Hardcore World War 2 shooter Hell Let Loose has released another massive update with Update 7: Battle of Carentan as it is growing closer to leaving early access to its full release. Most of the update is quality of life fixes but comes with a new package of animations for first and third-person cameras. The sound effects got completely overhauled as well. The majority of the focus has been on the animations and sound effects for the various weapons. All of this is done to gain as much realism as possible.
The largest draw with Update 7: Battle of Carentan is the new map itself, Carentan. Most of the maps in Hell Let Loose feature wide-open fields with large lanes of fire, coupled with the long wait times to respawn the game so far has encouraged engagements to open up at the farthest ranges possible. normally 500-600 meters and closing down to 300 meters.
This mirrors reality as most weapons at this time were full caliber rifles and 600 meters is estimated to be the farthest range to constantly hit a target over iron sights while the Wermacht found most engagements concluded at 200 to 300 meters, as concealment and cover available is greatly reduced and the machine pistols were in effective range. The Carentan map deliberately closes those distances down to under a hundred meters for most of the map, as Carentan is the first urban-centric map in the game.
The map is a recreation of the real-life engagement between the 101st and 82nd Airborne against Wehrmacht defenders and focuses on the real-life French town with each spawn being an open farm fields or empty land on the other side of canal locks. Carentan is a typical rural European town featuring narrow streets flanked by mid-rise buildings. The streets are littered with scuttled half-tracks, and building rubble. Streets often open into plazas, where a well place machine gun or automatic rifle can lock down a block of the map.
With the new maps, the Officer class gets a new rework. One key ability of that class is being able to drop unit and garrison spawns to get respawning players back into the fray faster. Now the garrison spawn, which can be used by anyone on the same side: can only be placed in friendly territory but the distance between the two garrison spawn has been reduced, they are harder to destroy and territory capture times have been reduced to two minutes. All of these changes are down to create more transparent front lines for teams to battle over.
Hell Let Loose is free to play until midday Monday and is discounted by seven dollars down to 23 from the normal price of 30.