Sometimes, the best moments in a shooter – online or otherwise – are when nothing is happening at all. When you’re inching closer and closer to enemy lines, with no idea what lies around the corner, and your mind is left to fill in the blanks.
That’s the foundation of Hell Let Loose. So much of a battle is just waiting – moving your unit forward, hoping something will happen. With a map so large, and enemies often so dispersed (even when it’s 50v50), it invites you to soak up the atmosphere, which at first glance, is tragically beautiful, complemented by immersive audio design.
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However, the longer I spent stomping around this World War 2 recreation, the more I found myself longing for more detail. The atmosphere is thick, but the scenery is static. There's very little interaction with everything around you, just the occasional tank or car. Often a vehicle or building looks like it should be interactive, but just isn't. And if you've joined the match after it’s already kicked off, you'll be hard-pressed to find anything to do other than sprint around for minutes on end to find the action. While Hell Let Loose may invite you to spend most of the game exploring, there isn’t much to be found.
You can’t just pick up and play Hell Let Loose. It isn't "easy to play, hard to master" like most – it's just hard to play, and proud of it. On the one hand, it only gets more satisfying the longer you spend with it. Rather than feeling burnt out, you feel emboldened, no longer terrified when you’re surrounded by enemies. Plus with fourteen classes to switch between, you’re not going to run out of different ways to play anytime soon.
“It’s hard” isn’t much of a criticism, but the problem is how it communicates its intricacies. When you boot up the game for the first time, the amount of instructions you have to go through is overwhelming, and much of what it describes won’t mean much out of context. Winging it got me a bit further, but the hints are too infrequent, especially when playing a new class for the first time. If you want to learn how to play it, you need to venture outside of the game itself and into fan guides, wiki pages, and community forums. Much like playing the game itself, it feels like you’re running towards something, but you’re not sure what.
This lack of direction is frustrating. Moments of peace in an online shooter can be used to the game’s advantage, but with maps so absurdly big, the wait is just too long, and the world is too motionless to keep you interested for more than a few games. It gets frustrating because you want to be in the thick of it, and that’s where the game is at its best.
Indeed, action is where this game excels. Another way Hell Let Loose distinguishes itself from the genre is that there's no kill feed – like in the Insurgency games, even you have no idea who you've killed unless you get visual confirmation. This small feature completely changes how you play a shooter: you play dead, you hide, you do whatever you can to convince the enemy they got you. It changes your entire relationship with the battlefield. It isn't just full of places to take cover, but places to fully disappear. This is Hell Let Loose’s biggest strength by far, and some smaller maps would ensure players get to experience these mind games to their fullest.
When I – finally – got my first kill, it wasn’t exactly a ceremonious occasion. I kept shooting the guy in case they were playing dead, and when the enemy side returned fire, I had to camouflage myself in some rubble. Hell Let Loose would do well to get players to the battle as soon as possible, so they can experience this too.
Another way to make the most of all the time you’ll be running towards the action is to find some mates to play with. With all the different classes, communication is absolutely essential, and it’s often the only way to make sense of the large maps. This is not a game to drop in and play solo – another lesson only learned through hours of playing. I had no problems with any players in my squad, but in matches of 50v50, it will be a hell of a task to ensure that toxicity doesn’t creep into the player base, and the level of communication needed to make it work is maintained.
Ultimately, Hell Let Loose gives you a beautiful playground to make your own fun in. You’ll need patience and communication skills in spades to get through the early hours, but once you break through these barriers, this is poised to be a great title to sink some hours into, at least for the most dedicated first-person shooter fans.
While Hell Let Loose leaves Early Access July 27, I hope the game sees more updates based on player feedback – it needs some smaller maps, and a hell of a lot more to do in the ones it already has. There are gems to be found here, finding them just needs to be a lot quicker.
