No More Room In Hell 2
- fafferyttv
- May 1
- 4 min read
I never played the first No More Room in Hell. I had no idea what I was getting into here. It was frustrating, but in a good way. I think games that make you feel like losses are your own fault are the right kind of frustrating. It makes getting better at the game that much more satisfying.
First of all, I recommend playing public games to start. The game lobby size is 8 and the party size is also 8. You can do private lobbies with your friends, but if you don't have a full lobby of 8 players you'll be at a disadvantage, especially when you're new. That said, experienced players can definitely get away with smaller lobbies.
So how does the game work? You start by rolling a random character. You have 3 slots you can roll for free, and you're presented with 3 choices every time you roll a character. You can spend resources to reroll the choices, but I never felt the need to do so. Characters die permanently, but they generally level up really fast in public lobbies where your team extracts with lots of resources, so don't worry too much about it. On average, a fresh character jumps from level 1 to 20 upon extraction in most of the public lobbies I've been in.
You get to pick a random skill from a choice of 3 every 5 character levels. Some skills are account level locked, and others require your character to already have certain other skills. You can't re-pick skills, but you'll generally move through characters fast enough at the beginning that you'll get to try lots of different combinations.
You'll usually spawn in alone, although there is one map where the players spawn in 2 groups of 4. Your job is to pick your way through the map picking up tools and resources, and doing sub-objectives with loot room rewards until you meet up with friends, then make your way to the center of the map where the main map objectives are.
The inventory is shown as a radial menu where heavier items take up more of the circle, and you can see how much space you have left by how much of the circle is empty. Tools like weapons, throwables, and healing items take up space in your inventory, but resource items don't. Examples of resource items are wires, phones, tablets, water filters, and filtration masks. They are generally teal-coloured, so they're easy to identify when you're looting in a hurry. Instead of taking up space in your inventory, they're added to your resource score which gives you the nice "big number go up" feeling when you find a bunch of stuff at once.
By default, you'll be added to a group automatically when you get near another player. If you queued with friends, you will be grouped from the start and you will be able to see each other on the map. Eventually, everyone merges into a single group with all players, and you can see each other's resource counts and status in the top left of the screen.
It should be noted that this isn't a horde shooter like Left 4 Dead or World War Z. You're not meant to run around killing every zombie, and using guns is generally a last resort for when the surrounding zombies know you're there and they're in the way of somewhere you need to go. It's really easy to get hit by zombies, sometimes you can even get hit when you were expecting to stagger them with a blunt weapon. The most reliable way to interrupt a zombie attack is with a shove, but it takes quite a chunk of stamina. If you let your stamina get too low, it's easier for the zombies to grab you, which comes with a long stun lock during which you're vulnerable. Being aware of your surroundings is very important.
There is a possibility of a zombie spawning right behind you. I'm not sure if this is a bug, but it's a very poor design decision if not. This is the only bad situation I've encountered that doesn't feel like my own fault, and I hope it changes.
The general meta at the time of writing is to chop the legs off the zombies and let them crawl around so as not to trigger the aforementioned spawns, but I feel that having a sea of crawlers around isn't great either, especially at the last sequence where you need to do an objective in one area. I've generally had more success when my team actually clears the zombies and watches each others' backs while rushing the objectives.
In summary, the game is difficult and frustrating to start with while you're coming to grips with the combat and the looting process, but it's easy to recognise what you did wrong, which will make you want to come back and try things differently again and again.
The game is currently sitting at 26 SGD on Steam, and the price is projected to rise closer to launch. There seems to be a sale every month or so, I picked my copy up at 20.80 SGD. Updates are very consistent, there has been an update every month so far which you can see in the roadmap in the main menu. I didn't expect it, but it looks like I'll be playing this one for a while. It's a good time both solo and with friends.
