This week, Torn Banner Studios (authors of the Chivalry series) has released their new game on Steam in early access format: No More Room in Hell 2, a sequel to the classic mod of Half-Life 2 with a zombie cooperative mode for eight players. The game should not be very complicated on paper, but it seems that the Canadian team has struggled with development nonetheless. The launch could hardly have gone worse on the Valve platform, with a “mostly negative” user review average.
Only 15% of the 967 reviews published at the time of writing this are positive, numbers that rival those of the highly controversial Overwatch 2 or the special case of The Day Before. Considering TBS has a good development history, the question is: what happened?
Where No More Room in Hell 2 has failed
Reviewing the reviews, one encounters so many issues that it is difficult to point in one direction and say “there is the root cause”. However, several users agree on ideas such as the game’s abysmal performance on PC, not looking or responding even as an alpha, being plagued with errors like enemies teleporting or not registering hits properly, and not feeling faithful to the first game.
Some of these criticisms may be due to its online nature and the stability issues that sometimes occur in these launches, but others are of design. User Minlona describes it this way: “I don’t understand what they were thinking by releasing an alpha and asking us to buy it. Even if I try to understand it, I still don’t see why they removed the best things from the original, like inventory or user mods, and call it a sequel. The optimization is so bad that it affects gameplay.”
According to the game’s Steam page, Torn Banner plans to keep it in an early access state until “sometime in 2025” without specifying. Additionally, it is explained that new features will be implemented before the release of version 1.0, such as Infection mode, new zombie types, or a new map. No More Room in Hell 2 takes the premise of releasing eight people in different random points of a huge map and relying on them to come together to join forces and survive the surrounding zombie horde.
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