it soon, there’s no reason for you—or anyone in your squad—to even consider buying it. For now, it’s nothing more than the reanimated corpse of the original, masquerading as something new.
There Isn’t Enough Content in this Early-Access Build
Early Access is often a slow burn, with limited content while the game is in development—and I’m usually patient with that. But even by those standards, No More Room in Hell 2 offers an especially thin experience.
The game currently features only one map, a small selection of guns and melee weapons, a single zombie variant, and around 20 points of interest on the same map. This would be underwhelming for a work-in-progress, and it certainly doesn’t justify the $30 price tag for an early access build. Once you’ve figured out the weapon meta and core gameplay loop, there’s little replayability left—assuming you can even tolerate the persistent server issues long enough to develop that game sense.
Progression is Random and Unfun
There’s a fine line between brutally fun and frustratingly unfun gameplay, and No More Room in Hell 2 leans too far toward the latter, especially with its odd approach to permadeath. Essentially, your character starts as a blank slate but gains random bonuses every five levels, the EXP for which is earned by successfully extracting at the end of every game. The key word here is "successfully."
That’s right—if you die, even once, your build is wiped, and you’re sent back to square one with nothing. On one hand, this makes every death feel significant, forcing you to value survival. On the other hand, with the game’s server and matchmaking issues, you’re almost guaranteed to die from some frustrating rubberbanding at least once. There’s nothing more unsatisfying than losing progress due to something completely out of your control, and No More Room in Hell 2 is keen to let you suffer that more than once.
Literally No Tutorial Whatsoever
This game has no tutorial. And I don’t mean that as an exaggeration for an insufficient or barebones guide—I literally mean there’s no tutorial. Sure, it’s early access, so some things are bound to be missing, but for a game with such punishing difficulty, a tutorial is essential. Even a basic written guide or archive-style resource would have done the trick.
Instead, you get nothing. Don’t get me wrong, the lack of guidance adds to the game’s atmosphere, tossing players into the chaos and wishing them luck. That first hit of survival adrenaline feels great. But after that initial rush, it quickly turns into frustrating ignorance, compounded by unreliable servers and the kind of visibility you’d expect at the bottom of the ocean.
Will Mulch Your Graphics Card for No Reason at All
No More Room in Hell 2 is a significant graphical leap from the original, boasting a new engine, a realistic art style, and expansive environments. Normally, I’d be quick to praise such advancements, but most of the improvements are swallowed by the game’s oppressive darkness, leaving it feeling more like a $30 benchmark test than a visual upgrade.
Since darkness is a core part of the experience, the solution isn't simply brightening the game. Instead, what it really needs is optimization—better scaling and more graphical options for lower-end systems. On top of that, I have to question whether all the visual enhancements were even necessary. The charm of the original wasn’t in its high fidelity—it ran on the same engine as Team Fortress 2, after all!
There’s a Good Game Somewhere Under All This
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about No More Room in Hell 2 is that I can’t simply dismiss it as a bad game—because it isn’t. While its early access build has its fair share of issues, they aren’t insurmountable. Unlike something like Level Zero: Extraction, which suffered from core design flaws, No More Room in Hell 2 could actually be salvaged with more development and polish.
But as it stands now, weighed down by its numerous problems—both as a game and a product—it feels like it's already trapped in its own version of hell.
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No More Room In Hell 2 Product Information
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| Title | NO MORE ROOM IN HELL 2 |
|---|---|
| Release Date | Fall 2024 (Early Access) |
| Developer | Torn Banner Studios |
| Publisher | Torn Banner Studios |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Survival, Horror, Shooter |
| Number of Players | 1-8 |
| ESRB Rating | Mature |
| Official Website | No More Room In Hell 2 Website |
