Hell Let Loose

If you come to Hell Let Loose expecting a typical FPS experience—quick respawns, solo heroics, or killstreaks—you’re going to die. A lot. But if you come looking for a grim, team-driven, punishingly realistic World War II shooter, then Hell Let Loose offers one of the most immersive and rewarding battlefield simulations in modern gaming. Developed by Black Matter and published by Team17, Hell Let Loose is not interested in holding your hand. There’s no mini-map. No glowing objectives. No regenerating health. It’s you, your squad, your rifle, and a constant fear of getting dropped by a bullet you never heard. Combat is lethal and intense—one or two shots is all it takes to die. Every movement matters. Every step outside of cover could be your last. It’s not a game about being the best shot—it’s about teamwork, coordination, and communication. And that’s what makes it special. The game features huge, historically inspired maps (like Carentan, Stalingrad, and Kursk), each hosting 100-player battles (50v50) that feel like true military campaigns. These aren’t just big spaces—they’re tactically complex zones where terrain, line-of-sight, and logistics genuinely matter. There’s a constant push-pull across objectives, and battles can shift drastically depending on how well squads communicate and coordinate with commanders. The chain of command system—where commanders and officers must communicate across different voice channels—gives the game a military sim flavor without becoming inaccessible. Hell Let Loose shines with its diverse class system: riflemen, medics, machine gunners, tank crews, snipers, engineers, and more. Each role has a clear, functional purpose, and selfish play is actively punished. There’s no lone-wolf fantasy here—you're a piece in a much larger machine. Engineers build outposts and garrisons, which are vital for spawning and logistics. Support classes bring resources to the frontline. Medics revive. And artillery crews hammer distant objectives, often never seeing the enemy they’re killing. In this game, even dying can be useful—if it buys your squad time, or reveals an enemy flank. Since its early access days, Hell Let Loose has grown significantly. In 2025, it boasts: -Dozens of highly detailed maps across the Eastern and Western fronts -New factions and weapons, including Soviet and Finnish forces -More refined UI and voice comms, though still intentionally minimal -Improved animations and movement fluidity, closing the gap with more polished AAA shooters -A growing, mature community that values teamwork (and punishes mic-less Rambo wannabes) -Performance has steadily improved, although some hiccups and optimization issues remain on lower-end systems. Some gripes: -The learning curve is steep. Very steep. New players may feel completely lost for hours—especially without a squad or mic. -Communication is essential, and a bad team or silent squad can ruin the experience. -Casual players may bounce off the slow pace, long walks to the frontline, and realistic lethality. -Some players still yearn for a more engaging solo experience, which Hell Let Loose simply doesn’t offer. Hell Let Loose is not for everyone—and that’s the point. It’s a punishing, immersive, no-frills war sim that captures the fear, chaos, and camaraderie of real battlefield conditions. When it clicks—when your squad holds a crumbling church under artillery fire, or when you flank an enemy tank with an engineer—it delivers tension and triumph few games can match. For players looking for tactical depth, realism, and a true sense of military immersion, Hell Let Loose is one of the best experiences available today. Pros: -Incredibly immersive and realistic WWII experience -Rewarding squad-based teamwork -Massive, well-designed maps with real tactical depth -Diverse class system and strategic roles -Mature, dedicated player base Cons: -Very steep learning curve -Communication-dependent (can frustrate solo players) -No single-player or offline mode -Occasional performance issues and bugs Hell Let Loose doesn’t glorify war—it throws you into it. If you can handle the chaos, you’ll find one of the most authentic and unforgettable FPS experiences ever made. Rating: 8/10

Talk about stressful. This is basically a "running through Europe" simulator, except when you get to where you want to go you die instantly, then wait for up to a minute to re-spawn so you can start the process all over again. I had some serious fun moments, but never anything more than a moment. There is nothing here to justify the long minutes of traversing the map, especially when it ends with insta-death from something you never even saw.

Nice one :) Getting the hang of it now. It is similar to Arma Reforger that you have to work with supplies and build stuff, but it is far less punishing. Still a tough cookie.

it' just boring: spawn-die-spawn-die-shoot someone-die. 90% of the time you have no idea where you got shot from. Playbase is mainly overly militarized basement dwellers, who take this whole *** way too seriously. don't buy!

Visually looks and sounds great, lack of a ticket system means that everyone shift+Ws towards objectives endlessly, you will never get a revive from friendly medics even if they're standing on top of you, and if you're playing medic you will get yelled at and TKed later for not reviving somebody who died in an open field to machine gun fire (because they were shift+Wing towards objective). It's like all the worst aspects of the genre rolled into a glitchy mess.

A game that requires a lot of refinement, at the moment there are a lot of errors, bugs and is extremely not optimized. The impression is that it's not from 2024-25, but from 2003.

Whilst the concept is an interesting one with all the right elements of great entertainment, the execution misses the mark for me. The maps are wildly too large for the 100 player limit, causing pockets of skirmishes rather than an atmosphere of fighting within a front line, even in the Offensive game mode. Coupled with notably far distances to cross at times and a lack of accessible transportation, most of this play time was spent running towards a contested area. The rest, spent in a bleed out screen from being picked off from potentially any direction whilst on route to the squad, uncannily accurate artillery fire or wanting to gouge my own brains out with the engineering wrench due to a supply drought drier than the Sahara despite repeated pleas for supply support. For some people, this will be right up their alley to the point its difficult to even open a dialogue on what they find enjoyable to see what you are potentially missing out on. For me, it is not an enjoyable use of my time.

Absolute nightmare to get up and running. long load times doesn't usually bother me but it was a bit excessive and included a black screen with no indication that the game is loading. A quick google search led told me that was normal. Once I finally got into the game i had to struggle with navigating the menu as the mouse would just disappear and my xbox controller would randomly stop allowing me to interact with the menu. After all that I finally found a game i could connect to only to lose connection to the server. Last time I played years ago it was fun but there's no way it worth this much effort.

Player movement is hot trash, nice 1 mm jump, as you try to jump over a pebble. Cant enter 90 % of building, what the point? try to go upstairs in a building and get stuck 4 steps up. This game needs to be revamped before it can be considered playable. Game is buggy as shit with tones of warping back ten feet. Maybe they should look at using actual good servers instead of the crap the are using. How can my ping on the west coast go from 46 to 300? it dogshit on the devs part. It makes the game unplayable at best.

-graphics: 7\10 the gameplay is realistic but you will waste more time waiting to respawn more then acutally playing the game same with loading\joining a server for some reason i want to keep playing but i know i will wait so much time to respawn or loading the servers so its not worth is

its fun. but good luck getting into a server, and if you do get into a server good luck finding a unlocked squad to join, and you will get rejected from most locked squads. you cant start your own with out getting punished by it.

50 euro for a game full of hackers and they dont even get banned its so great i dont hack and i get kicked from the match what a game

I really like this game, to be honest, but the sheer number of cheaters makes it unplayable on official servers for casual gamers at the moment. I won’t play again until this gets fixed...

i wish there was a single player mode to gain experience, i know it is about holding locations and resources but my early experience is i have been killed 20 times to only one kill for me

takes too long to get into a game and start playing for me.

last update only crashes my game, cannot join game, stuck loading screen.

Games broken, crashes everytime I load in. Usually dont even get to the main menu, if I get past it the game crashes when loading a server.

Requires a lot of teamwork and prep once the game gets going, but if done right its a hell of a good time.

Getting into this game as a new player is virtually impossible unless you have the patience of a saint and are cool getting screamed at for not knowing what you're doing. Getting spawn killed 10 lives in a row is so much fun.

Good game, watched my friend get blown to bits right next to me. 10/10

Community is toxic to newcomers even on 'newcomers welcome' servers. Just trying to play after work - not worth it.

Can't even get into a server. Every queue with less than 200ms ping is full. this includes Official servers. Good for Team17 I guess, but it sucks for me.

Great game with huge potential. It's just a shame that cheaters ruin all the fun :( At the moment the game is literally UNPLAYABLE due to the number of cheaters.

I bought a $50 "on sale" package of the game and DLC after reading that Australian servers were still active. Watched some YouTube tutorials, looked likes it's worth a try. The game takes forever to load, like 10+ minutes. Servers are either full or empty, so you wait again. Then you finally get onto a server, and almost all the squads are locked. I have 200MB+ internet and a good gaming pc and you can't see shit for opposition. It's all camping. When I went for a refund, it said I had "played" the game for 2 hours and at least 90 minutes of that was load times or sitting in a server queue. Great concept game running on 30 year old graphics engine. SKIP........

There are like 4 NA servers that people play on and they are always at capacity with the queue maxed out. If you ever do get in, you'll be greeted by a screen that shows all of the locked squads you can't join where you'll be forced to make your own and play solo, having to run 25 minutes to get to any sort of action. If you manage to into an open squad, you'll experience getting yelled at for around 6 minutes before getting kicked for not listening to all of your squadmates incessant commands to the letter lol. I'm sure it's a fun experience with enough friends to fill a squad, the experience I'm having is not.

Unless you enjoy milsims and multiplayer bullshit, don't waste your time with this game. The community is nice enough but at the same time somewhat demanding and fake "friendly" to new players, unwilling to discuss the game's flaws or acknowledge that there are large parts of the game that are downright unfun by design. I've repeatedly tried to get into this game over the years and every time I am burned by the experience. This is yet another fucking multiplayer shooter where you get repeatedly killed by enemies you will never see and annoying mechanics like long respawn times and lack of teamplay leading to little to no spawn points throughout the game, making the match a boring and punishing slog. It's a crying fucking shame that such a solid ww2 game is multiplayer only, if there were offline matches so that I could actually fucking LEARN the game and its mechanics without years long experienced players breathing down my neck and ruining the fun by sheer skill imbalance, then I might have a more positive outlook on this game, but it doesn't. So honestly, I give up on Hell Let Loose. Battlefield V is kinda mid but at least in comparison it's fucking playable for newer and non-sweaty players. This game is just too entrenched in its own bullshit and unfun milsim tropes to be enjoyable for the vast majority of potential players and myself.

If you are Aussie there are only a handful of servers which alternate between full with VIP queues or empty. I't a great game but you can't play it.

getting into a server is a chore. the load times are insane and the ping kicks you out in half the servers. The only running servers are full

This used to be the most unique and promising game I had seen in a long time, but like many indie games in my library it's lately made a turn for the worst. Firstly, it is no longer owned by the original developers, wholly bought out by Team17. This isn't a problem by itself since I don't believe that games are made good by any single person behind them or that only one dev team can make a game like this good. However, they are making me question my personal beliefs since the quality of the new content released after Team17 took over has been horrible. It used to be that the maps were extremely faithful recreations of real world battles. Including using recon photos taken during and after the actual battles, satellite information we have today, and consulting historians. Now, their maps are almost entirely fantasy and they even admit that they are purposefully avoiding making less detail to do less work. The content outside of maps is also going off the deep end quickly, the only faction that's been made since release is the British, when the British faction first came out it was so horrible that most servers didn't even put the maps with the British on them in rotation. The developers did a rework to their credit but the British kit is still lackluster and historically inaccurate, including the fact that the Cromwell tank the british use has decals indicate it's Polish. Speaking of Team17 not being able to tell the difference between the Polish and the British, they're adding a Danzig Post Office map where it's late war Germany VS British wearing Polish Paratrooper outfits, somehow the two are interchangable to the devs. This, along with the lackluster support for the Soviet faction (having only 3 maps to the GER VS US's 12 maps, notably the much more recently released british already have 3 maps as well) means that what was once a promising long-term support community driven game has turned into another drip fed content drivel DLC farming game for another corpo to milk until eventually the community gives up on it and they can sell a barebones sequel with the promise of More To Come™ and start the cycle over again. It's a great game, I've had lots of fun, I could go on about how great it is but the developers don't deserve me convincing you to buy it, you should not buy it, because it's not nearly worth as much as it costs and supporting developers who do what these devs have is only going to make gaming worse. Buy a key from a reputable reseller or wait for a really low sale.

There's a learning curve to this game, but definitely worth sticking around once you get the hang of it. Everyone has a job to do within the squad, best to have a mic and communicate with your squad. Game's feel rewarding even if you lose, feels like you're playing to accomplish a common goal, not just to unlock the meta weapon (not a thing in HLL). None of that sweaty fast paced slide around the entire map farming.

Poorly optimized is a understatement, otherwise kinda dead now a days since they sold out

Game won't even start up, and after 10 startups it is slow as f#ck. Refund!

Joined a game. All squads locked. Made my own squad. Kicked for starting a new squad. Joined a second game. Two squads open. Kicked from both immediately after joining. Made my own squad. Kicked for making my own squad. Tried to refund and it wouldn't go through.

Fun game, especially with friends. But lag spikes and performance issues make it unplayable, not very accommodating for those on weaker PC's like me, Lag spikes every few seconds, plus stuttering even in singleplayer makes the game unplayable, unreal engine sucks, lowest graphic settings getting 50 FPS with lag spikes every 4-7 seconds is just absurd, gameplay is good but my PC isn't, and unreal engine and this game both aren't accommodating for that, I love this game, really I do. But I can't even play it, and trust me I tried everything, internet reveals I'm not the only one with this issue. AND I should mention that I USED TO NOT have this issue what so ever, not until the recent updates and I can see I'm not the only one complaining about the updates.

To play the game you have to join a server from a list and all the official servers are dead (no one ever joins them). The ones that are active are all owned by people with control complexes. I join a server that is mostly full and all the squads with any open positions are are locked so instead of waiting around for someone to leave an unlocked squad I figure I'll just create a new squad, no big deal. Instantly kicked by an admin for violating terms of the server....seriously the rules are you have to be level 25 to click a button and create a squad so I CAN JUST PLAY? Screw that. I join another server...this one only had one squad with a free spot, a recon squad. Oh cool, that means I get to be a sniper...nope apparently you have to be level 50 to play that role on that server. I was instantly warned and threatened with being kicked. Unreal. The community will kill this game. I've played WWII FPS my entire life starting back when Day of Defeat first came out, I know how to play these games and work with a team to meet objectives and fill different roles. This game seriously needs a way to auto queue into an active server that doesn't restrict people from just playing the darn game.

Play it - need to use comms play as a team ... and remember I want my Nazi scalps

Fantastic game. I really like that theres some sort of progression that gives you something to work twards.

The sweaty players would be fine if i had the chance to really properly learn the game but the toxic teammates have just turned me away from that. I'll take the wasted money over having to deal with either, at least it was on sale

I enjoy this game, it definitely frustrates me at times with its technical issues but I've never experienced things that I would consider game breaking. I commend the developers for their steady stream of work and input into their community and hope that eventually we can get crazy modes/servers with vehicles only, or class restrictions and customization, just to keep the game fresh if live support ever ends.

Teamwork is everything in this game because everyone has a specific role in this game, sure you can play it solo but you will miss much of its excitement and after a while it'll become boring. The other thing is it's a very hard game it is much like WW2 simulator so do not expect a walk in the park

WW2, immersive big team battles, good sound effects, low time to kill. if thats your jam

Network error won't let me play with friends or even load the game. Even Valorant runs fine, this is goofy and just bad. Free gacha games that work 100% versus the 30 something I paid for this...

Devs continue to prioritize DLC and cosmetics over gameplay and stability improvements. The fact that friend play is still unsupported is mind-blowing given the number of similar games out there which support joining servers as a squad. This game exists for neo-N**i larping and that's about it.

Use to like this game... but now it does not work. Menus are frozen on contact, and when they eventually defrosts all you get is servers that never load :( The menus for this game have been absolute trash since day one (as well as optimization in general), but the fact its devolved to the point that the game is now unplayable for me is shameful.

Best First Person Shooter of my Time. Its is amazing Game. just missing Costal and Aircraft combat and this game would Rule. But That being Said this is on my Top 5 Ranked Games :)

Between locked squads, no one listening to squad leaders, and no Pacific Campaign (yet), this is loads of fun. Run, Die, Repeat. A little less gruelling than Squad, but still just as fun. 8/10

i bought this game and never played it until july 11 2025 and I played it and I went to fire an artillery gun and I could not due to it having no ammo and there was no instructions on how to load the weapon, I had to google. The game is only online game play there is no story mode. I thought it would have some type of offline mode. The online game play has absolutely no value for your time. run to this area. capture the flag. end of map. relentless repsawning to the point you question if this is even worth playing since you have to spend a half hour per match waiting for respawning. over all absolutely terrible game. do not buy. does still have active servers with people level 400 and above.

Want to role play as a WW2 soldier barely dodging a bombing run as you hold off german soldiers and panzers with your squad in a blown out church as you wait for backup and air support? This is the game for you.

Cool WWII-era PTSD simulator. It's the kind of game where the "You Are Dead" screen punches you in the gut without warning, serving as a stark reminder that in real life, that would be it—lights out, no coming back, often without ever seeing what hit you. This game can be incredibly frustrating at times, but it's also what makes the triumphs so much more rewarding. When you're part of a squad where communication is seamless, everyone's playing for the win, and you're moving as a cohesive unit, the satisfaction is unparalleled. It's a game that demands your full attention and rewards genuine teamwork, making those moments of victory all the more sweeter.

Realistic WW2 battlefield FPS, as advertised, and especially fun when you're part of a unit working together in the chaos, be sure to bring a mic and read the room at times, veteran players have a way of working (e.g. lower levels not hogging the officer role, letting more experienced players drive the tanks and using voice comm to coordinate airhead spawns and let command know when units are pinned down), so learn fast, stay close to your squad and you'll die less.