Hell Let Loose: Vietnam Preview: There’s No Hand-Holding in This Hardcore 50v50 Milsim
Gaming Reports 
My last thought before dying for what felt like the eighth time on Thanh Hoa Bridge was that I had a guy pinned inside a shack. I lined up at the door frame, breathed out, and waited for him to emerge from cover. Then his squadmate, whom I hadn’t even imagined would be waiting nearby, sniped me from a hundred meters behind me. As soon as I heard the distant crack of the shot, I found myself back on the redeploy screen. The entire two-hour preview of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam unfolded much the same way. Around the 90-minute mark, I began to truly respect what Expression Games had built: a truly hardcore 50v50 Vietnam-era milsim that pulls no punches, rewarding sharp tactical interplay as quickly as it punishes its absence.
Welcome to Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. The Western Front is gone, and the North Vietnamese Army is in. Almost everything else about the classic Hell Let Loose formula is intact, including the famously steep learning curve and the resource-driven meta where Commanders sit on a tactical map juggling Manpower, Munitions, and Fuel reserves the way an RTS general would. I played the preview event on Thanh Hoa Bridge, a version of the historical Dragon’s Jaw from Operation Rolling Thunder, which feels like a giant wet jungle stitched together with rice paddies, river crossings, and a few villages where most of the dying happens. Speaking of, there is a lot of dying in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, and its whole personality flows from that.
For full transparency: I played on a 4070 Ti, Ryzen 3900X, 32GB of RAM, running at 3440×1440 on High settings with DLSS Quality, frame generation set to Medium, and Reflex on. The build was clearly preview-grade. Foliage popped in close to the camera during firefights, frame pacing stuttered when effects stacked, and one time I got stuck in a body of water for a flat twenty seconds, unable to mantle out, before it inexplicably let me. I did nothing differently. The animation eventually triggered.
None of that worries me by itself at this stage. What worries me is that I explored every menu I could find and found no Accessibility tab in the settings. For a milsim with this kind of learning curve and such sensory minimalism, that omission could alienate a significant portion of its launch playerbase.
Run Through the Jungle
The controls don’t feel like Battlefield or Call of Duty, and you’ll realize it in 30 seconds. It’s WASD-based, but takes a bit longer to do, and there are fewer ways to get sensory input.
My American rifleman started each life with an M16, some bandages, and a combat knife. No pistol, which surprised me for a milsim so committed to authenticity. The “cool” thing — if ramming steel into a stranger’s throat can be called cool — is that tapping CAPS LOCK equips a bayonet and pressing B sinks it home. It’s clunky, much like Hell Let Loose has always been. Reloads have weight, and aiming down sights has a slight lag compared to the twitchier shooters most players are accustomed to.
You also can’t sprint-mantle-shoot the way you can in modern Battlefield. If you’re used to having your character perform multiple actions simultaneously, the first hour will probably feel frustrating.
The role kits make that friction systemic and enforce team play. As a Rifleman, I could drop a small ammo box for teammates to resupply ammunition, which came in handy since you get so little ammo to start.
At one point, I tried joining a new squad and found its three Rifleman slots filled up, so I played Medic instead. That kit didn’t differ a ton, instead including Morphine Syrettes that automatically marked any critically wounded ally within a hundred meters with a syringe icon on my screen. Medics can also supposedly drag downed teammates faster than anyone else and fire a sidearm one-handed during the drag, but I didn’t get to see that in action during the preview session.
The core class distinction comes down to a slight difference in loadout that makes a rather large difference on the field. The functions modern shooters cram into one loadout are split across five different roles here, and the result is that even basic battlefield outcomes (keeping a guy alive, getting a guy resupplied, building a piece of critical infrastructure for the whole squad) require coordinating with someone who picked the right specialty before the round started. Think old-school Battlefield (like, for example, Battlefield: Vietnam), but with even more granularity between classes. When the coordination clicks, it feels way more immersive than other games in the genre. When it didn’t, I found myself just running through a swamp for five minutes and dying.
White Rabbit
Thanh Hoa is one of six maps shipping at launch. The others are inspired by real engagements like Operation Starlite at Vạn Tường, the Tet Offensive at Huế, the Battle of Đắk Tô, the Cam Ranh logistics port, and Quảng Ngãi, where Viet Cong activity was sustained throughout the war. I only played Thanh Hoa, and even after two hours, I couldn’t tell you where half of its sightlines opened up.
You don’t get a hit indicator, you barely get directional damage arrows before collapsing, and once you’re downed, it’s unlikely anyone will be close enough to help. The Settings menu does include toggles for Show Killer’s Name and Show Cause of Death, but the defaults skew toward “find out the hard way,” and it seems that even with the helpers on, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam still refuses to point an arrow at the muzzle flash you missed. You get sound, you get whatever you can see through the canopy, and you better hope that’s enough.
That sensory floor is where Hell Let Loose: Vietnam stops feeling like a flat-screen shooter and starts feeling like something it isn’t designed to be. It’s the first shooter in a while that’s made me think, unironically, that it would probably be better in VR. There’s a head-on-a-swivel kind of situational awareness you build in something like Onward VR that translates directly into tactical instinct, and Hell Let Loose: Vietnam asks for the same instinct while handing you a mouse and keyboard to execute it with.
Gimme Shelter
When you redeploy, you spawn at a Garrison behind friendly lines. Garrisons are team-wide deployables, capped at eight per side, placed by a Squad Leader or Commander using supplies dropped by a Specialist. Alternatively, you spawn at an Outpost, a unit-only version your Squad Leader plants near the objective. You cannot spawn directly on your squadmates. You cannot spawn at a captured point unless your team has fortified it first. So you’ll typically look at the tactical map and pick one of two options: wait for the dev-piloted Transport Helicopter to take you to the front, or start walking.
During my session, riding the chopper back to the hot zone was rarely an option. Because the developers had locked players out of all vehicle controls for the preview, we either waited for a developer to respawn back to base and pick us up, or ran back in on foot. I usually just gave up and started running. From the rear garrison to the frontlines was a five-minute jungle sprint through the swamp; a jaunt that lasted long enough to forget my frustration before catching a bullet from an unseen enemy.
And then I respawned after a 30-second wait, give or take. And I started the five-minute walk back.
This is the design choice that will define who loves Hell Let Loose: Vietnam and who quietly disengages after a couple of matches. For hardcore players, the friction is the point. The Conquest mode I played even has a finite morale ticker that depletes with every team redeployment, meaning a careful Squad Leader who plants a smart Outpost a hundred meters from the objective contributes more to the team than three players topping the kill chart. For everyone else, that math will feel like punishment.
What kept me engaged during the long walks was the voice chat. Hell Let Loose has always lived and died on squad communication, and the preview reminded me why. Toward the end of one skirmish, I switched to the NVA side just to see what the other half of the asymmetry looked like, and I ended up as the Observer on a mortar team with no other members. Observers are the mortar unit’s forward eyes, equipped with binoculars to spot enemies and mark them on the tactical map for a Gunner and a Support who would, in theory, load and fire HE shells. Mine didn’t exist. I sat at range, scanning the jungle with my binoculars anyway, because spotting from two hundred meters out turned out to be the most relaxing thing I did all session. Then I switched to the equally empty Recon team and tried to plant an Outpost behind the line, and my former teammates on the American side shot me down for it a few times.
Meanwhile, the NVA Commander, played by one of the developers in my match, was audibly begging us via comms to set up tunnels at a recently captured point. Watching a dev get that invested in his own work is genuine in a way that can’t be manufactured, and it seems that Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is built to produce exactly that kind of emergent communication, which is one of the best arguments for this style of milsim to still exist in 2026.
All Along the Watchtower
The asymmetry is where Expression Games introduces something genuinely new to the franchise. The US faction exclusively uses helicopters, while the NVA faction seemingly exclusively uses tunnel networks. Tunnels can be linked into a connected web on the tactical map, and NVA Garrisons double as tunnel entrances when integrated into that network, allowing players to fast-travel between connected nodes. Helicopters spawn from fixed helipads, and transport variants can act as mobile spawn points when landed. The NVA Machine Gunner can deploy a static anti-aircraft emplacement to counter air threats. The US side counters the underground game with Napalm Strikes. The asymmetry runs deeper than the “slightly better tank” calculation that most military shooters settle for between factions, and both factions in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam have to fight with different verbs to win.
I can’t yet say how most of that plays in practice. As I was mostly on the American side, the vehicle lockout meant I never piloted a chopper or drove a tank. I saw armor rolling through jungle sightlines. I heard planes overhead. The mechanical design of the asymmetry is the most interesting aspect of the build, but its practical application is something I’ll have to revisit.
There’s also the 19-strong class roster, spread across infantry, armor, helicopter, recon, and mortar units. My squad comprised Riflemen and, infrequently, myself as the Medic. We never utilized the two-person Recon Unit (whose Spotter is the only class that can place a spawn Outpost inside locked enemy territory) or the two-person Helicopter Unit, which splits into a Pilot and Logistics Officer. Tank crews were entirely off-limits. When you see “19 distinct classes” on a storefront, the first question is whether the developer can balance that spread across a 50v50 lobby. I genuinely don’t know the answer yet. The preview didn’t give me enough to tell.
The Long Road to ’26
I was left with a handful of open questions I’m taking back to the full release. Will all 19 classes feel mechanically distinct in practice, or will the meta collapse into the same three or four picks every long match? Will vehicle scarcity stay this restrictive once players actually have access, or was the preview lockdown a closed-event quirk? Does the Conquest morale economy create the careful, life-preserving play it seems to want, or just make losing teams feel doubly punished?
If you’re craving a slow, communications-heavy milsim that respects your time enough to punish you for misusing it, and you don’t mind working around some preview-build roughness and a learning curve that hasn’t softened much, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam looks like it’s still very much itself. That’s a good thing if you already loved this series, and a warning if you didn’t.
Gabriel Moss is a longtime contributor to IGN. Say hi on X at @gabrielmosspdx.
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