Realism is serious business for the Hell Let Loose series, and that applies equally to the military simulator's upcoming instalment Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. But that commitment to authenticity has posed a significant challenge for developer Expression Games for this iteration, one that was equally a problem for the soldiers who actually fought in the war.
Vietnam, in case you're not already aware from going there, geography lessons, or ambient exposure to dozens of war movies, is almost half covered by jungle, and was more than half-covered by jungle prior to the Vietnam War. And the thing about jungle is the density of foliage makes it hard to see much else, like the sky, or passing animals, or someone with a rifle trying to murder you.
Getting killed outta nowhere is kinda how war rolls, especially from the First World War onward, but it doesn't make for an especially fun or balanced play experience. It's a dilemma that Expression Games has wrestled with for a while, as technical director Kieran D'Archambaud explained in the latest issue of PC Gamer: "Particularly if you're new to the game, it can be very hard to understand where you're dying from."
Expression's solution is to try to make the jungle your friend as much as your foe. The foliage Hell Let Loose: Vietnam's jungle is extremely sensitive to touch, and its trees and bushes will move and rustle at the slightest hint of contact to help alert players to an enemy's presence. In other words, the jungle is a dirty snitch, so you'll need to tread with the utmost caution if you want to avoid being ratted out.
Expect the sound of the jungle to be every bit as convincing as the other parts of Hell Let Loose, too. The team has at least one artist who is an expert in foliage, and an audio engineer whose role is purely to create the game's ambience. "All of it is a hundred-percent historically authentic," creative director Matt White told PC Gamer, right down to "the sound of the bugs" and "the sound of the frogs."
It'll be interesting to see whether the Vietnamese setting adds an extra dimension to Hell Let Loose's combat. The original game, which was set in World War 2, made for a great introduction to military simulators according to our FPS expert Morgan Park, but maybe lacked a little something to make it special. "If straightforward WW2 action is what I'm after, Hell Let Loose is a worthy option," he wrote in his Hell Let Loose Review. "But it's also really similar to a few other games that have been around longer."
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