Holdfast: Nations At War

Holdfast: Nations At War is a large-scale multiplayer shooter built around the organized chaos of black-powder warfare. Set across two historical periods, the Napoleonic Era and World War 1, it drops you into servers with up to 150 players and asks you to hold a line, follow orders, and resist the very human urge to break formation and sprint toward the enemy alone. Most of the time that urge gets you killed inside three seconds, which is exactly the right kind of punishment loop for this type of game. The class system is where the meaningful decisions live. You are not just picking a loadout; you are picking a role inside a living military structure. Riflemen and musketeers form the firing lines, officers coordinate pushes and rallies, engineers drop field fortifications, musicians literally play instruments to provide morale buffs, and naval classes shift the action onto ships and coastal maps. Each class has hard constraints. A musketeer does not have the accuracy of a rifleman but brings volume of fire. An officer without followers is just a man with a sword making noise. The interdependence is genuine and it rewards players who read the server chat, follow their regiment, and think about positioning rather than personal score. For anyone used to modern shooters the early hours will feel uncomfortable. Reload times are long, accuracy is deliberately limited, and dying while your musket is mid-animation happens a lot. But that friction is the point. When a coordinated line volley tears through an enemy formation, or when a cavalry charge breaks a flank that had been holding for ten minutes, the payoff is a kind of collective satisfaction that solo-carry shooters rarely produce. The two historical settings add genuine variety in feel: Napoleonic combat leans into mass infantry formations and melee, while WW1 maps introduce trenches, a slightly different class set, and the grinding attritional pressure that fits the period. The rough edges are real and worth naming. Servers depend on organized communities and regiments; if you join a low-population server at the wrong hour, the tactical depth evaporates and it becomes a confused skirmish. AI is not a meaningful part of the experience since this is almost entirely player-versus-player. New players who parachute in without reading the class guides or joining a regiment discord will bounce off quickly. The tutorial gives you the mechanical basics but does not prepare you for the social layer, and that social layer is basically the entire product. Finding an active regiment and playing with voice communication transforms the game from baffling to genuinely gripping, and that is advice you should treat as a prerequisite rather than a suggestion. With a 90 percent positive rating across more than 28,000 Steam reviews, the player base is clearly bought in. The mod and custom server ecosystem keeps things flexible, and the dedicated regiment communities have been active enough to sustain regular organized battles. For a strategy and sim-minded player who wants something that rewards reading the room over reaction time, this is a rare thing: a shooter where patience and positional awareness matter more than aim.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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