How to Install Hell Let Loose and Join a Server

The first thing Hell Let Loose does is make you walk. Not for ten seconds — for a minute or two, across open ground, towards a treeline where something might be. Then a machine gun you never saw opens up from four hundred metres away and you are dead, and there is no killcam to tell you where it was.

That is the game working. Almost every design decision in it exists to make distance, information and organisation matter more than aim, and the result is a shooter where the best player in the lobby can contribute nothing if nobody is talking.

Listings gather on the Hell Let Loose hub, and the server you pick determines whether you get an organised battle or ninety-nine people running in different directions.

The shape of a match

Fifty against fifty on a very large map, fighting over a chain of sectors.

The sectors are the point. The map is divided into a line of them, and only the contested one matters at any moment — you cannot skip ahead, you cannot capture the enemy's rear while the front is still theirs. The front line moves one sector at a time, forwards or backwards, and the whole match is a tug of war along that line.

Inside each sector are strongpoints, and which one your team commits to is a decision somebody has to make out loud. Three squads attacking three different strongpoints achieve nothing. Three squads attacking one take it.

The main mode runs that tug of war symmetrically. There is an attack-and-defend variant where one side is pushing and the other is holding, which changes the arithmetic completely, and a smaller-scale mode for fewer players that is a reasonable place to learn the maps without a hundred people depending on you.

Spawning is the actual game

This is the part that decides matches and the part new players do not see.

You do not spawn where you like. Your team spawns on things it has built, and building them requires supplies that have to be driven to a location by somebody in a truck.

Garrisons are the big ones — team-wide spawn points that let everybody arrive near the fighting. A garrison placed well is worth more than any amount of shooting. A team with no garrisons near the contested sector is a team walking for two minutes per death, which is how a match becomes a rout.

Outposts are the small ones, placed by a squad's officer, and they let that squad get back into the fight quickly.

Both of them can be destroyed. Both of them are why a squad that spends its match sneaking behind the line to remove enemy spawns will win a game they never appear to be winning.

The resources behind all this come from nodes that get built and defended, and they feed the Commander — one player per team who spends them on things nobody else can call in. Supply drops. Bombing runs. Reinforcements. A good commander is invisible and a bad one is a fifty-man handicap.

Roles, and which one to take first

Squads are small, and each one is built around its officer.

Officer is the job. One per squad, with the radio, the ability to place spawns, and access to a voice channel that connects to every other officer and to the commander. Nobody wants to do it and the match falls apart without it. If you have a microphone and you are willing to say where your squad is going, take it — the game is dramatically better from that seat and you do not have to be good at shooting.

Rifleman is where to start. It is the ordinary soldier and it carries spare ammunition for the people who need it.

Medic revives, and the revive is a real mechanic rather than a formality. A medic who stays alive keeps a squad in the fight through an assault that should have ended it.

Machine gunner is the role that produces the opening paragraph of this guide. Set up covering a road with a decent field of fire and you become the reason an entire enemy squad has to go somewhere else. Deploying takes time and moving is slow, so choosing the position is the whole skill.

Engineer builds — nodes, defences, and the repairs that keep armour running.

Anti-tank exists because armour exists, and a tank with no anti-tank opposite it is a rolling problem that does not stop.

Armour crews are three people in one vehicle, one of them driving, one on the gun, all of them dependent on somebody outside telling them what is around the corner. It is the most co-operative thing in the game.

Recon is two players a long way from everyone else, spotting for artillery and removing officers.

Talking is not optional

Hell Let Loose has proximity voice, a squad channel and a command channel, and it uses all three.

The single biggest difference between a good match and a bad one is whether the officers are on the command channel. Not whether they are skilled. Whether they are talking.

New players are frequently reluctant to use a microphone in a game full of strangers. The honest advice is that this game is substantially worse without it — you will not know where to go, you will not know what your squad is doing, and squad leaders on well-run servers will remove you to make room for somebody who can hear them. Say "moving to the church" and you are already contributing more than half the lobby.

The maps have personalities

Server rotations are built out of a pool that varies far more than the shared setting suggests, and knowing what a map wants from you before it loads is worth learning.

Foy is a winter village with long approaches and very little cover between the treelines, which makes it a machine gunner's map and a nightmare for anyone crossing the fields. Carentan is hedgerows and streets, where the fighting collapses to twenty metres and armour has to be careful. Hürtgen Forest is dense enough that you will be shot by somebody thirty metres away that you never resolved against the trees.

Omaha Beach is the asymmetric one, and defending it is a completely different job from anything else in the rotation. Stalingrad turns the game into room clearing. El Alamein opens it out into desert, where the armour finally has the space it wants and infantry are extremely exposed.

Getting the game

Hell Let Loose is a paid game on Steam. Install it from your Library, and set aside a large download.

Hardware matters more than in most shooters, because the maps are large, the view distances are long and there are a hundred players on them. The setting to protect is your ability to see a person at range — turning the visual quality down until infantry stop rendering properly is a false economy, since spotting somebody first is most of the game.

If Steam itself is new to you, our Steam guide starts further back than this one does.

Play the training material and then take a quiet server for your first hour. Learning what a garrison looks like on the map, while fifty people are shouting, is not learning.

Finding a server

The in-game browser lists servers with their region, player count and name, and you join from there — there is no console and no address to type.

What to read in that list:

Region. Distance costs you in a game where people shoot at each other across four hundred metres. Play near home.

The rules in the name. Server owners advertise what they enforce, and the common ones are meaningful: mandatory microphone for squad leaders, no one-person squads, restrictions on which roles can be taken without a full squad. A server that enforces those is a server where matches are organised.

Whether it is seeding. This is HLL-specific and worth understanding. A server with a handful of people on it is "seeding" — filling up towards a real match — and most communities have rules for that period. Fight only around a specified point, no armour, no artillery. It is a social agreement to keep the small game playable until it becomes a big one, and breaking it will get you removed faster than anything else you could do.

Our note on what makes a server listing trustworthy covers reading a listing for signs of an actual community behind it, which in this game is the difference between an evening of coordinated fighting and an evening of walking.

Listings collect on the Hell Let Loose server list, where entries are queried directly rather than trusting a server's own claims about how busy it is.

Favourite the good ones immediately

Server communities in this game are strong and stable. The same admins, the same regulars, the same expectations, night after night.

Find two you like in your own timezone and stay on them. Being a recognised name on a server is worth more here than in any shooter on this site, because squad leaders will take you into their squad and the game only works if somebody takes you into a squad.

Problems you will hit

You spawned two minutes from the fighting. Your team has no garrison near the front. This is a team problem and the fix is somebody driving supplies forward.

You keep dying to nothing. Machine guns and snipers at range, and the game deliberately does not tell you where they were. Move between cover rather than across open ground, and stop running the same route.

A squad leader kicked you. Almost always no microphone, or taking a specialist role in a squad that needed something else. Not personal.

The frame rate is poor in large fights. Expected on the busiest maps. Reduce effects and shadows before you reduce anything that affects how far you can see.

You cannot find a squad. Join one that already exists rather than creating your own. A new empty squad with you as its officer, on your first evening, helps nobody.

The neighbours

Squad is the closest relative and the most common comparison — modern-era, larger vehicles, deeper logistics, and squad leaders who talk to each other constantly. If the organisational side of Hell Let Loose is what appeals, Squad does more of it.

Squad 44 takes that engine and that culture back to the Second World War, which puts it in direct competition with this game and produces long arguments about which does it better.

Rising Storm 2 and Red Orchestra 2 are the older lineage that established a lot of this — lethal, unforgiving, and still played. Darkest Hour is the free Western Front entry in that same family.

And Arma 3 is where you go if fifty against fifty starts to feel small.

If you end up trying to run one of these yourself, our piece on why nobody joins your server is about the seeding problem from the owner's side, which in a game that needs a hundred people to work at all is the whole business.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Hell Let Loose servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.