Hell Let Loose Vietnam Open Beta Is Live. And War Is Hell!

The team that took over gets their shot. We haven't had a good Vietnam game since Rising Storm 2. Tonight we find out if that changes.

The Hell Let Loose Vietnam open beta goes live today, May 29, and runs through June 1 on Steam. The Thanh Hoa Bridge map is the test bed. 50 versus 50. Helicopters, patrol boats, mortar squads, jungle warfare. All of it running on Unreal Engine 5. Free to play for the weekend. Register through the FirstLook platform and you're in.

I'll be running it all night. And I'm going to be honest with you, I'm cautiously excited about this one.

Cautiously. Not skeptically. Not pessimistically. There's a difference. I want this to be a success. I want this to be fun. But there are some things about this launch that need to be talked about before everybody jumps in and starts blasting Fortunate Son through proximity chat.

This Is Not Black Matter's Game

This is the part that I think a lot of people either don't realize or haven't thought about enough. Hell Let Loose Vietnam is not being made by the studio that created the original Hell Let Loose. Black Matter, the team that built the first game from scratch, handed over development responsibilities to Expression Games a while back. Black Matter has since moved on to their next project, a game called Hunger that I am genuinely looking forward to.

Expression Games has been maintaining and updating the original Hell Let Loose since taking over, and to their credit they've been pretty solid with it. They've shipped updates and engaged with the community. Kept the lights on for a game that could have easily been left to rot after the original developers walked away. That matters. That's not nothing.

But there have also been some blunders along the way. Patches that broke things. Updates that didn't land well. Moments where the community felt like the game was drifting from what made it special. None of it was catastrophic. But it's the kind of thing that makes you pause when that same team announces a brand new standalone title in a completely different theater of war.

Hell Let Loose Vietnam is their chance to prove what they can do on their own. Not just maintaining somebody else's game, but building something new while using the shell and the lessons from everything they learned since taking over. This is Expression Games stepping out from behind Black Matter's shadow. And that's going to be the story of this launch whether the beta goes well or not.

The Original Was a Masterpiece That Ran Like Garbage

I say this with love. Hell Let Loose is one of my favorite multiplayer shooters. The communication, the coordination, the feeling of being one small part of a massive battle where everything depends on your squad doing its job. There is nothing else like it. When it works, when your commander is calling plays and your squad leader is marking targets and everybody is moving together, it is one of the most intense gaming experiences you can have.

But man, that game ran like absolute trash on release. I'm talking frame rates in the 20s for the first two years of that game's life cycle. Stuttering, crashes, server issues, all of it. And people still played it because the core experience was that good. The community stuck around through all of it because underneath the performance problems was something genuinely special.

That gives me hope for Vietnam. If the foundation is strong enough, players will forgive a rough launch. They did it with the original. They did it with Subnautica 2 just this month. They do it every time a game earns their patience by proving that the vision is worth sticking around for.

Vietnam Has Been Abandoned by the Industry

Here's the thing that I don't think gets talked about enough. We haven't had a really solid Vietnam game since Rising Storm 2. That was 2017. Nine years ago. The Vietnam War setting, one of the most viscerally intense and narratively rich conflicts in modern history, has been almost completely ignored by the games industry for nearly a decade.

And it's not like there isn't demand. Every time somebody brings up Vietnam games in a forum or a comment section, the responses are overwhelming. People want this setting. They want the jungle warfare. They want the helicopters and the tunnels and the asymmetric combat. But nobody has stepped up to deliver it at a scale that matters.

Expression Games chose Vietnam specifically because of that gap. They've said publicly that it hadn't been featured in any major game title for years. And I think that's exactly the kind of decision making that leads to something special when the execution matches the ambition. You're not fighting for space in an overcrowded genre. You're walking into an empty room. The audience is already waiting.

50 versus 50 tactical combat in a Vietnam setting with helicopters that transport troops and provide air support, patrol boats running river warfare, mortar squads laying down indirect fire, and 17 different roles across six unit types. On paper, that sounds like everything this community has been asking for. The beta is where we find out if Expression Games can actually deliver it.

What I'm Watching For

Performance. That's the first thing. If this beta runs smooth, if the frame rates hold, if the servers stay stable under load, that alone will tell me more about Expression Games' capabilities than anything they've done with the original game. Unreal Engine 5 has been a mixed bag across the industry. Some games look incredible on it. Some run like they're rendering through a potato. The engine is powerful but it's demanding and not every studio has figured out how to optimize it.

Beyond that, I want to see if the Vietnam setting actually changes how the game plays. Hell Let Loose's World War 2 maps had a certain rhythm to them. Open fields, hedgerows, urban combat in bombed out towns. Vietnam should feel fundamentally different. Tighter sight lines. Denser vegetation. More vertical gameplay with the jungle canopy. If the maps just feel like WW2 maps with palm trees, that's going to be a problem. The setting needs to inform the design, not just the textures.

And the helicopters. This is the wildcard. Aerial units in a 50v50 tactical shooter could change everything about how these matches play out or they could be a nightmare to balance. Dropping troops behind enemy lines, providing reconnaissance, laying down fire support. All of that sounds incredible in theory. In practice, it needs to feel integrated into the flow of the match, not like a separate game happening above everybody else.

See You on the Battlefield

I'm going in with open eyes and managed expectations. This is a beta. Things will break. Servers will struggle. Balance will be off. That's fine. That's what betas are for. What I'm looking for is the feeling. Does it feel like Hell Let Loose? Does it feel like the team understands what makes these games work? Does the Vietnam setting add something meaningful or is it just a reskin?

If Expression Games can answer those questions the right way even partially, they're going to have something special on their hands. The audience is ready. The demand is there. The genre has been starving for exactly this kind of game. All they have to do is not fumble it.

From what I've seen so far, the trailers, the previews, the gameplay footage, it looks solid. The atmosphere seems right. The scale looks authentic. The new additions like helicopters and patrol boats look like they belong instead of feeling bolted on. But trailers are trailers and footage is footage. Tonight we find out for real.

The open beta runs May 29 through June 1 on Steam. Register through FirstLook if you haven't already. I'll be out there somewhere in the jungle trying not to get shot.

Now queue up some Fortunate Son. its time.

Update: I Played the Beta. Here's What I Found.

Added after the open beta weekend.

So I jumped in. Played through the night like I said I would. And I want to be straight with you because I think people considering a purchase need to hear this before the game drops.

The foundation is there. You can see it. The bones of something that could blossom into a genuinely awesome shooter are visible underneath everything else. The maps feel authentic. The squad dynamics carry over from the original in a way that proves Expression Games understands the formula. When things were working, when the server was holding up and the squad was communicating, those flashes of what this game could be were real.

But right now, it's rough.

Server performance was terrible when I played. People in the lobby were getting high pings all throughout the match. Not just spikes. Consistently elevated latency that made everything feel slightly off. And the further away enemies were, the worse it got. Distant players were skipping around, stutter stepping across the terrain in a way that made recon basically useless. You can't call out targets when the targets are teleporting every few frames.

The gun audio was the other thing that really stood out to me, and not in a good way. The weapons sound subpar. Flat. Thin. Like placeholder audio that hasn't been finalized yet. If you've played the original Hell Let Loose, you know how much the sound design carries that game. Vietnam doesn't have that yet. And that matters more than people think because in a game where you spend half your time listening for threats you can't see, the audio has to hit. Right now it doesn't.

Overall I'd say they have something solid here but that something might be about a year or more out from being really polished. And the game is supposed to launch soon. That gap between where it is right now and where it needs to be for a full release is concerning. Not fatal. Not unfixable. But real.

If you played the beta yourself or caught gameplay from streamers and content creators this weekend, you probably have a sense of what I'm talking about. If you didn't get a chance to see it in action, consider this a heads up before you buy. The vision is right. The execution isn't there yet. Give it time. Keep it on your wishlist. But don't go in expecting the finished product because what I played wasn't that.