Hell Let Loose

Hell Let Loose is a multiplayer World War II shooter originally developed by Black Matter and published by Team17. It entered Steam Early Access on June 6, 2019, the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, and received its full PC release in July 2021. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions followed that October. Team17 later acquired the game’s intellectual property from Black Matter.

Its battles pit two teams of up to 50 players against each other. Rather than following a fictional protagonist through a campaign, players fight over objectives on maps named for real wartime locations. Normandy maps include Omaha Beach, Utah Beach and Carentan. Other battlefields include Foy in Belgium, Stalingrad and Kursk on the Eastern Front, and the Remagen bridge area in Germany. The British forces update added maps set at El Alamein in North Africa and Driel in the Netherlands.

Players join infantry, armor or reconnaissance units, each with different roles and limits on squad size. An infantry squad can have an officer, medic, engineer, machine gunner, anti-tank soldier and other specialists. Armor crews operate vehicles together, while a reconnaissance unit pairs a spotter with a sniper. The playable armies include the United States, Germany, the Soviet Union and Britain. Their equipment reflects those factions: examples include the American M1 Garand, German Karabiner 98k and Soviet Mosin–Nagant rifles.

The commander has a different job from a frontline rifleman. Using resources such as manpower, munitions and fuel, commanders can call in abilities, including supply drops and bombing runs, and arrange vehicle spawns. Engineers can build resource nodes and defenses. Officers use supplies to establish garrisons, which serve as team-wide spawn points, and place outposts for their own units. These systems make control of ground matter beyond the immediate firefight: losing a useful spawn position can change where an entire team is able to regroup.

Communication is built into the game’s structure. Players can speak over proximity and unit voice channels, while officers and the commander have a separate leadership channel. In Warfare mode, both sides contest a changing front line; Offensive mode instead assigns one side to attack a sequence of objectives while the other defends them. Coordination between infantry, tanks, reconnaissance squads and command therefore affects how each battle unfolds.

Hell Let Loose has expanded beyond its original Western Front setting, but its defining format remains the large, objective-based match: named historical battlefields, distinct national forces and a player-built network of supplies, defenses and spawn points.