Independent UK developer Rebellion has announced that a sequel to its best-seller Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army is already in development and will launch this year on PC.

Directly following the aftermath of the nerve-shredding climax to the first game, Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army 2 follows franchise stalwart Karl Fairburne and his three allies as they battle back into the dark heart of Berlin to put an end to the occult powers that reside there once and for all.

But as Head of Creative Tim Jones explains their unholy adversaries haven’t been idle, and neither have Rebellion:

“We really wanted to heighten the demonic, nightmarish tones of the first game. The environments, the levels, the soundtrack all give a strong feeling of descent – each encounter, each level becoming progressively more hellish. Most importantly though, we’ve expanded the legions of Nazi undead with some really intimidating new enemies which we’ll reveal soon.”

Launched in February of this year, the original NZA was imagined as a fun spin-off project between games, but the incredible reaction from gamers took the whole studio by surprise as Rebellion founder and CEO Jason Kingsley explains:

“It was amazing. At that point we hadn’t announced Sniper Elite 3. A lot of Sniper Elite V2 fans had been asking for 4-player co-op content, and we thought it would be a good test of our gameplay mechanics. So we thought ‘Why not?” and self-published it.

“What got though was a breakout hit. The co-op and the price put the game on the map, and suddenly we were at the top of the Steam charts. We had hundreds and hundreds of requests from YouTube channels wanting to do “Let’s Plays” and reviews, and the game just took off. When we had a second to breathe, we looked at the player data and it turns out most of them had never actually played another Sniper Elite game. We never knew it would tap into such a broad audience.”

“We have to admit, we underestimated the demand for the original game. All of sudden we had console gamers desperate for us to port the game to 360 and PS3, but without a publisher this just wasn’t feasible. We left a lot of Sniper Elite fans disappointed. They didn’t want to hear excuses from us, they just wanted to play it”.

“As an independent, we’re obviously really excited about what we’re hearing from Sony and Microsoft when it comes to self publishing on PS4 and Xbox One. We think the series could be a great fit for them.”