Hell Let Loose
Learn by dying like a dog for no good reason
PC, PS5, Xbox Series
Conventional WWII shooters have the player inhabit Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller – the Saving Private Ryan protagonist who, through a combination of gumption and dumb luck, is witness to meaningless death but never its subject (well, not until the very end, at least). Black Matter CEO Max Rea likes to say that Hell Let Loose newbies are the men standing behind Hanks on the D-Day landing craft – the ones who take a bullet the moment the ramp hits the beach.
“Normally, I think people’s first or second game is an extremely overwhelming and bewildering experience that’s largely just terrifying,” he says. “Things are exploding incredibly loudly around you, you wonder how you’re alive still, and then you die. You never see the person who kills you.”
Then comes an inflection point, Rea says. “Most players will figure out, ‘Is this something I want to overcome? Do I want to be the wolf at the top of this animal kingdom, or can I just not handle it?’” The Captain Millers of his studio’s 50v50 FPS earn their coolheadedness and knack for survival through study and experience.
It’s a brusque approach to onboarding, especially in the sphere of large-scale multiplayer where indies are understandably concerned about low player numbers ringing an early death knell for their games. “If you don’t have enough players to fill a server, then new players won’t come to the game,” Rea says. “That was by far the biggest worry.”
After the first sweaty month of Early Access in the summer of 2019, however, Black Matter saw a community band together – one to which we can attest, having scrolled through the many full matches in Hell Let Loose’s endearingly ’90s server list. When PS5 and Xbox Series players crawl into the Battle Of Carentan later this year, they’ll do so with an army of Redditors and Discord members at their back.
Rea believes console players will find that well of shared knowledge organically, and we suspect he may be right. There’s something about the vulnerability and horror of starting out in Hell Let Loose that pushes you naturally towards your squad’s officer, who represents connection and support. Only the officer has a direct line to Command, and can pass on the intel that might save you from stumbling blindly into the path of an enemy tank.
Filtering that information is a skilled job, and experienced officers become effective middle managers. “We tried to refine how many people were in the unit,” Rea says. “If you make them very large you have to contend with umpteen more voices, and if you make them too small it becomes extremely fractionated. But I can’t claim responsibility for that flow-ofinformation hierarchy. There were mods from the past decade that pioneered that, and Hell Let Loose is a direct result of no triple-A game being made of those mods.”
Specifically, Rea worships at the altar of Project Reality, the Battlefield and ARMA mod which rejected conventional FPS balance in favour of accentuating the differences between roles. “I’m always tempted to write an essay about what it did,” he says. “Having to hide from a tank put you into this almost Splinter
Cell-type experience, which was much more fun than trying to destroy it. It widened out the variety of gameplay loops within an FPS away from just the act of shooting people.”
It’s easy to file Hell Let Loose in a dusty drawer with other historical wargames. But Rea sees it as part of a wave of modern, Twitchready multiplayer shooters that value anecdote generation over kill/death ratios, such as Escape From Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown. “Players now care more about narrative than they do about kills,” he says. “With Hell Let Loose, a lot of it is about your own personal narrative, and retelling that to other people is where the excitement and the fun is.”
“Do I want to be the wolf at the top of this animal kingdom, or can I just not handle it?