Hell Let Loose, the WW2 shooter promising 100-player battles, launches Kickstarter campaign

Hell Let Loose caught Andy's eye earlier this year with its promise of realistic platoon-based World War II shooting and vehicle combat combined with strategy elements, including resources and airstrikes that can be called in from off the map. Developer Black Matter has now launched a Kickstarter campaign, aiming to raise AU$136,000 (roughly $106,000/£80,000) before the end of this month.

Alongside the campaign the team has released a new nine-minute gameplay video that focuses on one squad protecting a capture point, of which there will be multiple on any given map.

There's things to be excited about, I reckon: there's almost no HUD (or crosshairs) to speak of, which ties into the theme of realism, and there's a heavy emphasis on player positioning and communicating with your platoon.

It's not entirely clear how the strategy elements will work yet. One player will take on a commander role that will presumably oversee the battlefield and issue instructions to the 50 soldiers on their team, but there's not much detail on that. What we do know is that capturing different points on the map will yield different resources: holding a fuel depot will allow your side to refuel vehicles faster and controlling a munitions depot will let you launch off-map naval strikes.

Players will choose between 13 different combat roles, such as an Engineer that can lay down mines and build machine gun nests.

There are one or two things in the video that seem a little out of place to me, primarily the lack of recoil on some of the weapons both when aiming down sights and firing from the hip (skip to 6:20 to see what I mean). It doesn't sit well in a game that's shooting for realism.

However, other than that (and a few lighting glitches aside), it looks like it's worth keeping an eye on. There's a variety of pledge levels, and $24.95 (roughly £18.65) will get you a Steam Early Access key when the game migrates to the platform next year. A closed alpha is due early next year.

The developer expects the full game to cost $29.95 when it eventually comes out.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.