Hell Let Loose is a realistic battlefield game set in World War II. The principle is simple: multiplayer, fifty Allies, fifty Nazis, and a front line where they fight it out. Everything looks stunning, the audio is unprecedented, and chaos erupts every other minute. Sometimes in Hell Let Loose, there is nothing you can do but run, bleed out, and die.
What is fun about that? Nothing. Hell Let Loose is not fun. Hell Let Loose is war. Hell Let Loose is the sixth episode of the miniseries Band of Brothers, the Battle of the Bulge. Hell Let Loose is pure fear and pain, while you lie with your nose in the mud and wounded colleagues are screaming for their mothers in panic everywhere.
Now you might be thinking: whatever Vorstermans, you play seven thousand games a year, and now we suddenly have to play a hardcore battle game while we're apparently screaming for our mothers? Well, no. Hell Let Loose isn't for everyone. Hell Let Loose is for people who understand that sometimes war is nothing more than trying not to die.
Well, I'm not a soldier, of course. I don't know the misery of war. I'm typing this while eating chilled, seedless green grapes. But I do know the hectic pace of multiplayer games. Compared to those games, Hell Let Loose does something very special: the game really shows you and lets you feel what it is like to be put under pressure. This game is bursting with moments where your fight-or-flight response kicks in.
One of those moments is my absolute favorite. For that, we have to go back to one of my first play sessions. That takes place in early September on a PlayStation 5, although I also play the game on PC. At that moment, there isn't a cloud in the sky on the sunny map in France where I am playing. It is my tenth game in total, but for the first time, I am an officer.
That means I have five soldiers under me. They are truly dependent on me, and I feel quite a bit of pressure. Only officers can communicate with other officers. This happens in a separate voice chat channel, where officers call in bombardments and discuss broad tactics. I then have to relay those tactics back to my soldiers.
We are on our way together to a point marked on our map. It is a meadow, about two hundred meters long. On one side lies a ditch. I see roughly thirty soldiers lying there across a width of seventy meters. It is not a large meadow, but it lies right in front of a small farm that we would like to capture from the Allies.
Everyone is just lying around in the ditch. Every now and then shots are fired and someone runs to the other side, but otherwise, there isn't really much going on. Before I can even walk onto the meadow, all hell breaks loose. Everyone who isn't lying in the ditch is blasted to smithereens within a second or two by two machine-gun nests on the other side of the meadow.
I am talking here about an inhuman and relentless barrage of bullets at ankle height. In my living room, the fillings are rattling out of my teeth due to the surround sound. My screen is shaking and covered in mud. I can barely see what is happening, and things are being screamed in the chat channel that I cannot understand at all.
I am talking here about an inhuman and relentless barrage of bullets at ankle height. In my living room, the fillings are rattling out of my teeth due to the surround sound. My screen is shaking and covered in mud. I can barely see what is happening, and things are being screamed in the chat channel that I cannot understand at all.
I throw two smoke grenades to obscure the enemy's view. It works. I run onto the field. I can still hear the machine guns firing. Bullets whiz past, but I am not hit. The path I take to the other side is one of unparalleled opportunism. Don't think. Ten meters. The gunfire gets closer. Fifteen meters. I still haven't been hit. Twenty meters. This is going better than I thought.
I make it to the smoke grenades. I stop running, throw my body to the ground, and start crawling. Now you might be thinking: why doesn't everyone do that? Well, crawling is very slow in this game. Because officers can place beacons for teammates to spawn on, it is often more effective to simply die and respawn with your team.
But then you underestimate how rigid and inefficient this officer is. I begin my advance crawling, while the machine-gun nests resume the assault on my eardrums. I am under so much pressure now that I can barely distinguish between the grass and the sky. My screen vibrates incessantly and the colors fade. I keep crawling.
By now, I see the icons of several flanking squads on both the right and left sides of the meadow. There is no time to get excited. Vrrrrrrrrmmmm. Roaring aircraft engines fill the living room. A bombardment is coming.
Bombardments in Hell Let Loose cannot be compared to bombardments in other war games. I could write another seven hundred articles about the first time I had to endure one. Bombardments in this game are slowly approaching orgies of dust and fire. By comparison: it is a bit like the world ending.
