Holdfast: Nations At War

Rating: 7/10 🎩 Holdfast: Nations At War — where military discipline goes to die with dignity. Imagine putting 150 armed gentlemen onto one battlefield, giving them muskets, bayonets and proximity voice chat, then expecting anything resembling organised warfare. Naturally, within thirty seconds, someone is blasting music, another chap is delivering a passionate speech about the Empire, and your commanding officer has been shot before finishing the word “CHARGE!” ⚔️ The average Holdfast experience: 🔸 Spend half a minute carefully loading your musket. 🔸 Take aim at an enemy standing perfectly still. 🔸 Miss him by approximately three neighbouring countries. 🔸 Get stabbed by a screaming Frenchman. 🔸 Respawn and do it all again with immense patriotic enthusiasm. The gunplay is slow, inaccurate and deeply frustrating—which is precisely why it works. Every successful shot feels like divine intervention, while every bayonet duel resembles two intoxicated pensioners fighting over the final reduced sandwich at Tesco. 🎙️ The proximity chat is the real weapon. The community transforms every battle into a glorious mixture of historical roleplay, tactical communication, terrible accents and complete psychological collapse. Your musket may fail you, but the gentleman screaming “FOR KING AND COUNTRY!” directly into your ear never will. There are large land battles, cavalry, artillery, naval warfare and enough different classes to ensure everyone can find their preferred method of dying pointlessly. 🏅 Final verdict Holdfast is barely a serious military simulator. It is, however, an outstanding Napoleonic comedy generator disguised as one. It is clumsy. It is chaotic. It is occasionally held together by musket smoke and national stereotypes. And somehow, it is absolutely bloody brilliant. 9/10 ☕🇬🇧 Would follow an incompetent officer directly into enemy cannon fire again.

Fun game that I really loved, and had tons of friends buy, but my opinion of it is forever soured by how they handle moderation. This is a PSA. the MODERATION of this game is DISHONEST and Upsetting. If you are muted by an admin/moderator you will never be notified. Instead everything appears normal to you. But not a single person in game can hear your voice, or read your text in chat. Your custom music will not play. You will spend a bunch of time pointlessly troubleshooting. At any time your game could be rendered essentially unplayable with no notice. (Found out I was muted for saying "please join my spawn r@@e tent, in the text chat while I was officer). Yes dumb to use that word, but in context I am not trying to personally attack anyone was about the tactic of attacking the spawn. Fair enough to moderate me... but why is there 0 communication, 0 notice, and the dishonesty of not even letting the user know that they are shadow banned after one infraction without a warning? The only way to appeal this is to figure this all out yourself and ask to be unmuted in their discord, through a google form. Communication is the main feature of this game. I was unaware I was muted and purchased more DLC primarily to make use of the new instruments and since I had unknowingly been muted I cannot access the DLC features I paid for and am past the refund window. I am not the only one with this issue. Search reddit about this. There are people that are muted years on end, with no notice and no feedback from the moderators. OTHERS have no idea they were even shadowbanned and helplessly waste time troubleshooting their hardware and software for NO REASON. There is a constant stream of users posting in their discord bug report section about "mic not working" unaware they have been shadowbanned since there is no transparency. Half the time they receive no response, or aren't suggested they've been shadlowbanned. This is the first game I have ever been muted/shadowbanned in in my 20+ years of playing a video games. Every other sensible game gives you warning first to change your behavior. Holdfast acts like the strictest HR department you've ever seen, secretly plotting in the background and never being direct or upfront, laughing as they make you guess at what you did over the hours and days you played.. EXTREMELY DISSAPOINTING.. Half the people that have been shadowbanned have no idea what happened and think they just have a mic issue. Their appeal process refuses to even tell you why you were moderated and when you were moderated. Which is unreasonable, since they don't even ever tell you when they shadowban you so it could have been hours, days, weeks months ago. I had played over 100 hours on my account for example, yet they ask YOU when, what server it happend in, and why it happened.... WHEN THEY NEVER TOLD YOU IN THE FIRST PLACE. They want you to guess at why they SECRETLY shaddowbanned YOU with no notice and no warning, like an angry girlfriend that is giving you the silent treatment and thinking IF HE CANT READ MY MIND WHY IM MAD WE ARE DONE.

Absolutely riveting gameplay. The melee combat could DEFINITELY use some work, but it's an enjoyable experience 8/10 times.

Almost wish there was a half rating. The melee in this game is absolutely horrendous and takes away from the experience, if it wasn't for that core mechanic being so poorly implemented this would be a perfect game

Absolute great game, 150 player lobbies, and the community is sooo funny, from role players to straight up toxic MFs haha

for any asians out there, this game basically has no public asian server which is probably expected due to the low asian playercount most servers are european or american, sometimes australian during mjor updates (110 ping) and since im a SEA i play with 180-250 ping, this will throw you off very badly when youre new to the game, your melee is slower and your bullet is delayed just a little bit and you might have to aim ahead of your enemy sometimes, its a bit weird despite that, youll get used to it and realize maybe its not that bad so its still a pretty good game despite the lag, theres always at the very least 2 officers larping/roleplaying which is what makes this so fun for a casual and there are always at the very least 2-3 servers alive when major update's hype dies down, you can be really good at the melee despite the horrendous ping but you won't be swinging as fast as europeans/americans gameplay is fun if youre a casual and are just there to experience the chaos (alot of people scream especially during major updates), easy to learn but hard to master, age of sail is boring compared to nations at war/american revolution or frontlines (WW1) since you mostly just reload cannons 90% of the time holding E

A spiritual successor to the Mount and Blade Napoleonic War mod, very fun especially with buddies.

Janky mechanics, inconsistent hit box melee. Long vs short range doesn't matter. It's infuriating, unless you're drunk playing and talking ♥♥♥♥, other than that, it's worthless.

This game is brilliant I haven’t had this much fun in years! Soon as I join a game somebody has already f***ed my mam which takes me back to old school banter unless your a fairy.

After over a hundred hours this is easily one of my favorite games