No Room in Hell 2 Review – The Dead Shall Rise Again
The journey to the 1.0 version of No Room in Hell 2 has been a long, bug-filled, and grueling road for Torn Banner Studio, but I’m glad to say that the studio has managed to pull everything together for this grand release, crafting possibly one of the greatest zombie experiences you can play right now.
Regardless if you’re a fan of the series or a newcomer, there might be something for you here. Even if you’re tired of zombie games, you might be surprised at what you’ll experience in No Room in Hell 2.
Curious? Read on for our full review.
Night of the Living Dead
In No Room in Hell 2, you play as an emergency responder tasked with going on survival missions. It doesn’t have a traditional story in the sense that you play through a linear narrative like, say, Left 4 Dead. It’s a pick-and-choose type of structure, where you spawn on a map with a goal to complete. It’s more like an episode per map, each having its own different story, but it’s not exactly narratively driven, though each map does have a story to tell if you pay enough attention. In one, you’ll be venturing off to a town tasked with saving survivors, which involves you going through a string of missions to help them evacuate. In another, you’ll explore a large hospital facility, seeking medical supplies and such. A brief call from someone over the radio telling you what needs to be done is about as much “story” content that you get, but having this grand narrative arc and cinematic scripted moments isn’t what No Room in Hell 2 is even about.
No, it’s a game about surviving and doing that together with a group of friends (or randoms), as the game supports up to 8-player co-op, throwing them onto a vast map filled with objectives to complete. For those new to the series, think more along the lines of Left 4 Dead, but with John Romero zombies rather than your frantic, blood-thirsty sprinters from L4D that are similar to ones in 28 Days Later or World War Z. That may not sound all too scary, but like Left 4 Dead, No Room in Hell 2 manages to set a dread-inducing atmosphere where every dark corner, flickering light, and distant groan keeps you constantly on edge. They may not be charging at you like some crack addict on a really bad day, but their sheer numbers, coupled with claustrophobic, pitch-black environments, make every slow-moving shambler feel like an inescapable threat.
You laugh at the idea of a character in a movie or show dying to zombies that move slower than a sloth, but No Room in Hell 2 really demonstrates just how threatening things can be when you’re put in the shoes of those very characters with all its survival mechanics. A stamina system that makes you question your movement, no health regen that you can abuse by simply running away, limited visibility, and scarce ammunition. This isn’t some gun-ho hero type of game where you can just shoot your way out of every situation. It’s not necessarily a hardcore survival game either, so those worried about an experience closer to, say, DayZ, where hunger, thirst, and several other micromanagement mechanics come into play, don’t be, as this isn’t that kind of game.
But it’s not to say there are no risks, as dying during a match can result in permadeath, which wipes your character’s level, skills, gear, and currency spent, as they are now completely dead. The lower difficulties aren’t much on the risk, but once you start playing on the harder ones, every single encounter carries real, terrifying stakes. To help counteract a character’s permadeath, a new feature, the Rescue Beacon, has been added with the 1.0 update, allowing you to keep your character upon death in exchange for one of these beacons. It’s a neat feature to have, as while leveling isn’t all too much of a grind, players can easily become attached to their characters and builds they’ve made for them.
There are two types of game modes: the mission-structure one that’s been there since the start of early access, and survivor mode. The general gameplay loop on the mission-based levels essentially revolves around completing objectives, and as you complete them, the zombie horde grows more and more frequent. You scavenge loot, kill zombies, complete objectives, and then extract from the map. I do want to point out that, while it may sound like an extraction shooter, it most definitely isn’t one. It has similarities to one, but lacks PvP, and loadouts aren’t kept after a run, which is a huge part of any extraction shooter. The risk of permadeath looms forever, but ultimately what we have is cooperative survival horror at its absolute finest, where teamwork, tension, and atmosphere take center stage, not the threat of another player trying to get your gear.
Survival mode is your classic round-based zombie mode where you prepare for a horde of zombies. You have preparation time to barricade doors and windows and to collect weapons and other items. Once you’re ready, the phase will end, with some loudspeakers playing at an objective point and your task of making sure the zombies don’t break it. It’s a mode that’s built for a group of players, rather than a few (mission mode can be completed in duo on lower difficulties), and it’s an absolute blast with more players. Permadeath can also occur in this mode; it’s definitely a higher-stakes mode because of it, since it’s round-based and brings a swarm of zombies directly to you, while you fight in close-quarter areas.
Solo play is also available in the 1.0 release via Solo Training Mode, though it comes with some limitations, such as no character progression or permadeath. The big reason on the progression side is that the studio didn’t want players to farm and “break” the game’s economy. But seeing that this is a cooperative game, with no PvP, I’ve always been in the boat of who actually cares about that stuff when most just want to be as prepared as possible, without relying on randoms or getting all your friends together for a game night. That’s just me though, and I do understand the reasoning, even if I don’t entirely agree with it.
Good, Bad, I’m the Guy With the Gun
Combat-wise, you’ll be relying on both melee and firearms. The melee combat does feel a bit off at times, with blows that should be connecting missing, or the ones that should stagger a zombie being ignored, despite taking the damage, causing you to trade blows. I wish the melee combat was a bit more responsive and had better feedback when attacking zombies, as I can see it being a much bigger annoyance in the harder difficulties. For the most part, gunplay feels fine. I had to turn aim assist off while I was using a controller cause it does snap weirdly, to the point that it’s off target. I will say that ammo did feel plentiful, not to the point where you’ll amass an entire armory of it, but enough to get you through certain situations when you really need it.
As you collect survival material and extract with your team, you’ll gain XP to level up and earn rerollable skill slots, which also have their own levels. These skills are attached to a character, so if they are permadeath, you lose them all. It’s a very interesting idea, one I rather like as it makes you care more about your character, along with the skills you pick. As with any multiplayer game nowadays, there are weekly missions that grant you credits and merit points, which can be used to unlock character cosmetics. Again, these are tied to your character and will be lost should you meet your unfortunate demise. And while you don’t carry your character loadouts from previous runs, you can go in with a loadout to help get you started. There are no Character Level requirements for loadouts either, something introduced with the 1.0 update.
Progression feels relatively fair, and more player-catering, rather than a grindfest.
I do have some irks, some of which are addressable. I’ll start with the UI and its controller support. Given that this was a pre-release 1.0 version, it’s possible that not everything is functional yet, but we did notice countless UI elements that were downright broken, or made changing settings an absolute pain. Going through graphical options and toggling, only for it to kick me to the very top of the scroll list, was a pretty big annoyance. There are things that simply don’t work in the UI, too, like some text not scrolling, and on controller navigation, it just felt unresponsive in parts of the main menu. There are plenty of parts of the UI that could be improved. Most of these are layout-related, which I’m sure will be updated as more community feedback comes in post-launch. In its current state, it feels clunky to navigate the menu with a controller, and even with a mouse and keyboard, some things just didn’t work.
I think the one thing that will be much harder to address is the game’s general repetitiveness. This all depends on the person, and obviously, since this is a multiplayer game, they are, by their nature, designed to get repetitive quickly to keep you in some sort of grind loop. So complaining about a multiplayer game being repetitive is a pretty moot point in many instances. I don’t actually have any problem with the core loop of No More Room in Hell. I love the tension of dropping into a pitch-dark map, filled with zombies at every corner, as a group of friends and I fight our way through hoards of them. What we didn’t like were the objectives themselves during each mission. They vary from mission to mission, but once you start one, that particular mission is essentially littered with the same objective types.
Stand here for five minutes while a progress bar fills, then go do that again five to six more times. Or search some corpse for an objective item, and then proceed to do that several more times through the mission. It’s not so much that the objectives are boring; it’s more about how often they’re used during a mission that makes them feel tedious. I would love to see much more variety between objectives that don’t involve us going from point A to Z, while doing the exact same thing from the start. There are plenty of objectives in the game, but they are grouped together (despite the randomization) in specific missions, which start to feel like padding that drags down an otherwise terrifying, adrenaline-fueled atmospheric horror experience. Is it still fun? Absolutely, but I would love to see more objective variety mixed in. This has been an issue since early access started, and though it’s gotten better, it’s a major area of the game I want to see Torn Banner improve even more in later updates.
Dead Inside
There are other issues here and there, but I suppose the big question that many of you early access players are wondering about is regarding the level of polishing and optimization. With the 1.0 update, Torn Banner is bringing over 8,000 community-driven bug fixes and optimizations, and it really shows. I’ve played my fair share of early access titles, and normally only the ones that feel good from the get-go make it out in such a short timeframe. The ones that don’t, well, those tend to remain bug-ridden even after their big release. No Room in Hell 2 was far from in a good state when it first released, and although it’s been better since, every update that fixed something seemed to break something else.
So performance and optimization have always been at the top of players’ lists, and having already invested tens of hours in the 1.0 version, I have to say I am surprised by how polished it feels. It honestly feels like a day-and-night difference here with how smoothly the game plays, and how few bugs I’ve encountered during my time. It’s not to say it’s bug-free, and some things need tweaking, but I was fully expecting the 1.0 to be more of a mess. It’s not, far from it. Now I do have to point out that I am playing on a high-end PC (9800X3d, RTX 4090), but even my fellow staffers who are running on considerably weaker hardware, both in terms of GPU and CPU, were able to play the game near-flawlessly. I’m surprised by how smoothly the 1.0 runs, especially given that it’s built on Unreal Engine 5, an engine known for its performance issues.
Optimization is so good that the game now officially supports the Steam Deck as of 1.0. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to test this myself, but it makes me excited to see the possibility of a Nintendo Switch 2 version down the road.
What I did want to talk about is how damn good this game looks. Much of that is the way lighting and art direction work together to create a hauntingly atmospheric world that makes every dark hallway and fog-drenched field feel terrifying. It’s not aiming for super-realism, and it’s not setting some sort of graphical benchmark or anything like that. But for the type of game that it is, it certainly feels like something you would see out of a zombie movie. That George A. Romero Living Dead vibe definitely oozes everywhere in this game.
The sound design keeps the creepy level high up there, especially when you get infected yourself and start hearing voices, trying to guide you to your impending doom.
It’s a very good showcase of Unreal Engine 5, and if you’re jumping from the first game, it definitely has that “next-gen” look going for it.
Hell on Earth Is Finally Here
I had my worries that Torn Banner wasn’t going to be able to pull it off, but to my surprise they have, and No More Room in Hell 2’s final 1.0 release feels like the game we’ve all been waiting for since the start of early access. That’s not to say it won’t disappoint some fans, especially those of the original. But as far as an experience goes, this is precisely the kind of zombie game that I have been waiting for, delivering on an intense cooperative horror loop, where every single bullet, dark corridor, and desperate team-up carries real weight. It’s tense, atmospheric, and downright terrifying when things go sideways—and for modern survival horror fans, that makes it an absolute must-play.
Pros
- 8-player co-op makes for an amazing experience in both mission and survival mode
- Visuals and sound design - Really captures that John Romero movie vibe
- Performance and optimization - 1.0 brings drastic needed optimization
- Permadeath, stamina management, and limited resources give every encounter real weight without feeling like a tedious grind.
Cons
- Repetitive objectives - These can get old quick.
- UI needs more work, as does controller support.
- Solo Training Mode lacks character progression and permadeath, limiting its appeal for offline players.
No Room in Hell 2 review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.
Stay connected to MP1st and the latest news by following us on Bluesky, X, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Google News.
