Hell Let Loose: Vietnam

The Vietnam War has been strangely absent from major shooters for twenty years, which is exactly why Expression Games went there. Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is a standalone game rather than an expansion, and on paper it’s the best idea the series has had: swap the hedgerows of Normandy for mountain gorges and dense jungle, then hand both sides tools that suit the terrain. Ten days after launch, it’s also one of the most frustrating releases of the year — because the game underneath the problems is genuinely excellent.

The jungle changes everything

The core is the same hardcore, deliberate warfare the series built its name on: fifty players a side, a chain of command that actually matters, and firefights decided by coordination rather than individual aim. What’s new is how well Vietnam reshapes it. The NVA can dig tunnel networks and surface behind American lines. US forces field fully operational helicopters for fire support and supply runs. Both sides fight through a river system in armed patrol boats. Movement has been expanded too — swimming, climbing, fast crawling, and dragging a downed teammate out of the line of fire so a medic can reach them.

Seventeen roles across infantry, recon, armour, mortar and helicopter units mean a full team has real structure, and the six maps built on real locations give the whole thing weight.

Get into a squad that communicates and this is the best the series has ever felt. That’s not a small claim.

The launch, honestly

And then there’s everything around it. Steam reviews sat at 59% in the first days and have moved only to Mixed, 60% of 6,345 reviews — with the review count nearly doubling in ten days, that’s a settled verdict rather than launch noise. The complaints are specific rather than vague: crashes on AMD GPUs (adding -dx12 to your Steam launch options is the community workaround), and VOIP failures in a game where voice comms are the core mechanic.

The monetisation deserves a mention too. On top of the $39.99 base game there’s a $26.99 “2026 Field Supplies” cosmetic pack and further paid uniform packs — a lot of storefront for a game still stabilising. It also uses kernel-level anti-cheat that requires manual removal after you uninstall, which some players will want to know up front.

Worth noting: Team17 already delayed this two months from June to sort exactly these kinds of issues, which makes the state it shipped in harder to excuse.

Verdict

There is a genuinely great, atmospheric, deeply tactical shooter here — arguably the definitive Vietnam War game once it’s fixed. But “once it’s fixed” is doing heavy lifting. Critics reviewing pre-launch landed around 78; players on real hardware and real servers landed at Mixed, and they’re the ones who’ve now put in the hours. At $39.99 with crashes still being triaged, wait a few patch cycles — or jump in now only if you’ve got a squad, a tolerance for jank, and ideally an Nvidia card.