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The original Hell Let Loose has never had a staggering number of players at any one time. According to SteamDB, its peak was at just over 21,000 in January 2025. However, developer Expression Games can boast about something incredibly rare and impressive: its concurrent player count graph has, on average, continuously increased over its five-year lifespan. That’s a sign of a dedicated community for a niche first-person shooter.
It’s safe to say there’s enormous appeal for the sequel, which trades the oft-treaded battlefields of World War II for the slightly lesser-explored Vietnam War. Of course, while the premise of the game is still the same — it represents conflict in a hardcore, realistic manner where mistakes are punished — the jump in time and locale calls for new mechanics to properly reflect the era.
I took part in a hands-on preview session full of developers, other members of the press, and content creators for two intense matches of Warfare mode, Hell Let Loose’s flagship offering. This is an all-out scrap over five key locations with two teams of 50 players apiece. When you take one, achieved by simply having more soldiers in the area, you push onto the next. If you lose control of the active objective, you fall back. It’s essentially a tug of war.
One new addition for Vietnam is a tunneling mechanic. To emulate the style of warfare employed by the North Vietnamese Army, tunnels can be made to link outposts and garrisons. These essentially act as fast travel points across the map, so you can quickly relocate from one to the other. They’re especially helpful for getting behind enemy lines, but in a game where communication and squad co-operation are so vital, they also help you pivot to different objectives and capture zones.
Conversely, the US Armed Forces have aerial vehicles at their disposal. Choppers can carry entire squads across the map to get into the action as quickly as possible, not to mention unmanned support from the skies in the form of recon planes and bombing runs. Both sides have access to patrol boats, useful for navigating long, winding rivers in the Vietnamese jungle, that also serve as respawn locations.
I only played on one of six promised launch maps in my preview session. Thanh Hóa Bridge is bisected by the colossal Nam Ma River, and the biggest chokepoint on the map is Dragons Jaw, a huge bridge crossing from west to east, with a stationary train atop. Paul “Rushy” Rustchynsky, game director on Hell Let Loose: Vietnam at Expression Games, explained in a Q&A session on Discord that this is the kind of design the team is aiming for in every map.
“We tried to make sure that each map has a central, pivotal point that players naturally focus on,” Rustchynsky said. “The maps are all quite distinct. You’ve got ones that are really dense jungle, and then others, like when you’re down on the port by the water, that are really exposed and open, and largely urban. Whereas on the Đắk Tô Airfield, which is surrounded by jungle, you’ve got this entire strip of open runway which you have to cross.”
My most successful stretch came when I somehow parked up on the edge of a small cliff overlooking one side of Dragons Jaw. I was technically in enemy territory, but I was picking off foes with my automatic rifle, and the sheer amount of plants and trees meant I couldn’t be seen easily. Eventually, I was taken out from behind, but not before the rest of my army had successfully captured the location.
Tactical gameplay, timing your advances, and using the environment to your advantage, are essential if you want to succeed. Vietnam is full of dense foliage, so where, in a game like Call of Duty, you want to rely solely on your gun skills to out-shoot your opponent, your positioning and knowledge of your surroundings are far more important here.
Hell Let Loose has always had a somewhat steep learning curve and Vietnam is no different. If you’re the sort of player who gets frustrated at other players taking a game too seriously and trying to win, it likely won’t be for you. If you want to immerse yourself in this historically accurate, realistic shooter, where you can die in one shot to someone you didn’t even see all while your squad leader barks orders at you, then Hell Let Loose: Vietnam feels like a natural sequel.
Hell Let Loose: Vietnam Gets Its First Gameplay Trailer Ahead Of A Simultaneous PC And Console Launch In 2026
The Hell Let Loose sequel will introduce helicopters, boats, tunnels, and more when the series heads to Vietnam next year.
