clickbliss

Hell Let Loose is a lesson in accepting the inevitable

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Hell Let Loose
• Developer- Black Matter Studios
• Publisher- Team 17
• PC, PS4/5, Xbox

Most games try to give you some sense of your impact. You can construct stories about your prowess, about what you did to help bring your team to victory. You know how many kills you made, how many objectives you captured, and how you assisted your teammates. The numbers spell out plainly exactly what you’ve accomplished. 

In Hell Let Loose, sometimes it’s an achievement just to stay alive. A bomb you had no chance to avoid might take you out seconds after spawning. Or you might run ten minutes to the next objective only to be killed instantly by an enemy you’d never seen. 

Sometimes you play a key role in setting a well timed offensive that creates momentum for the whole team. And sometimes you wander around, separated from your squad with no objective, no direction, and wondering if you’re even going to contribute anything in the next 30 minutes of bloody attrition. 

Hell Let Loose is both the most exhilarated and bored I’d ever been in a shooter.

Information constantly comes it’s hard to tell what’s important. A casual chat room full of roleplaying that erupts into screams when artillery rips the person you’re talking to in half. 

Part RTS, part squad based shooter, so much of a match is determined by who you bring in and who you’re stuck with. The game takes place as much in the voice channels as it does in firefights. Maps are massive, with long treks taking place between objectives and so many players on the map at any time that without direction from squad leaders and your commander, it’s basically impossible to know if and when you’re making any meaningful contributions to the fight. Even in more specialized roles such as tank operators or snipers, no single player is going to make the difference in a battle. Information rules all, and often the team with the better coordination is going to win over the one with better aim. 

Hell Let Loose is basically the opposite of everything you expect from a modern shooter: arduous, tedious, and with massive, dense maps that make it impossible to pick out targets and provide no immediate feedback on if you’re doing well or if you even landed a hit on the person you were shooting at. Games can last over an hour, with no guarantee that anything interesting will happen. 

Despite that it remains constantly compelling. Hell Let Loose operates at a scale where you stop seeing yourself as a major player on a team, but a contributor to a massive effort. You’re not the person performing sick feats of skill to turn the game around, but a gun who puts bullets downrange to keep others from sticking their heads up, or a medic picking and choosing who they can save in the chaos. You’re rewarded not by the system but by the situation. The thank yous of people you revive, or seeing your squad crest over the hill, through smoke and taking a position you’ve been grinding at for the last 20 minutes. 

Hell Let Loose excels at generating these situations. It’s a game you always come out of with stories, tiny moments you remember from the larger experience. It’s requires a certain headspace and a large chunk of time, and often the sheer intimidation of it means I gotta psych myself up before I jump in. But there’s something about the awe and terror of the battlefield, the rhythms of the radio chatter, that keeps me coming back for more.