Hell Let Loose Vietnam gives one side a weapon the other simply does not have. Only the North Vietnamese Army digs tunnels. They hide spawn infrastructure, allow underground repositioning, and let attacks appear from places US forces cannot watch. That is real asymmetry, and the developers spent the run-up to launch reining it in.
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Expression Games releases the game on 13 August 2026. It slipped from June after beta feedback, which is exactly when most of these tunnel changes landed.
What Hell Let Loose Vietnam changed about tunnels
Before the changes, a well-placed network let the NVA appear almost anywhere on a contested map. Testers found that hard to answer, because the entrances are small and the ground above gives few clues.
Four adjustments matter most. First, tunnels now collapse automatically once the enemy takes the friendly territory around them, so a tunnel network no longer survives behind a collapsing front. Second, the cooldown climbed from two minutes to five, which slows how often the NVA can rebuild.
Third, travel and entry times both went up, making rapid redeployment through the network far less attractive. Finally, the maximum distance between two tunnels dropped from 800 metres to 400. That last one quietly halves the reach of a network, and it is probably the biggest change of the four.
Read them together and the intent is clear. Tunnels stay powerful, yet they stop being a free teleport. You now have to plan where a network sits, because you cannot stretch it across the map or rebuild it on a whim.
It helps to remember what the base series does, because this is a departure. Hell Let Loose built its reputation on two sides that broadly mirror each other, where both teams field comparable roles and comparable tools. Vietnam breaks that symmetry deliberately. One army gets an underground layer the other can never build, and the other army gets the means to bury it. Balancing that is much harder than balancing two mirrored sides, which is precisely why the tunnel numbers moved so much during testing.
The US side is not helpless
Crucially, the counterplay is destructive rather than defensive. US forces can collapse NVA tunnels, and doing so brings down whole underground stretches, killing anyone inside at that moment. So a tunnel is not merely an advantage. It is also a concentration of risk, since a single successful collapse can wipe several players at once.
Tunnels are only part of the package, mind. The game also adds helicopters, river combat, dense terrain, new roles and broader faction asymmetry on top of the series teamwork-first foundation. Current details sit on its Steam store page, and GamingBolt interviewed the team about the asymmetry.
One caveat worth stating plainly: these numbers come from pre-launch balancing, so they can move again after release. If squad shooters interest you meanwhile, see our Ground Branch Beginner Guide: Why Helldivers Habits Get You Killed, and our Company of Heroes 3 vs StarCraft: The Biggest Gameplay Differences.
Frequently asked questions
Can both sides dig tunnels? No. Tunnel warfare belongs to the North Vietnamese Army alone.
How far apart can two tunnels sit? Four hundred metres, down from eight hundred.
Can the US do anything about them? Yes. They can collapse a network, killing anyone underground at the time.
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