Recent reviews by Vanta

I think this game is one of the VR GOATS.

It's probably got some of the most satisfying melee combat, and it's actually fairly difficult and has a pretty decent skill curve.

Dialogue is pretty fun, and the boss fights are fun.

Pretty lite on roguelite mechanics, but they're there enough to be enjoyable.

Could use a little more bonus content such as some new weapons and stuff though

It's cool on paper, but the audio is completely busted and it's been this way for a year or so now. With no sign of the developer coming to fix it

Alright, I'm finally updating this review.

The game is in a MUCH better place now than on launch, but it still has a tiny bit to go but we at the very least have an idea of what's coming later down the track.


For starters, the game is a lot more stable now, significantly less bugs and problems, and the matchmaking doesn't seem so eager to match me with people who aren't speaking english.

Ammo has been made slightly more scarce, and it gets scarcer on higher difficulties as you rank up

The ammo is now a proper caliber system instead of generic "pistol ammo" or "rifle ammo"

Infection is here so there's a higher element of risk, and with it there's now the option to take one for the team and commit suicide if you're bitten so there's that now.



On what's to come, we've got a melee combat overhaul, some new weapons, more fixes, difficulty rebalancing, a proper roster system and loadout system for loading into matches and some new maps have been revealed.

I'm most interested in these new maps, they don't seem to be too close yet, they'll probably release in a few months but they seem to be a bit closer to the original NMIH in terms of design and layout, with more of a focus on smaller, more compact areas.


Either way, If you've still got the game I'd recommend checking it out, and if you don't consider purchasing it maybe around July or August, as there'll be more updates by then and we might have a new map or two to play on.



Review Revision Part 2: April "Reanimation" Update

With the new Reanimation update, No More Room in Hell 2 has easily been brought significantly to where it should have been for it's early access release, and the vision for it is significantly clearer. And it feels significantly closer to the original title in terms of gameplay and feeling.


The zombie hordes are now overwheming like the original, with massive numbers of shamblers constantly flooding the map, crawling out of bodybags, coffins, from under cars and dropping off of roofs to consume your flesh.

The difficulty has become boosted insanely, as infection is always a risk you take in combat and you're having to duck and weave through innumerable numbers of the dead. If you get cornered without an escape route? You're dead. There is never any reprive.

Combat has become much more dynamic, with more smooth feeling melee, kicking and the ability to swing from the left and right.

There's now also three maps in total, the original Power Plant mission that the game launched with, Lewiston (Also known as Waldoboro from the original pre-alpha concepts) and Pottsville.

Lewiston and Pottsville are the newest maps, and are both urban focused, similarly to the original maps in the first game like Broadway, Brooklyn, Junction.

The areas are more cramped, with tight stores and alleys separated by populated streets and courtyards.

You have to play a lot more crafty with the tight quarters, dead ends and constant chokepoints.



On the bad end of things, there's a distinct lack of servers. Australia here plays on terrible ping and we get stuck with the asian populace, meaning we do not get the luxery of teamplay or communication as no one speaks english properly.

I believe other regions are also experiencing poor servers and latency.

Zombie animations are also sometimes buggy, and some zombies can attack you straight through stagger.

If I could mixed review this I would.


There is some damn good stuff here. The whole persistent corpses, bugs climbing over their dead, building and defending your base from hordes of bugs down to the shooting. All of this is dang good. In fact I'd even say pretty much all the core gameplay is good.

However, where it unfortunately starts to suffer is when you realise how janked together with spit and glue this game is.
It's very clearly built off of Squad's codebase, another game I have sunken a few hundred hours into

This means this game has some nasty problems
For 1. It's inherited Squad's poor performance, but ten times worse because it's somehow even worse in terms of optimization. If I were to guess, the whole issue is the amount of enemies being rendered on screen and the persistent corpses. I wouldn't sacrifice these mechanics for better performance but I do hope we get some better optimization in other places to loosen the bottleneck a bit
2. It's JANK in several places, from a number of bugs (And not the kind you can shoot) to just overall weirdness in some aspects (Why does the Engineer's mobile build tool ability have an 80 second cooldown???)
3. What's up with the weird company system and why is the new planet locked to it?
4. The game feels pretty poorly explained in terms of some mechanics so it can leave noobs wondering what the heck to do


Either way. The game is an enjoyable time and really does channel the spirit of Starship Troopers at it's peak moments, but you should expect a bumpy, windy road getting to those peak moments.


I'll review it as positive since i can atleast recommend you give it a shot. Play for like three hours and if you don't like it or are struggling too much refund it. Don't bother with the SOG solo play thing. It's terrible and Casper Van Dien can't save it as much as I wish he could.

It is a jank fest, it is a very early early access title and it has many problems and it is not remotely stable...

But on the other hand, the game's atmosphere and tension is hardly rivaled, the world feels ruined beyond repair and every escape is another day of life for you and your community of survivors.

Everything about this game feels like it was a game made by artists, conceptual and technical. Everything about this game feels unbelievable slick with style.

And when the gameplay comes together, it really hits just right.


I say, buy it to support it, or give it a few months or even a year in the oven and see where it's at. But so far it has some real potential

This game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lit. You can grappling hook onto missiles and fling yourself 100km at mach feck-off and then destroy a gunship whilst doing a flip all in the span of five seconds

marginally exaggerated but not far off. Buy it or suffer a boring life

It's so far mostly good in terms of gameplay besides some of the stupid balancing in campaign (It feels very much so like you're supposed to play in co-op. I am not playing in coop)

However, this feels like a console game ported to PC. The performance is terrible, the game starts on the wrong monitor and it nearly crashes every time I alt tab.

This really needed an extra month or two for a technical polishing pass.


To further extend my review after further playing and finishing the game:

For one, the game feels like it forces you to play too conservatively on higher difficulties, I played on Veteran (the difficulty labelled as the INTENDED EXPERIENCE) as I played the first game and i'm usually pretty competent at most similar titles.

The biggest reason for this is melee feels far too risky. If you fail one block, you can sometimes end up stunlocked and get half of your health deleted and you can get swarmed by insane amounts of enemies whilst ranged enemies do massive chip damage to your health.

The ways to gain health are insanely limited on Veteran+
The only way to heal is via righteous fury (Which takes forever to charge) or through stims (Which are utterly and insanely rare, and it feels like I can go through atleast two fights without finding one sometimes. Maybe even more)

The whole armor mechanic doesn't provide enough health and usually gets chipped away by ranged targets insanely quick

Guns feel INSANELY weak. It takes MULTIPLE bolt rifle rounds. Yes. The Bolt Rifle in this game feels weak. The key weapon of 40k, the most iconic weapon known for hitting like a truck feels weak because it does chip damage to anything above a hormagaunt.


It feels super bad to have to mag dump several mags of a bolt gun to kill one enemy, meanwhile an enemy with similar armaments can chunk your health down ridiculously quick.

On top of that, your AI teammates feel super incompetent and don't cover you at all.


The game is good in some aspects, visuals, story, feeling and overall fits 40k like a glove. But the difficulty is terribly unbalanced for Singleplayer, and the combat feels like it forces you to play too conservatively to compensate

So far, a neat game but I'm skeptical about it's future as an "esport"

It's essentially as someone else described it "Valorant and Counter-Strike with Bipolar DIsorder"

Kind of literally.

It's a 3v3 game in the traditional sense that you have six players in a match, three on either team. However, the catch here is each player is basically playing as two characters.

You have "You" and you have your spectre.

Your spectre is essentially a second physical body, and you can swap between you and your spectre.

Your spectre has all the same abilities as you and for all intents and purposes is basically just a second person you can play as.

You can also throw a puck a short distance which will make your other double that isn't active essentially teleport to it, after pathfinding to it which takes a few seconds depending on the distance it has to pathfind.

The buy system in this game is somewhat unique as your weapon buys essentially come in a bundle of two. One gun for "You" and one gun for your spectre.

Also your Spectre will always get the same weapon based on the tier you purchased that weapon from, so a tier 3 buy will always give your Spectre a basic standard assault rifle, however your main copy will be given a different weapon depending on what you picked in your buy, so in Tier 3 for example, you can buy an auto shotty, an LMG or a semi-automatic rifle that one taps to the head.

This essentially means your Spectre is going to be more or less overall a bit more general purpose jack of all trades master of none in terms of their weapon loadout, whilst your main copy is going to be a bit more specialized in some cases albeit they do get access to the better rifles than your copy.

Your abillty to move around and swap between your copies means you essentially can do a number of crazy things like trading yourself, baiting yourself, watching your own plant or your own defuse and a number of abilities tie directly into the duality system, like one of the classes being able to stealthily shift their body into a smoke cloud undetected.

In essence, a 3v3 match is actually a 6v6 in a sense.


However of course, unique concepts aren't everything and what really matters is... "Is the game actually good?"

The way i'll answer that question is this "Do you like Valorant?" You'll probably?? like it??
"Do you like Counter Strike?" You miiiight like it with an asterisk*
"Do you hate Valorant?" You won't like it.
"Do you hate Counter Strike?" You probably won't like it.

At it's core, this game very deeply copies Valorant, with some hints of Counter Strike being copied.
Some of the areas in some of the maps for example, like one of the bomb sites on the map Mills is directly copied from Cache from Counter Strike.
The UI is copied directly from Valorant.
The visual style for the environments is copied from Valorant.

It's also basically a hero shooter like Valorant, albeit not very obviously as there are no "characters", just different ability kits. But in gameplay it's basically a hero shooter.

it's baaarely a few steps ahead of being a Valorant clone, albeit it doesn't do a terrible job at being a clone atleast.

The gunplay feels crisp enough, it's decently easy to read and the overall balancing is in an okay-ish spot, albeit there are some parts that feel a bit messy in terms of balance.

However, this is also a free to play title, and it comes with all the monetary bells and whistles that most F2P titles have, albeit the monetization in this game is PARTICULARLY bad.

For 1. The prices of skin bundles range up to 150 Australian Dollars, that's a lot of money.
2. You can't buy skins in these bundles individually like you can in Valorant.
3. You can never buy the exact amount of currency to buy these skins
4. The quality of these skins so far aren't anything to really fawn over compared to CS or Valorant
And in my opinion, even worse
5. Grinding to unlock new classes is a terribly long process, with presumably weeks of grinding just to unlock ONE class.
6. You can however BUY THEM for 15 dollars instantly


I don't know how low Shroud's pockets are getting, but this is simply egregious. Some of the worst free to play monetization in any recent western game ever made, and I've seen some nasty monetization. (Albeit, you can't top any Asian market title for extreme monetization)



Ultimately, I think it's worth a shot to see if you MIGHT like it and so far I've been enjoying it, but it's not a perfect experience and those who don't like Valorant's take on the competitive shooter genre won't get much out of it, and it's unlikely to replace Valorant's spot on the throne, but I can see it keeping a community if the developers keep working on it regularly. I'd hate to see this go the way of Due Process.

So far, this game is utterly excellent. I haven't finished it yet, but so far this has got to be a damn great FPS and dare I say it's quite rapidly climbed to my favorites. Try it out!

If I could make a neutral review I would, but ah well. I'll put it as positive because this game does legitimately deserve it.
Largely due to the whole game being completely unavailable legally in 170+ countries and the whole PSN requirement for Multiplayer connectivity. At least singleplayer doesn't require PSN. I suspect the whole shindig is for them to eventually try to sell PS+ to the PC market which as far as I'm concerned is a big no-no and I'll very quickly lose any support for Playstation in future. Still, on the other hand...

I will say this, the game is ENTIRELY excellent. It feels like a tribute of love to the Kurosawa films and it is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cinematic and visually stunning.

Whilst it does follow largely a pretty standard open world format of "Do sidequests, raid camps and outposts, do random collectathons, and do a heap of side missions and quests" I think it does the format pretty well.

But the format isn't why this game is great.

The combat, stealth and the sheer amounts of saucy good FLAVOR this game has in those aspects makes it damn well friggin' incredible.

No game has captured the feeling of being a samurai, or even a damn shinobi assassin aswell as this game does.

Sure, the actual combat mechanics are basically arkham mechanics, but the sheer feeling of chopping enemies apart is insanely satisfying, from dropping smoke bombs and then slicing three people apart in the smoke, or poisoning your enemies and making them vomit blood, to simply standing your ground, and killing five guys with five strikes as they each charge at you to take a turn at you.

Everything is so incredibly well done I can't hate it. I just can't. It feels incredible and feels like I'm playing a Kurosawa film, but I'm the lead protagonist, and I'm the one with the sword.

Even the story is really good, and it feels respectful to the culture of how it portrays Feudal Japan during the Mongolian invasion of Tsushima.

Admittedly, as someone who enjoys reading up about real history, Tsushima takes a LOT of liberty in that regard, although it's intentional largely.

Concepts like Bushido, Katanas, even Samurai themselves weren't really quite a thing back during the Invasion of Tsushima, that is to say everything is portrayed relatively well, despite how it's kind of anachronistic to the period Japan was in at the time.
Realistically Jin should be a simple warrior, and he should be carrying a Tachi instead of a Katana. But those are really nitpicks at the end of the day, because it still pays a lot of respect to the culture.


Also this is the only game that's basically made me cry from cuteness, because of the damn foxes. The foxes are too damn cute for their own good. CURSE YOU SUCKER PUNCH FOR MAKING THE FOXES ADORABLE.


Either way, I'd definitely recommend you try it out if you're looking for a damn good Open World experience. Everything oozes with love and quality. This game was made by incredibly talented people and I'd love to see a sequel one day.