PC Gamer - March 2012

FREE GAMES STUFF FROM THE WEB DownloaDs

Hands out, shambling instead of running— this zombie clearly just wants a hug.

Half-dead, too
2

mod No more room iN Hell fills Half-life 2 with zombies

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REDISCOVER ThE jOYS Of SAN
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No More Room in Hell has been—appropri- ately enough—in a development hell of its own since Half-Life 2 came out way back in 2004. After five years of hard work on their Romero zombie-movie mod, the mod team decided to start again from scratch. Now, at last, it’s been released in a semi-playable state.

The game pitches straggly survivors against hordes of the undead, in missions that involve getting the survivors to a safe zone, intact. But even if its cooperative zombie-smashing errs on the side of Valve’s own Left 4 Dead, it’s still impressive for a mod made by a handful of people. It’s a far trickier endeavor than Valve’s game, for starters: these zombies are slow-moving but tough, and more often than not, it’s death at first bite.

Other big differences include a doubling of the
party size, which results in a bunch of clones of
Patrick Bateman or Walter Sobchak running
around—like an American Psycho or Big Lebowski
convention, but with zombies. Get bitten enough
and you’ll transform into a zombie yourself—
which is, after all, the way it normally works in
the movies.
Despite its numerous flaws, No More Room in
Hell has a rugged charm all of its own. The levels
are detailed and well-designed versions of real-
life locales such as New York’s Chinatown, and
the shambling zombies are detestable without
looking too much like Valve’s own
Infected. They’ve also been cleverly
motion-captured by means of a
hacked Kinect—something that
wouldn’t have been possible if
the team hadn’t rebooted their
project. Even the amateur
sound design works quite well,
with a score that would be at
home in a grimy ’70s horror flick.
It’s definitely in beta at the
moment, though. Unless you’re lucky,
you’ll spend half an hour waiting for a vacant
in-game slot to come up only for the game to
crash. It’s in definite need of polish, but there’s
an incredible amount of potential here. One to
keep a dislodged eye on. Henry Winchester