Plays nothing like the mod for those checking this out who had played NMRIH1, so be warned.

Overall my experience has been pretty negative with this one.

To be honest, I'm not even sure how the hell they can advertise this as a "8 player co-op action horror experience", when nobody spawns together and most players just end up dying anyway before meeting someone else but yet you're expected to group up on an oversized map whilst as an individual player you hold less power and agency as you did when you were solo in NMRIH1? I don't know, it just confuses me a touch by what TB decided to do here.

And I'll point out this game's biggest positive right now and that's the price, it's priced pretty nicely at £24.99. But the pricing does not cover up the fact this game has massive problems even if it's 'early access'. Difficulty wise, it's harder than NMRIH1 and not in the good way. It's "unfun levels of difficulty", it doesn't give me the feel of being challenged by the game or the maps like in NMRIH1 but more as if the devs are trying to clonk me on the head with their game design diploma repeatedly at every possible moment, think nmo_suzhou's finale but all over the map if the spawns instead were not scripted and instead constant and dynamically placed around you to keep the oppression up.

This game doesn't feel fair in the challenge department whereas in NMRIH1 most of your deaths would eventually fall down to you messing up or biting off more than you can chew, in NMRIH2 it's kind of forced especially with the fact everyone spawns separately with very little starting ability to fend off zeeks that are always on your back. It feels somewhat cheap and coupled with the character permadeath extraction shooter mechanics that were slapped in and well you've got quite frankly one of the biggest confusions ever for a sequel, considering the non-TB NMRIH2 was almost complete but got scrapped FOR THIS VERSION which I'm still trying to wrap my head around and understand why this happened in the first place.

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So my biggest gripes with this game so far;
The stamina system is awfully balanced; four light swings with any weapon and you're out of breath, heavy attacks drain you even faster and shoving takes a lot too. I don't remember NMRIH1 being this bad, or at least, NMRIH1's melee in tandem with the stamina system was both better paced and better balanced.

Melee system and balance is complete garbage; you'd think with TB jumping on, the devs of Chivalry that you'd get a melee system which is supposed to be an upgrade from NMRIH1, infact they decided to make it a absolute downgrade in terms of feel and balance. So far I just feel as if aiming my attacks at the head seems pointless, along with heavy attacks with most weapons, most noticeably the starting weapons being way less effective than just shove and light attack spamming. Ontop of that I cannot tell which weapon is supposed to be more effective than the other at dispatching zeeks, at least with NMRIH1 you could get a feel for the melee weapon hierarchy and even then a lot of melee weapons in NMRIH1 were closely matched with one another, you didn't feel defenceless unless you were stuck with a kitchen knife or your hands. I know that the starting melee weapons give you no real agency at all, which is a massive problem considering you start off on your own and zeeks tend to spawn in a radius around the player pretty consistently and constantly, have fun spending 6 or so light melee swings to take down one zombie whilst two more spawn near you.
Not only that, I've had trouble telling just how far my melee attacks can reach as well as the reach of the zombies towards my person, as your altered FoV doesn't scale the viewmodel to your current FoV, so if you stray away from the default, have fun with an additional learning curve.

Zombie variants that make no sense; why does a shambler that is covered in blood with red eyes magically take more melee swings than all the other zombies that aren't as bloody? NMRIH1 didn't have this, infact in NMRIH1 the only zeeks that took could potentially take more damage generally were the military zombies with helmets on outside of difficulty modifiers, so why does this game do this the way they do? Instead TB should probably make it so if a zombie has a stab-vest or military outfit on, MAKE those ones more tanky just like NMRIH1, not "lol blood here more chonk", it's bad and awful and quite frankly was a rude surprise when I found out I had to waste three stamina bars back to back just to expend this one zeek that had the +1 blood cloak of magical divine protection equipped, that gave it protection from blunt force trauma to the head.

Infinitely spawning zombies and runners inside objective areas; what the ♥♥♥♥ is this, nmo_suzhou on crack? If my character is unable to effectively clear zeeks of any kind because melee is generally weaker and slower than it was in NMRIH1 and ammo is hard to come by but also really easy to end up going through with the current spawn system. What chance do I have as a solo player after every other solo responder has died at the start of the game to finish the match? Seemingly none, that's what. At least with most NMRIH1 maps barring a few exceptions, you could slowly but surely carve your way through the crowd as well as duck and dive, but this isn't as much of the case in NMRIH2 as zeeks seem to just spawn anywhere you aren't looking, around you and nearby you. And before people go "but NMRIH1 had infinitely spawning zombies all over the map", yes, but like I pointed out, you could at least make some room and push forward with the objective, especially in a team, which is less of the case in NMRIH2, doubly so if you're on your own, which is crap at the moment, given everyone spawns separately from one another.

Simplified inventory and firearm calibres;, Whilst I do think the new inventory is both a blessing and a curse and is probably one of the better things they've done for NMRIH2, the big issue is that now the weight and capacity of an item is completely ignored, so you can probably carry a lot more high value items than you should be able to. At least with NMRIH1's system, you had to balance ammo with utility and even consider just how much room your melee weapon would take up along with your guns, which is no longer the case with NMRIH2. As for firearms, the calibres have been completely simplified, this is better for accessibility and newcomers but also means you have way more incentive to hog and horde ammo now, as pistol rounds work for ALL pistols, there's no longer 9mm, 22lr or 45acp, which before would have created some aspect of cooperative teamplay with inventory management, with people giving those that could use those calibres the appropriate ammo for their gun and so on, NMRIH2 technically misses this by a mark and whilst you can be a packmule for other players in NMRIH2, by holding onto extra rounds, with the new inventory system, you don't really need to.

It's been released in EA whilst undercooked; TB have decided to release this now, without the major selling point of a zombie game, that being the infection mechanic and whilst I understand they need feedback and so on to develop the game better, they already kind of spat in everyone's drink by scraping the previous pre-TB NMRIH2 and instead releasing an extraction shooter which nobody to my knowledge expected NMRIH1's sequel to turn out as. And of course, bugs, bugs, bugs, but bugs and glitches are to be expected with early access titles so no point talking about 'em.

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I'll be honest, I was hoping for this game to pop off and prove me wrong. I really did but with how it's came out right now, I would recommend everyone to stay away from this one until it's released a few major patches, maybe then I'll change my tune but in it's current iteration it might look good graphically but it is such a chore to play.

I did like this game, but it's definetly not ready to be out as an Early Access game. I never played first NMRIH I can't compare inventory system, controls and etc but none of those so far was an issue for ME. I hope this will get fixed ASAP, there is a potential for this game to be good. There my lags/bugs/issues I encountered in three games:

Got connected to CN sever somehow
Guns doesnt feel accurate
There is a performance issue
Networking issue make some games simply unplayable
Unkillable zombie
Invisible zombie that didnt took damage from shotgun but took damage from melee weapon
Zombies were hitting me through the wall
Didn't let me use syringe to revive myself but min later i got revived anyway

I don't even know what to type here. I was so excited for this to come out, yet I knew better. They didn't even bother preparing for launch.

First round in as soon as I spawned my flashlight was bugged until I was knocked down and it began to function normally after I got up. Not a big deal, EA and all, however you're telling me nobody in play testing experienced this OR you decided it was acceptable to release with bugs like this? Zombies look placeholder, they sound like sex noises. The melee is possibly worse than the first, plus the desync and lag from P2Ping with 300ms players.

The world is pitch black so you need to rely on a flashlight (which may be bugged out) yet the light has a limited battery amount that you then need to loot. In reality, in case anyone wants to say muh realism, this is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid because LED light batteries last DAYS. They also work and provide more than a narrow cone of light. So if you want me have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ light source, at least don't make me have to feed it every 5 minutes.

The UI arrows that stay showing could have easily been remediated (we don't want to stare at that ♥♥♥♥) by only showing the arrows when you show your wristwatch/compass. Things that were in the first and even implemented in their 2021 build of this are now missing. (Infection, child zombies, various weapons.) Their "in concept" portion of the roadmap, things that aren't even in development right now, include a second map. There's not even more than one map here? What was wrong with the smaller scale objective based maps inspired by classic Romero movies and original ideas? Couldn't even port in some smaller scale maps to this? Oh no because now we are CRC Responders with persistent characters and Torn Banner wants some of that Hunt Showdown player base.

Congrats on rushing your release. You made your window. There's no more room in Steam for games this bad.

why in gods sake would you release this game in this state ??? you had early access players/streamers or reviewers and instead of letting them give you honest reviews of the state of this game, you make them say it is at least okay(no clue if they were kinda forced but it feels forced after playing myself) but it is not it is in a sorry state in launch, worse then any game that i have ever played, dsyncing of zombies that punch you and then teleport away
the swinging of some weapons feel super stupid clunky and that from a Dev team that made chivalry, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hell

where was the dedication to this game? Why did you decide to change so much from the core concept of NMRiH 1?
because it was niche? as if 70 k positiv reviews for the first game mean nothing and not a lot of people do write reviews.
oh and no modding options as well ?? yeah you guys just bought the name and that is it.

there is potential but that is all