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I've been a console gamer since I was 4 years old and my dad bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System. Over the last three decades, consoles have fulfilled almost all of my gaming needs, especially with the rise of Xbox Live and online gaming. But because I got older and my go-to franchises like Halo and Battlefield started to lose me, my eyes began wandering over to PC gaming, where I could discover the next evolution of shooters in the more strategic, hardcore titles-namely, Rising Storm 2: Vietnam and Hell Let Loose.
In particular, it's Black Matter Studios' World War II shooter that helped me want to finally build my first gaming-ready PC. It presented the kind of experience that I'm longing for a while now-a more grounded, realistic form of a genre that Battlefield and Call of Duty have moved from. It's a game that needs teamwork, patience, and communication. It is a shooter where K/D isn't everything, that offers ways to play apart from firing your gun.
Hell Let Loose is also a game which i just never thought will come to consoles. Part of that was because of the performance issues I experienced on the PC that could more than handle the game's demands. Even while the new Xboxes and PlayStation launched, I didn't think it was easy to get that game in working order on the console. But my uncertainty about Hell Let Loose making it to console had mostly to do with the crowd it would find there. PC players are used to playing niche, complex shooters; console gamers are too accustomed to frag fests like Battlefield and Call of Duty and battle royale games like PUBG, Fortnite, and Warzone to simply accept something as laborious as Hell Let Loose.
It's clear after playing Hell Let Loose on the Xbox Series X that my fears on both counts were unfounded. It doesn't only run surprisingly well on console (typically), but the players that I've interacted with seemed willing to provide in to the game's charms and accept that, rather than being a super soldier on the battlefield, they were merely one of the hundred pawns fulfilling their unique roles.
Before engaging in the specifics about the console version, let's consider Hell Let Loose in general and why it's possibly the most engaging shooter arrive at consoles in a very long time. Based on real battles of World War II (the developers have even recreated the locations of these battles on a 1:1 scale), Hell Let Loose is really a 100-player first-person shooter with a deep strategy metagame. Every soldier on the field includes a role to experience, and how well those roles are played and how well the various squads coordinate their attacks and defenses-as in opposition to who has got the most kills-are what truly determines the outcome of each and every match.
Teams are divided into squads, with three kinds of squads available: infantry, armor (tank crews), and recon (one spotter and something sniper). Infantry squads contain a more six players, armor three, and recon two, and each team are only able to have three armor squads and two recon squads in the game at any given moment. Each squad also offers a police officer that can contact another squads' officers. Finally, there is the commander, who are able to communicate with all of the squads' officers and provide support in the form of bombing and strafing runs, airhead spawn locations, and supply drops, as well as spawning new tanks and trucks-all whilst playing as a soldier on the field.
When I say that each soldier includes a role to play, I mean it, though most matches get down to how good infantry squads interact. Other than the officer, there are eight roles that a player within an infantry squad can enjoy: rifleman, assault, automatic rifleman, medic, machine gunner, support, engineer, and anti-tank. Apart from the rifleman, only one player can play each role per squad at any given time. Each role has at least two different classes that they'll choose from, which pick which weapons and gadgets they're bringing together into battle.
While most of the roles are self-explanatory, it is the support and engineer roles which are most likely the most crucial to winning a match. Support drops supplies that let officers build garrisons, what are spawn points for a team. In case your team doesn't have a garrisons built (or even the enemy has destroyed them), then you can only spawn on an HQ at the far end of the map or on an outpost, but only if your officer built that outpost. Meanwhile, engineers can build nodes, which gives the commander the resources they need to get in touch with bombing runs and the like.
For my money, playing as a full squad that's working together to aid the team's efforts is among the most gratifying experiences you can have with a first-person shooter. As you have specific duties to fulfill, no matter what role you're playing, emergent objectives appear constantly throughout the course of a match. About a minute, you will be running supplies back and forth with a supply truck so you can build garrisons and nodes. Later in that match, you could be building defenses and anti-tank cannons to hold down a strong point. If you are attacking, you may be sweeping the outer perimeters of a sector for enemy garrisons or trying to get around a fish tank so that you can shoot it within the butt with a rocket launcher. Maybe you're just pinned down in some trenches, doing all of your best to stop an enemy squad from flanking your team.
These moments are given context by Hell Let Loose's two modes: Warfare and Offensive. Warfare is really a tug-of-war mode where each team is trying to advance further into enemy territory by capturing sectors. Offensive sets one team as the attacking force and also the other because the defending force, using the attacking force needing to take every sector in sequential order. For those acquainted with Battlefield, Warfare is actually Frontlines and Offensive is Breakthrough.
Warfare is definitely the better mode, since it is tug-of-war structure results in the most interesting back-and-forth matches. If one team captures a sector, then your next sector opens up for capture. However, the other team can recapture that time and open up the following sector within the first team's territory. Whichever team can manage to capture all five sectors or hold a majority of the sectors when the timer expires wins the match. At certain stages of the match, it may be better to play defensively and hold onto the majority while a smaller number of squads makes some targeted attacks. In other cases, you might find your team going full-scale on a desperate push to capture the sector which will give you the win. Offensive, meanwhile, is much more straightforward. It can lend itself to intense frontline battles, but it's also much less interesting in terms of the strategies that you could employ.
All of these elements-roles, squads, strategies, emergent objectives, and game modes-are presented in an authentic-feeling World War II, Western Front package. Players are limited towards the weapons that their factions (U.S. or German) use, with the only scopes being those provided to the two snipers per team. When you can unlock different cosmetics, your characters will not be appearing like Battlefield V's budget G.I. Joes.
Most importantly, the maps you play feel like actual battlefields and not highly authored maps. I am not saying they are not effective for gameplay, because they do, there are a few obvious creative choices from map designers when it comes to bunker and trench placements. But there's something specifically naturalistic concerning the maps. Black Matter's research and dedication to recreating locations such as the snowy village of Foy and also the dense foliage of Hurtgen Forest result in maps with realistic topography and distance. Fields, city streets, hills, and forests all feel like the real thing, and never shrunken, truncated simulations according to design choices.
Besides its performance issues, Hell Let Loose on PC had been a captivating and exhilarating experience. However the question is if the console versions can capture the same magic. Rapid answer is yes. In lots of ways, it is a better experience on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5.
One of the reasons that Hell Let Loose works very well on console is the fact that there's a parity of experience among everyone that's playing. If you are hiding in certain tall grass, you are able to safely assume that exactly the same tall grass has been rendered for that enemy, too, and they can't help you. Getting the game world appear exactly the same to all players may appear just like a provided to console gamers, but it is simply not the situation on PC where many will turn down their graphics settings for performance's sake and inevitably experience the game differently. It is simply nice to understand that, whenever you inevitably get shot, it wasn't because you desired to experience higher graphical settings.
This probably has something related to the truth that Hell Let Loose has lower benchmarks to pay off when it comes to acceptable performance on console. Where PC players expect to be capable of getting countless frames per second, the console version only really needs to hit 60 to be both acceptable and playable. Despite a few hiccups that were more due to server issues and fewer to do with the game's performance, Hell Let Loose keeps going at a steady clip-on the Series X, even just in the busier parts of the maps asset-wise, while still managing to look great. There's some texture pop-in at much longer ranges, but nothing that drastically impacts gameplay, particularly when everyone is shooting at each other with gamepads and not on mouse and keyboard. The only real time which i experience severe frame drops is when I examine my binoculars as either an officer or recon spotter. The magnification, that is loading in assets which are technically farther away from the gamer, appears to halve the frame rate, although it continues to be playable and hinder combat.
The console parity and the fact that most people are playing on controllers, making the guns just a bit more cumbersome to use, leads to a lot more intense and fun engagements. It feels more easy to dart from cover to cover as the map design intends, or to roadie run alongside a hedge to cross a wide open field, when you don't get instantly headshotted by someone who is aiming having a mouse. Unlike in the PC version, it's incredibly rare to obtain killed by someone you cannot see. More often than not, you know how you died and why, and it creates a more rewarding gameplay experience overall. (This means that normal German infantry, who are equipped with a bolt-action rifle, instead of the semi-automatic Garand on the U.S. side, are at a slight disadvantage, though that does not necessarily change anything from laptop computer version.)
What most impressed me about the console version is how well the controls translate to a gamepad. Hell Let Loose is a complex game with many different moving parts, a lot of which involve communicating on various channels both with your squad with other officers. Pulling up the map, marking targets, using various gadgets, after which aiming and firing your weapon are mechanics you need to have the ability to swiftly and smoothly transition between, and Hell Let Loose's default control scheme lets you handle all of this effortlessly. The two radial menus around the Xbox controller's bumpers-one for switching between squad and proximity chat, and also the other for altering your gadgets-go quite a distance toward causeing this to be juggling act possible, and it is fairly intuitive when you decipher it all out. I'd go so far as to state that, now that I've got it down, I'd rather play Hell Let Loose with my Xbox controller than my mouse and keyboard, when i still get tripped track of the latter sometimes.
But the point that has surprised me the most about playing Hell Let Loose on console, at least to date, is how willing players I've encountered will be to accept and adapt to the complex metagame that Black Matter has created. Hell Let Loose is not only about who gets more kills; it comes down to who are able to control more territory, who are able to create more spawn points, and who are able to build more nodes so that their commander can get in touch with useful perks like bombing runs and spy planes. All of these elements that truly determine the outcome of the match, much more compared to amount of kills each team has, require multiple people cooperating to accomplish objectives.
Don't get me wrong: Console players have a long distance to go. I've played several matches where my squad was the only person placing garrisons, which are the spawn points that the entire team can spawn on and perhaps the only most essential thing in the game. It's rare to possess a commander yet, considering you have to be a minimum of level 10 to become one, and rarer yet to have a squad by having an engineer that's building nodes for the commander to use.
The game is partly at fault for these issues; it doesn't do a congrats explaining the complexities from the game to newcomers, leaving the bulk of the education to extracurricular sources like YouTube tutorials. But there's even the concept that the sorts of shooters which have so far been on console haven't really required deep strategic thinking or coordinated teamwork. Console players have developed years of muscle memory for simply running and gunning that they need to unlearn when they jump into Hell Let Loose.
Still, whenever I produce a squad and obtain on mic to coordinate with my teammates, magic happens. Furthermore the teammates communicate back, but they are also willing to learn about the intricacies of the game. They're prepared to not just charge headfirst in to the closest firefight, but to take longer flanks to decrease supplies and set up garrisons. They're willing to switch classes and play their roles. And finest of, they are not spewing racist or sexist crap simply because they believe it's funny to yell garbage in a bunch of strangers. It was my biggest fear about Hell Let Loose visiting consoles, and thus far, my fears happen to be unfounded.
The one place where Hell Let Loose's console version is somewhat lacking is in its matchmaking. To date, there is no server browser, which means console players are restricted to quick matching.
It's not too it does not work, as well as in some ways it really works better than it will on PC, where you can either stand in a queue to get into a complete match on the rented server or load into one with 30 out of the max 100 players. However, Hell Let Loose's lack of options with regards to quick matching can result in playing the same map 3 times in a row: once in Warfare, then twice in Offensive where each team plays as attackers. Because of this, you'll end up replaying exactly the same maps over and over again. An all-black costume Matter needs to do is set up two different playlists for Warfare and Offensive, though this may split the playerbase. Still, considering there's cross-play between Xbox and PlayStation and many from the early matchmaking issues appear to have been resolved, there are many players for everyone, a minimum of at launch.
Besides that, Hell Let Loose on console continues to be nearly everything I wanted so that it is. As the console playerbase continues to discover the game's intricacies and just how crucial communication is, the sport will get better still with time. In a genre that's filled with arcade-y movement and gun mechanics, Hell Let Loose truly stands apart like a unique experience on console, and hopefully it'll function as a pioneer for additional developers to place their more strategic, hardcore shooters on Xbox and PlayStation.
