Hell Let Loose: Vietnam was on at least one fan’s Gamescom 2025 bingo card. “Hear me out: ‘Hell let loose Vietnam,’” they wrote on the Hell Let Loose subreddit at the start of 2025. Now that fan has fished their wish, as the game’s announcement trailer delivers the sequel that Battlefield players are still waiting for.
Set during the years of the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1973, the next Hell Let Loose will be a big departure from the first game’s WWII battlefields in Europe. In addition to the shift to dense jungle terrain, Vietnam will also feature aerial vehicles with players ferrying supplies by helicopter between camps, as well as river patrols by boat. North Vietnamese forces, meanwhile, will have access to sprawling networks of tunnels for bypassing enemy patrols and launching ambushes.
It’s set to come to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC sometime in 2026, with the publisher promising that both the new and existing games will continue to be maintained and updated alongside one another. Here’s the trailer:
Hell Let Loose blew up on Steam when it launched in 2021 despite being borne of a Kickstarter project years earlier by Australian studio Black Matter. Unlike recent battle royale free-for-alls or modern Call of Duty-style deathmatches, Hell Let Loose leans into the military simulation genre with 50v50 battles, in which players designated as officers share commands over priority voice channels and victory requires prioritizing communication and coordination over individual KDA ratio heroics.
Hell Let Loose: Vietnam won’t replace the original
The new game will introduce six maps at the start focusing on key moments in the war like Operation Starlite and Operation Piranha. It will also transition the franchise to Unreal Engine 5, hopefully with all of the visual bells-and-whistles that allows and none of the PC performance issues we’ve seen so frequently in other games. But even while this entirely new campaign is being built out across multiple game modes, the developers swear post-launch support for the original Hell Let Loose will continue.
“Our World War Two-based Hell Let Loose is incredibly important to us and our players. We can reassure you all that Team17 remains fully committed to the franchise,” they write in an FAQ. “To bring Hell Let Loose: Vietnam to life, Expression have built a second team in order to support both titles simultaneously. One game will never come at the expense of the other. Our focus remains on growing and improving both experiences for our players.”
Black Matter sold the franchise to Team17 a year after it came out and is currently working on an extraction RPG set in the plague-ravaged Napoleonic era called Hunger, so Hell Let Loose: Vietnam will be developed from the ground up by a completely separate team. We’ll see how the formula fairs and whether the sequel can live up to its premise. If you’re interested in checking out Hell Let Loose for yourself, it’s currently available on Game Pass on both console and PC. The game continues to get new updates with a March road map pointing to additional maps, vehicles, and cosmetics coming in the future.
