If you’re looking for an alternative to Call Of Duty and Battlefield, the sequel to Hell Let Loose offers a more demanding but uniquely compelling experience.
Call Of Duty’s run as undisputed king of online first person shooters may be looking shakier than ever, but it remains many players’ first and sometimes only experience of getting together with friends, and internet strangers, to simulate shooting each other to death. Its distinctive twitch firefights, short respawn times, and deliberately low threshold for getting involved perfectly suits consoles, where players tend to expect instant gratification.
PC gamers are exposed to a little more diversity. Military sims like Arm 3, Arma Reforger, and Squad all offer deeper and more detailed battlefield experiences, in which you take on specific roles within an overall command structure. In those games, setting your rifle to full auto and going Leeroy Jenkins on one of the many red dots on your map is not a recipe for success. That only happens if you stick with your squad, understand and take on your unit’s role, and follow objectives.
The same is true for the original Hell Let Loose. Released five years ago and set in World War 2, it offers complex, tactically involved 50 vs. 50 online matches where you’re expected to know what you’re doing in each of its many specialisms, whether driving a tank, manning a machine gun, or spotting for a sniper. Its sheer scale sometimes makes you feel like an irrelevant cog in a large and brutal machine, but its adherents love not only the harsh realism, but the fact that beyond its cliff-like learning curve there’s a hugely satisfying and strategic game underneath.
As you can see, the sequel is set during the Vietnam War, which quite apart from its murkier motivations, was a very different sort of conflict. It was fought in extreme terrain, from near desert to triple canopy jungle, and importantly, its forces were completely asymmetric. While the American war effort was mechanised with helicopters, fixed wing air support, and river patrol boats, the North Vietnamese Army had much greater manpower and rallied militias of Viet Cong citizen soldiers.
Both sides had artillery and tanks, and while Hell Let Loose is strictly USA vs. the NVA it borrows the Viet Cong’s hand dug tunnel networks to even the odds. Playing on the Vietnamese side, engineers can link garrisons with tunnel entrances anywhere in the bush, providing an invisible fast travel network for troops, which lets squads pop up unexpectedly in places where previously there was just jungle.
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The job of engineer is just one of 17 military disciplines you can choose to take up, the game’s dizzying collection of tutorials only slightly preparing you for enacting those same jobs under fire and with teammates relying on your actions. Specialists support engineers, speeding construction and destroying the equivalent enemy infrastructure. Rifleman is the easiest job to get the hang of, with little tactical responsibility other than making sure to follow your squad leader and keeping your head down.
Mortar teams, machine gunner, grenadier, tank, and boat crews, plus pilots for the iconic twin-bladed UH-1 supply helicopters, are all necessary parts of the military machine. All of those come under the aegis of your team’s commander, who to a large extent shapes the battlefield. All soldiers carry a tactical map, but the chief can use it to call in resupply, air strikes, and artillery bombardments, as well as assigning priorities for attack and defence.
Whether anyone’s listening is a matter of experience. It takes many hours to gain even a hint of competency at your chosen specialism, but you’re also beholden to the quality of your side’s leadership. Having a commander who’s paying attention really helps, but they rely on squad leaders, and skilled practitioners of the army’s various disciplines to get the job done. It’s a tall order in the usual chaos of online multiplayer games.
Starting out, it’s not unfair to say that Hell Let Loose: Vietnam isn’t all that much fun. Spawning as a rifleman, you’ll use your map to choose a spawn point, being careful to use the same one as your squad-mates, then follow your sergeant to an objective. There are myriad ways for that to go wrong. Getting distracted, losing your team in the bush or, most commonly, running for several minutes through thick simulated jungle before being shot and killed by someone you didn’t see.
There’s no kill cam or feedback of any kind about who fired the fatal round, just you lying mortally wounded on the ground. At least during the review period, medic was a role practically nobody seemed to be occupying, your best bet being to embrace oblivion and respawn, only to repeat the process. You soon learn that being an infantryman is about more than sprinting towards a waypoint. Crouching helps, as does going prone the second you hear a bullet snap past your head.
Starting the slow drop feed of survival instinct comes hand-in-hand with getting to know what’s expected of the job you’ve taken on, in rounds that can last 90 minutes if the two sides are evenly matched. All four of its game modes require taking objectives, but each brings its own distinct flavour. Warfare is the most straightforward, requiring both teams to take a neutral central location, then push further into each other’s territories.
In Offensive, one team attacks while the other defends, with the twist that zones are captured permanently and can’t be retaken. Conquest is more chaotic, relying on whittling down enemy morale across multiple flashpoints, with firefights taking place in several places at once across the map, forcing your team to prioritise in a continually changing situation. The final mode, Domination, gives teams headquarters on either side of the map, with three neutral nodes in the middle. Your side needs to take and hold two or more to be allowed to go after the enemy’s HQ.
At launch there are six extremely large maps, each easily containing the maximum of 100 players. It’s already busy, and it can be frustrating trying to nab a place on more popular servers as thousands of others join you in trying to find one with a decent ping rate that’s also well populated. It’s a cross-play game, so console gamers are up against PC players, a situation the developers have tried to even out with very slight aim assist for those using a controller.
