HELL LET LOOSE: VIETNAM

A tougher, smarter FPS where kills hardly matter

- 

There is no greater symbol of personal success in the multiplayer FPS than your kill/death ratio. Some developers try to mitigate its precedence – Battlefield 6 asks you to think about more than stacking up bodies and increasing your own individual score – but even when a game encourages different types of play, it’s hard, after decades of deathmatches and kill streaks, to redirect the competitive FPS dynamic. This is part of the challenge faced by Expression Games. Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is a multiplayer shooter with 100-person lobbies. It’s also difficult, built around teamwork and has a slower pace than its peers. Historical accuracy is vital to its creators and followers – but it’s set within one of the most morally opaque wars of the 20th century. Even with the success of the original Hell Let Loose as proof of concept, how do you create a tactical FPS that’s rooted in fact and realism without straying into dry simulation-game territory?

It starts with the visual and production design. Alongside staff from Expression Games and publisher Team17, we play Hell Let Loose: Vietnam for just over an hour. Scheduled for release in 2026 (“Not the end of 2026,” Team17 producer Craig Clark says, “but also not around the GTAVI release date”), the game is still in alpha. Nevertheless, it makes for an impressive spectacle, running on Unreal Engine 5. Dusky sunlight filters through the canopy. Helicopters, piloted by our teammates, swoop in low overhead. Above the concerto of AK-47s, M60s and frag grenades, we discern a single word on the division radio channel: “napalm”. Suddenly, the jungle bursts into flames. Expression wants to make a shooter that’s cerebral and strategic, but not at the cost of raw thrills. “It’s not instant running and gunning,” Clark says. “But we sit in a specific space where we’re not COD or Battlefield, but also not military simulation.”