It took about one-and-a-half games for Holdfast: Nations At War to click for me. In my first game, I approached it like I do any other FPS. So I rushed forward, taking pot shots and trying to flank. It didn’t end well. My second game, I ended up following a decent leader. He set us a line to stand on, and commanded us to fire volleys. And like that, I was sold. Frantically reloading a musket, as balls whizz past your ear, is intense. Firefights dissolve into fields of smoke, as comrades fall screaming to the ground and we’re firing volleys blindly. It’s great.
Though for PC players, this might as well be a retro review. It’s been out for yonks there. But as of the start of this month, crossplay with consoles has been released. I imagine this has been transformative for the voice chat. Still, it means the servers were nice and full. 150 muskets all firing at once is a sight to behold. Either way, as a result of this, I was parachuted into Holdfast for a week. The end result is almost completely positive. The muskets, and the firing thereof, are great. The bayonets on the end of them though? Not so much.
On The Line
Holdfast: Nations At War has two major settings: the Napoleonic Era and World War I. I’m mainly going to focus on the first one. Nothing wrong with the WW1 setting, but the faster reloading guns make it feel closer to a standard FPS, so was a little less interesting for me. Anyway, once you’re in a match, the first thing you’ll do is fire your musket at the nearest enemy. You’ll mostly likely miss. It’ll then take you half a year to reload the thing. This is an authentic musket, right down to the bayonet screwed onto the end.
It might seem irritating at first, but it’s a stroke of genius. It means that no one can just run ahead and rack up thousands of kills. You have to stay with your squad, so that reloading doesn’t immediately leave you defenceless. To co-ordinate this, you have leaders who can set up lines and respawn points. You even get bonus accuracy and XP if you fire in a line, so there’s a great incentive to engage with the mechanic. It means that even without using the voice chat, teamwork happens organically. It’s an immensely clever gameplay mechanic and works like a charm.
It also lends itself to continually generating stories. Like when I was playing as a medic, healing a group defending a hill, until the enemy charged and burst over the edge. The whole hill turned into a cacophony of panicked musket fire and death screams. Speaking of surgeons, there are plenty of different roles available. There are three types of leader, a variety of rank-and-file classes, and support classes. Grenadiers get bonuses in melee, sappers can build fortifications, and so on. Each class generally has its own counter-class, and there’s a big ton of cosmetic unlockables for each. There’s enough content here to keep you playing for many hours.
Fix Bayonets
Holdfast: Nations At War has also put a lot of effort into making its guns feel good. The muskets sound like thunder. Even the little pistols make a satisfying pop as you desperately fire them at someone’s face. It’s good stuff. Though this love has not been extended to the melee. It uses that ‘classic’ directional combat system, seen in things like Kingdom Come: Deliverance. It’s clunky, and melees dissolve into people running in circles around other, frantically swinging all over the place. A silly Do-Si-Do, which ends with someone getting a bayonet in the ear hole. It’s just not as satisfying as the gunplay.
There are other quality of life issues too, ranging from big to small. Here’s a quick list. There’s absolutely no tutorial, so half the mechanics you have to piece together from the control list and HUD icons. You can remove your bayonet, for instance, which a lot people seem unaware of. Secondly, I wish it would let me choose a default camera so I don’t have to switch back to first person every respawn. Thirdly, cavalry classes are supremely unbalanced, as there is little to no counter other than desperately firing a musket at them. Lastly, please make a big warning sign when you’re being healed so people will stop wandering out of cover every bloody time.
Still, cavalry aside, these are minor irritations. Even the melee stopped grating after a while, when I realised that everyone sucks equally at it, which might well be the point. If you get behind the line mechanic, it will sucker you in. That, and the fact that there’s a lot of content here. There’s a big rotation of maps, and different objectives. My favourite are the siege maps, where one side defends and another attacks, with a time limit. The defenders have limited respawns, so it’s a desperate struggle against almost inevitable defeat. As the clock ticks nearer to the end, cannon fire has usually blown holes in your defences and your guys are trying to hold amongst the rubble.
Holdfast: Nations At War – Tremendously Exciting
I should also say a word about the community. I found it to be a mixed bag. There were some leaders I encountered who were great. They knew the best place for lines and helped martial the troops. A thankless job. I also had a laugh at the people doing their best mock British accents. But for every one of those, there’s someone screaming racial epithets, or trying, very desperately, to be funny. There’s also a trend of blasting music through their mics. Sometimes it can work, like when ‘Enter Sandman’ was cut off by an artillery shell hitting our boat. Other times it’s just someone blasting Justin Bieber to try and be funny.
Still, I think the community is mostly on the positive side. Even then, you can mute them and not lose that much, beyond the occasional blast of Rule Britannia. I should also mention that, after fifteen hours of play, there’s a lot of Holdfast: Nations At War I haven’t tried. I wasn’t brave enough to be cavalry or use the artillery and I also realised the day before writing this that there are naval battles. There’s so much to play with here, that the scale can be quite intimidating at first. It’s well worth digging into though, as its smart systems and wealth of things to unlock will keep you on the line for a very long time.
