How No More Room In Hell 2 creates zombie horror through its intense gameplay

Co-op zombie survival experience No More Room In Hell 2 innovates on its predecessor with its new permadeath feature, and it's brutal.

Silence. There’s nothing quite like it. In some ways, it’s a moment of calm in a frantic world, but in others it’s deafening, allowing your thoughts (and fears) to run wild. It’s this silence that No More Room In Hell 2 plays upon, dropping you unceremoniously into a zombie-infested world where you either fight or die. Launching just in time for Halloween, Torn Banner’s hardcore survival game is the perfect co-op experience for you and your friends, but it doesn’t pull its punches.

You appear on the outskirts of a huge, hulking power plant in the middle of rural Pennsylvania. You’re alone: you don’t spawn in with one of your eight squadmates. Instead, you’re left scrounging in the dirt for supply items, hunting for discarded weapons, and hoping that you’ll find someone to group up with. Your No More Room In Hell 2 journey begins with a sense of pure desperation.

As you scour abandoned buildings and once-loved homes, you’ll discover various reagents and materials. Among these, however, are supply items, which grant your Responder XP that, in turn, lets them level up their abilities. While these don’t take up inventory space, all of your other items do, forcing you to make careful, calculated choices about what eventually ends up in your tattered old backpack.

As a result, each new match offers fresh opportunities. Power Plant’s map is absolutely huge, meaning there’s a variety of rotating spawn points. In some ways, that’s even more eerie – once you think you’ve got to grips with everything, the formula changes, plunging you and your squad into chaos once more.

But, thankfully, there’s the familiarity of your teammates. You’re all trying to achieve the same thing: get good gear, and then get the heck out of dodge. No More Room In Hell 2 uses proximity chat, meaning you’ll only hear your allies if you’re close to them (thankfully the game is fully PvE, so there’ll be no zombies moaning down the mic). There’s the adrenaline rush of realizing someone’s nearby; the spike of dopamine as it dawns on you that you are, in fact, not entirely alone. That first interaction is oh-so-sweet, and collecting more and more teammates replaces that feeling of pure isolation with a sense that maybe – just maybe – you can make it out alive.

As your group expands, you can make use of ‘group up,’ which expands the proximity chat’s radius and allows you to hear comrades from further away. This is essential to No More Room In Hell 2’s tactical gameplay, which relies on solid teamwork and bulletproof (or bite-proof) strategizing.

You see this in action first-hand as the team approaches the looming Power Plant, the central extraction point of the game’s flagship map. With multiple entry points, you’ll have to complete various objectives along the way depending on which route you take, including fixing wiring, fuelling the relevant generators, replacing fuses, and opening padlocks. One entrance forces you to tackle the infamous bridge from the epic Gamescom 2024 trailer, which forces you into close-quarters combat with hordes of shambling undead. You’ll need to use discarded crates, cars, and other climbable objects to get out of reach if your health starts to blink, and you have to rely on your melee skills to get by. If you prefer to pop heads from afar, you’ll be left bringing up the rear – but keep your wits about you, because something’s probably following you.

Infiltrating the Power Plant relies on a series of difficult objectives, too, meaning you’ll be running back and forth through different buildings and rooms searching for the correct keypad pin, or the right switch to flick. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on your surroundings, as open lockers may give you extra supply items, or you may find some useful weapons to add to your collection. As you ascend, however, the threat only grows, as the ominous control room lies ahead, and you’ll need to work together to switch the plant on and, in turn, call in the escape chopper.

But there’s more. Unlike its predecessor, No More Room In Hell 2 includes Permadeath, meaning that when you die, you die. All of that work would be for nothing, and your team’s now down a person, making their lives a lot harder. Best to memorize all of those different zombies and what they do, then, otherwise you’re just another walking corpse.

The stakes are dramatically higher as a result. What No Room In Hell 2 does so well is make you feel like you’re a survivor; you are Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead. A single error can be catastrophic for both you and your teammates, and it can set you back entirely. It challenges your morality – should you risk it all to save a downed comrade, or let them die to safeguard your own gear? I know what I’d pick.

So strategy is key. Make sure you’re closing doors and building barricades as you go, otherwise the infected will be able to overwhelm you very, very quickly. Keep an eye out for explosive barrels and flammable equipment, which can help you toast your foes from afar. Conserve your ammunition – make every shot count; after all, you may need to kill your own teammates if they get infected.

From start to finish, No More Room In Hell 2 feels cinematic. There’s tension in those moments of silence; terror as a lone gunshot pierces the night. There’s that ‘phew’ moment when you find your teammates, then the anguish of seemingly overwhelming odds as you see the undead shamble at you in droves. No More Room In Hell plays with your emotions, tugs on your morals, and forces you to think like a survivor.

No Room In Hell 2 releases in early access on Tuesday, October 22, just in time for the spookiest day of the year. You can pick it up on Steam or the Epic Games Store – are you up to the challenge?