No More Room in Hell 2 has been quietly grinding through Early Access since October 2024, and if you’d asked me a year ago whether Torn Banner had a real shot at breaking through the noise of a busy 2026 gaming calendar, I would have easily said no. But now, after playing the 1.0 update over the last week, and the first time since it launched in Early Access, I think they have a real shot. But there is one thing promised in this update that fumbles hard. It’s a real shame because without that fumble, this really could have been up there with one of the all-time great zombie games.
Loading into any of the maps in objective mode in No More Room in Hell 2, what always struck me immediately wasn’t the setting or the enemy count; it was how quiet everything is. The music wasn’t swelling to warn me that danger’s near, no glowing waypoint dragging you toward the objective. It was just pure environmental design selling the fact that the zombies have come, and could be anywhere. The silence in No More Room in Hell 2 does more heavy lifting than any jump scare could, and it’s the clearest sign Torn Banner still understands what they’re building on top of.
This is still fundamentally the same pitch as 2011: you’re not a superhero mowing down hordes, you’re a scared civilian or first responder with a crowbar and a handful of bullets, trying to survive by being quiet, being smart, and trusting the people next to you more than your own trigger finger. In a genre that has been bloated since the early 2000s, it’s a nice treat when one comes along and proves it can stand on its own two feet by being unique and extremely unsettling.
Combat in No More Room in Hell 2 is deliberately clumsy in the way that makes you feel like an everyday person, but not to a frustrating degree. Swinging a crowbar has weight and recovery time, and overcommitting on a swing with three zombies converging on a doorway will put you in a tough situation if everyone isn’t pulling their own weight. The tension can be felt in almost every aspect of the game; take ammo management for another example. It isn’t a suggestion; it’s something that, based on how well you do it, can make an objective or surviving a wave impossible or doable.
“The silence in No More Room in Hell 2 does more heavy lifting than any jump scare could, and it’s the clearest sign Torn Banner still understands what they’re building on top of.”
There were times when something as simple as a single shotgun shell was worth running back through a burning room and taking some damage for, and that kind of real stakes over a stingy resource is something most co-op survival games wish they could pull off. Barracading is something else worth spending time over especially if you need to give yourself some time to take a breath, I can not overstate that once the noise kicks up and you have made yourself known to the zombies there feels like there is no escape from the never ending horrors, especially after you shoot a gun, it makes what you do in an given situation life or death and it is a great feeling.
The new content added in the 1.0 launch of No More Room In Hell 2 backs that atmosphere up. Raven Rock, the new map, is dense in a way that rewards the slower, paranoid playstyle the game is built around, full of sightlines that turn into chokepoints and rooms where you have to decide if one more medkit is worth the noise. The rural farmstead, drawing obvious inspiration from Night of the Living Dead, is a standout too, a cramped farmhouse surrounded by open, exposed fields that force a genuinely uncomfortable choice between the safety of four walls and the mobility of open ground.
It’s some of the best level design Torn Banner has put into this series. The new eight-player Survival Mode, sectioned defence with supply drops and an extraction vehicle, plays like the natural endpoint of what Objective Mode was always getting at, though it’s a faster, punchier, wave-based experience that trades away the slow dread of the core mode for something closer to a more conventional horde mode.
I found it fun for twenty minutes, a good onramp for newcomers, but not where this game’s heart is. There’s also a solo mode stripping out permadeath and character progression, which feels a little like the game apologizing for how brutal it can be with a full squad, but also at the same time feels a little degrading for single-player focus people.
Torn Banner really made the game performance and bugs do a 180 in No More Room In Hell 2 1.0, because there was a time when last I hopped into the game it was pretty janky. There used to be a ton of frame stuttering, crashes and straight-up zombie nonsense. But for now, the majority of that is gone, and it really does feel like a brand new game if, like me, it’s been since the game came out in EA two years ago that you jumped in. There was only one time the game crashed on me, but there is one glaring issue that I was most looking forward to that ends up being, not only disappointing, but a downright problem.
That’s the controller support on PC, and it’s a shame that here’s where I have to stop being generous with how I feel about the game. I went in with four different pads: an 8BitDo, a Steam Controller, an Xbox pad, and a PS5 DualSense. I figured that with the game now shipping on PS5 and Xbox alongside PC for the first time in the franchise’s history, this would finally be the moment Torn Banner nailed the support I have been hoping for since day one. That’s been a running complaint since the sequel’s earliest days, and it pains me to say that it fumbled HARD.
Every controller I tried fought me in ways that went beyond simple jankiness. Aiming would switch me over to mouse inputs, menu navigating randomly stopped registering inputs or would switch between needing to use mouse and a gamepad, and more than once I got locked out of interacting with an object entirely because the game seemed to forget my controller existed mid-task.
It’s functionally being unable to progress in No More Room In Hell 2 unless you drop the controller and finish the match you are in on mouse and keyboard. And having to do anything with the inventory management became an absolute nightmare, especially since my menu selection would frequently switch from controller to cursor, so the thumbsticks would move instead of moving over an item as a selectable object.
It turns it into a slow, arduous process that really takes all the steam out of the game, and every time I tried to play with a controller, it had me asking, “Why tout this as an upgrade when it’s actively making the game worse?” I adjusted sensitivity, toggled aim assist on and off, tried every combination the settings menu offers, and that’s also why I tried four different controllers, trying both the Bluetooth and wired connection for the ones that offered, and nothing fixed it.
This isn’t news to Torn Banner if you scroll through any of the No More Room In Hell 2 discussion threads on Steam. They have been flagging this since the earliest Early Access builds, some players pointing out it locks Steam Deck owners out entirely, others noting it’s a genuine accessibility issue for anyone who can’t comfortably use mouse and keyboard for long stretches. Torn Banner has acknowledged the gap and says tuning is coming, which is good to hear, but this is one of the big changes they pushed for in the 1.0 release. This also makes me curious and hesitant to see how it plays on console.
What Torn Banner has built is a genuinely tense, occasionally nerve-shredding co-op horror game that respects its 2011 roots more than almost anything else available right now. If you’re playing No More Room In Hell 2 on PC and comfortable parked at a desk with a mouse, you’re going to have a great time. But 1.0 is supposed to mean the training wheels are off, and on controller, they’re very much still on. There’s a genuinely great co-op horror game buried in here. Right now, it’s a mediocre one in a great one’s clothing.
