Right, let’s talk about this.
Hell Let Loose: Vietnam launched last week and, on day one, pulled in 30,000 concurrent players on Steam. That makes it one of the biggest launches the series has ever seen. Critics gave it a 78 on Metacritic. Dexerto called it tough but extremely rewarding. GamesRadar described it as brutal but always engaging. PCGamesN praised its sky-high skill ceiling.
And yet, if you spent any time looking through the Steam reviews or gaming forums over the last week, you would be forgiven for thinking it was an unmitigated disaster made by people who had never played a video game before.
It isn’t. Let me explain what is actually going on.
The mixed Steam rating, which has been sitting somewhere between 53 and 59 percent positive depending on when you check, is mostly down to three issues: AMD GPU crashes at launch, broken VOIP, and server problems. Those are real issues. They are valid complaints, and nobody should pretend otherwise.
But there is an important difference between launch problems and game problems.
The AMD crashes already have a workaround: add “-dx12” to your Steam launch options. Expression Games is actively patching the game. And VOIP issues in large-scale tactical shooters at launch are so common that they are practically a genre tradition at this point. The other complaint, and the one people are much more emotional about, is that the game feels less hardcore than the original Hell Let Loose. Some players feel it has been simplified. They think the factions are too similar, the tunnels are little more than fast-travel hubs, and the asymmetry between the two sides does not go far enough.
That criticism has more substance to it, and I am not going to dismiss it entirely. But I do think it is being amplified by a certain kind of player who wanted Hell Let Loose 1 set in Vietnam. When they did not get exactly that, they decided the whole thing was a betrayal. What Expression Games has actually made is a game that takes the core Hell Let Loose formula, 100 players, mandatory communication, a chain of command, and squad coordination over individual skill, and drops it into a genuinely different kind of conflict with its own mechanics.
The jungle maps change everything about how you move and how you think. You cannot see much of anything. Moving through dense vegetation creates a kind of tension that the open European battlefields of the original never really had. A quiet squad trying to push through the jungle without communication is a dead squad, and the game makes you feel that constantly.
The tunnels are probably the most interesting new addition, and people calling them simple fast-travel hubs are underselling them badly. The NVA can build tunnel networks across the map, connecting positions and creating spawn points that US forces have to hunt down and destroy. GamesRadar said crawling through those tunnels in first person creates an incredible sense of asymmetric warfare, and that is exactly right. The tunnel system is the direct counter to the US helicopter advantage. When both systems are working properly, and both teams understand what they are doing, the asymmetry is genuinely fascinating.
US helicopters can ferry troops across the map, while NVA squads emerge from underground in completely unexpected places. That is not something Hell Let Loose has done before, and it works. The helicopters themselves are brilliant, and they completely change how the US side plays. A good helicopter pilot is worth their weight in gold. A bad one will drop you into the wrong part of the jungle and get shot down immediately. Both outcomes are entertaining, just for very different reasons.
Is it a rough launch? Yes. Does it feel a little underbaked in places? Also yes. The faction asymmetry could go further, and there are legitimate design criticisms buried underneath the louder complaints. But that 78 on Metacritic, from professional critics who played under controlled conditions with functional servers, is not a coincidence. The underlying game is genuinely good when it works.
The claustrophobic jungle tension, the tunnel warfare, the helicopter logistics, and those rare moments when a full squad is communicating and everyone knows their role: this is what Hell Let Loose does best. The Vietnam setting makes it feel meaningfully different rather than like a simple reskin.
Give it a month. Let the AMD issues be properly patched, let the servers stabilise, and let the player base learn what it is doing. The same thing happened with the original Hell Let Loose. It was chaotic at launch, slowly found its footing, and built an incredibly dedicated audience over time.
Vietnam will not be any different.
It deserves more than a 53 percent Steam rating, and in six months, it will probably have one.
Meanwhile, stay tuned to Respawning for our review going live very soon!