

Support drops supplies that let officers build garrisons, which are the spawn points for a team. While most of the roles are self-explanatory, it’s the support and engineer roles that are maybe the most crucial to winning a match. Each role has at least two different classes that they can choose from, which determine which weapons and gadgets they’re bringing with them into battle. Other than the rifleman, only one player can play each role per squad at any given time. Other than the officer, there are eight roles that a player in an infantry squad can play: rifleman, assault, automatic rifleman, medic, machine gunner, support, engineer, and anti-tank. When I say that every soldier has a role to play, I mean it, though most matches come down to how well infantry squads work together. Finally, there’s the commander, who can communicate with all of the squads’ officers and provide support in the form of bombing and strafing runs, airhead spawn locations, and supply drops, as well as spawning new tanks and trucks-all while also playing as a soldier on the field. Each squad also has an officer that can communicate with the other squads’ officers. Infantry squads contain a maximum of six players, armor three, and recon two, and each team can only have three armor squads and two recon squads on the field at any given moment. Teams are broken down into squads, with three types of squads available: infantry, armor (tank crews), and recon (one spotter and one sniper). Every soldier on the field has a role to play, and how well those roles are played and how well the different squads coordinate their attacks and defenses-as opposed to who gets the most kills-are what truly determines the outcome of every match. Based on real battles of World War II (the developers have even recreated the locations of these battles on a 1:1 scale), Hell Let Loose is a 100-player first-person shooter with a deep strategy metagame.

Not only does it run surprisingly well on console (for the most part), but the players that I’ve interacted with seemed more than willing to give in to the game’s charms and accept that, instead of being a super soldier on the battlefield, they were merely one of a hundred pawns fulfilling their particular roles.īefore getting into the specifics about the console version, let’s look at Hell Let Loose in general and why it’s possibly the most engaging shooter to come to consoles in a long time.
#The hell in vietnam game system series#
It’s clear after playing Hell Let Loose on the Xbox Series X that my fears on both counts were unfounded.
#The hell in vietnam game system Pc#
PC players are used to playing niche, complex shooters console gamers are too used to frag fests like Battlefield and Call of Duty and battle royale games like PUBG, Fortnite, and Warzone to accept something as laborious as Hell Let Loose. But my uncertainty about Hell Let Loose making it to console had mostly to do with the audience it would find there.

Even as the new Xboxes and PlayStation launched, I didn’t think it was possible to get that game working properly on a console. Part of that was because of the performance issues I experienced on a PC that could more than handle the game’s demands. Hell Let Loose is also a game that I just never thought would come to consoles. It’s a shooter where K/D isn’t everything, that offers ways to play other than firing your gun. It’s a game that requires teamwork, patience, and communication.

It presented the kind of experience that I’d been craving for a while now-a more grounded, realistic version of a genre that Battlefield and Call of Duty have moved away from. In particular, it’s Black Matter Studios’ World War II shooter that made me want to finally build my first gaming-ready PC. But as I got older and my go-to franchises like Halo and Battlefield started to lose me, my eyes began wandering over to PC gaming, where I could find the next evolution of shooters in the more strategic, hardcore titles-namely, Rising Storm 2: Vietnam and Hell Let Loose. Over the last three decades, consoles have fulfilled almost all of my gaming needs, especially with the rise of Xbox Live and online gaming. I’ve been a console gamer since I was four years old and my dad bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System. Note: This review has been updated from the original version and given a final score.
