At times Hell Let Loose: Vietnam has the tone of a horror game. Running through the thick foliage as you make your way towards the objective or try to catch up with teammates, the sounds of distant gunfire are drowned out by your own stomping and crashing through the plants. But then you hear something. Extra footsteps. Is it a trick of the mind? Is it a teammate? An enemy? Stop. Wait. Ready your weapon… shoot anything that moves.
If you’re lucky, it’s the other player that gets the worst of it. If you’re not… well, you’ll get used to the respawn map screen pretty quickly in this game.
The sequel to the WW2 era Hell Let Loose, this game jumps ahead, you guessed it, to the Vietnam war. That brings a lot of changes, with the asymmetry of the US and Vietcong forces, the maps able to explore the variety of the Vietnamese setting, but this remains a hard-nosed multiplayer FPS where roles are defined, teamwork is paramount, and victory is really, truly fought for.
With launch this week, we’ve been hands on for a few hours ahead of time, dipping a toe into the waters and getting slight feel for what this game offers.
The first thing to appreciate about Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is that, just like the first game, this is a much more considered first person shooter. Given that it features large scale 50v50 battles, the most obvious point of comparison is the Battlefield series, but where that series goes gung ho with its action, Hell Let Loose is slower. Death comes quickly with just one or two bullets, but a respawn is then only as part of a wave every 30 seconds or so and at defined spawn points and in certain situations.
You, as a player, also have a more defined role. A commander sits at the top of the action, handing down orders to the squads, which must feature an officer to take those orders, and can then feature a mixture of riflemen, medics, engineers, machine gunners and so on. Only the engineer can construct things and fix up vehicles (very, very slowly), only the anti-tank role has anything to hit enemy armour with, only the officer can place outpost, garrisons, and relay orders. None of you can hop into the driver’s seat of a tank or pilot a helicopter – patrol boats are a special case in this regard and anyone can hop in to drive – though all and sundry can man the guns or just be a passenger, and can spawn on vehicles when they’re sat with engines off.
I variously played as an engineer and machine gunner, but both take a little time to settle into the rhythm of what they do. The engineer is able to place various helpful structures, such as barbed wire to restrict and funnel enemy movement, resource generators back at base, ammo dumps, and so on, and is then a regular soldier the rest of the time. The machine gunner is then really about setting up shop, flipping down their gun’s mount and locking down enemies with suppressing fire.
While it’s certainly not the main measure of your contributions, it’s fair to say that my k:d ratio was pretty abysmal. A few times I was able to get into a good position with flanking, or use the directional sound to ready myself for a lone enemy crashing through the bushes, but with both teams congregating on the main objective point and the eagle-eyed sharpshooters out there, I was generally more in the category of cannon fodder. In fairness, I also wasn’t especially coordinated. Each death would leave me separated from squad mates, and so it often just more general teammates that were nearby. You can still talk to them with proximity chat, but things like map-wide voice chat and placing markers on maps is limited to your squad and the command structure.
My favourite moment was spawning, seeing an NVA tank right near me and running over for the Battlefield classic of using an Engineer’s blowtorch to slowly cook them to death. No dice in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, though, and I instead had a few minutes of laughing and talking to my squad and other players spawning in to try and coordinate some anti-tank weaponry.
While we have mental images from Hollywood of the massive imbalance between the US forces and the Vietcong, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam brings them closer together. Both sides have tanks, both sides can call in air strikes, but there are differences. Key to the NVA is their ability to construct tunnel networks that allow players to quickly zip across the map, with a neat animation as you climb out of the tunnel, though US forces will naturally be hunting down and destroying tunnel exits, just as they would each squad’s spawn beacon. For the US, it’s the proliferation of helicopters, with troop transports able to carry a good sized squad across the map, laying down fire as it goes, and supply copters able to give troops a boost on the ground.
There’s a variety of different game modes. Warfare and Offensive return, with the former having the back and forth across a string of objective points and the latter an attacker vs. defender set up, both of them keeping the fighting focussed around one or two large objective zones at a time. Conquest and Domination also feature, putting a different onus on the fights, with the ticking down of ‘morale’ in the former, and the need to hold all three objective in the latter.
Six maps feature at launch, and again, there’s good variety here as the team has picked out more diverse settings than what you’d imagine from the movies. Yes, there’s plenty of fighting in jungles and heading down rivers on patrol boats, but it was neat to have a match of Offensive running along the coast of Cam Ranh Port, the inland areas contrasting with the built up shoreline.
It all adds up to give Hell Let Loose: Vietnam its own particular feel and tone.
