Recent reviews by Silen

It's alright. Would be much better if they stopped adding DLCs which are pretty much mandatory to buy. Why so?

Well lemme tell you. Most DLC vehicles are TONS better than the vanilla vehicles. For example, if I wished to play on a cooperative server right now and be a jet pilot, I'd have to fly the Buzzard, which is very slow and only after a lot of time spent in constant altitude it can reach 800 km/h.

Whereas, if I flew one of the jets in the DLC, I could reach 1500 km/h in few seconds, so you can imagine what it's like fighting one of these jets with a Buzzard. If you're a very good pilot, you can still shoot them down, but if you're fighting against humans instead of AI you don't have a single chance, simply because in few seconds they can gain altitude on you, they can get on your tail, they can outmaneuver you, and if they wanted to they could even escape from you and get out of your range in few seconds. Which means, if you want to fly jets, you gotta buy the €10 Jets DLC. €10 is in my opinion way too much for a couple virtual jets and nothing more, I can get an indie game for that price.

The same applies for tanks DLC. Also there are plenty of sniper rifles and DMRs locked up behind DLC paywalls, as well as heavy machineguns and other weaponry. The helicopters DLC isn't as annoying as the others, but if you need to lift something very heavy and large up, you can only do so with one of the helicopters of this DLC.

Fun game, runs way better than it used to years ago, although there are some random FPS drops. Everything's pretty good, the shooting's great, the audio's great, the graphics' alright.

Sometimes you might get on a server and only find squads of people who don't communicate, which can be annoying, and sometimes you'll get on a server and find great cooperation. If anything the only con is that every battle feels kinda meaningless.

Hello there,

During this review I will be comparing Holdfast: Nations at War to Mount & Blade: Warband - Napoleonic Wars a lot. Seeing this game takes so much inspiration from the latter, and seeing how much I know and played the latter, the comparison comes up naturally. Furthermore, before starting on this very brief review, I would like to let you know that despite my few 11.6 hours (at the time of writing) on this game, I experienced everything it had to offer within the first five hours, including every single map, mode, and even organized events (linebattles). I am aware that this product is currently in Early Access phase, and I will give my thoughts on how the game currently is.

Now I'm not much of a writer so I'll go over this quite briefly, please forgive me for the poor quality of the text. I will start with a list of pros, to then follow with its cons, which will all be based on a comparison with Mount & Blade: Warband - Napoleonic Wars.


- Naval warfare: It is something that is missing from Napoleonic Wars, and for someone who is quite interested in the naval warfare of the era I thoroughly appreciate this feature, however it is still pretty much barebones. The person who holds the helm has entire control of the ship (you just press either W or S to lower or raise some sails, simple as that) and there currently is no animation for the person holding it. I would've enjoyed more a system where the crew actually cooperates to manage the sails, instead of it all being done through the one holding the helm.

There is no way to angle the sails either, making it look even more simple. Each cannon can be loaded with only two kinds of shots: Balls, and chain shots. Balls are simply used to hit the hull of the other ship. Apart from rare cases when the top of the hull is it and is displayed as destroyed, or when cannons or other small parts are hit and get destroyed, there is not much visual damage on the hull. That means, if you hit the hull of a ship with a cannon ball it will probably look as if nothing happened and it was never touched. Furthermore there is absolutely no way to tell how much your ship has taken damage and how more damage it can take. There is no way to repair the ship, and there is no way to bail water. Simply, once it's taken enough cannonballs, your ship will proceed to sink and you'll have to launch the rowboats to get away. I'm not fond of this, a very very simplistic approach.

The chain shots are pretty weird. Originally, chain shots would be used to shoot another ship's sails, filling them with holes, therefore rendering the other ship slower and easier to catch or outmaneuver. In this game, from what I noticed so far (And I might be wrong, even though I used these chain shots quite a lot), they cannot damage the enemy sails. All they can do is destroy the enemy ship's mast completely, but not damage the sails. Because of this, every single naval battle turns into a "Load chain shots, aim for masts, shoot the ♥♥♥♥ out of those masts untill they're down and then come in and use balls", which is kind of ridicolous. There is no presence of canister shots either (this is true for land artillery as well).

One last issue of the naval combat in this game is the bad water: It looks like hair gel, and it's always flat. There's never a single wave, on any map. I know I've put naval warfare in "pros" despite all its flaws, but that is because it's still something more than Napoleonic Wars, which must be taken into account, however don't expect the greatest of systems.

- Graphics: Not much to say about this. Far better graphics than what the old Warband engine can give. Well detailed models and textures, everything looks quite good, except for the antialiasing not working almost at all.

- Rewarding kills: Far more rewarding kills than Napoleonic Wars, be it because of all the score numbers displayed on the bottom of the screen when you kill an enemy, or because one of those numbers is in a bright red.

That's it for the pros. Literally everything else Napoleonic Wars does better.


- Horrible melee combat: The melee combat in this game is structured exactly as Mount & Blade's, with four attack directions and four parry directions, except that this game got it completely wrong. It results in a laggy, clunky mess with attacks and parries having an annoying delay of one or two seconds each time you hit the mouse button; People killing you when their weapon doesn't even touch you, or people killing you when their attack animation is only at the start, or even when you're too far away for them to hit you. The system suffers so much of that laggy delay that each single melee fights turns into a spinning around spamming the attack button hoping you'll hit them. Absolutely horrible.

- Lack of modes, and maps: Yes, I know it is an Early Access, but as I stated prior I am reviewing it for what it currently is. As of now, the only modes available are "Army Battlefield", "Naval Battlefield", "Army Siege" and "Coastal Siege" (might've gotten one or two names wrong), the first consists into killing the enemy team as much as possible untill it runs out of reinforcements (sorta like spawn tickets), the second is about sinking the enemy ships, the third and last one about controlling fortified areas. That's it. The maps are currently very few, both for land and sea battles. Hopefully there will be far more in the full game, but as of now you can literally play every single mode and map in the very first few hours of the game.

- Trolls: A huge amount of trolls. If you don't play in an organized event, a linebattle, but you instead play casually on a server, you'll be experiencing people who spams all sort of incredibly loud music into their mics, destroying your ears (luckily you can mute them by pressing P), and most importantly there are trolls who will ruin your fun when trying to play as artillery. There is no 'artillery' class sadly, so literally anyone can use a cannon or swivel gun, this means that there will be trolls trying to steal your artillery piece each single time you get off of it to reload. Or, they'll jump in front of the cannon (with teamkill being disabled on most of the official servers), blocking you from aiming, and they will just stand there for the entirety of the darn game without ever getting bored of tired.

- Bad shooting, resulting in bad linebattles: Muskets in this game are FAR too accurate, literally every single linebattle is about shooting the enemy line when they're so far away you can barely see them (due to the bad antialiasing as well). It's more like snipers than muskets, seriously too accurate, rendering the linebattles pretty boring. You just shoot that very small shape in the distance, get some kills, run around, shoot at that small shape in the distance, repeat, repeat, repeat untill the round is over. Being guns so accurate and being combat done so far away from each other this pretty much removes any tactical advantage in going for a melee charge, which pretty much never happens.

- No cavalry: For a game about Napoleonic Wars cavalry units should be an essential part of the game, however cavalry is not in the game yet. I believe the developers said it will come in future (how future? who knows, soon TM) although I think it would've been far better if they released the game in EA with cavalry being already in the game. Being the melee combat utter ♥♥♥♥, though, I suppose cavalry would turn into a laggy mess as well.

That's all I can think of for now. I would like to recommend this game only if you truly believe in the project and you wish to fund the developers; However, if you're just looking for a game to play and have fun with, it's currently not recommendable. I will be updating this review in future and if, hopefully, these issues are solved I will be fully recommending this product.

Not what it used to be. Just pay to win now, if you got cash you'll enjoy the game. If you're a poor sod like myself you'll get instantly bored of grinding.

Have a nice day.

This is one of those games that keeps you entertained for HOURS. If you're, like myself, into ships and history, this game's mood can only make you happy. It totally deserves the "just 5 more minutes" award. Furthermore the developers are very kind and available, they listen to the community and they work hard on their games. I highly recommend you buy this game, not only to enjoy it but to support the devs with their future projects. :)

Have a good day!

Bel gioco.

Fan of total war but this is pure ♥♥♥♥. Battles suck, pay to win and you must wait hours to do things if you don't pay.

Played it a couple times, not bad.

This game could be good.. it COULD be, instead it highly sucks for few reasons:

1. There is no unit collision, you don't understand anything in battles and you can't even defend walls cause there's no unit collision, we're in 2014 ffs.

2. Graphics really sucks. I am not a guy who looks at graphics, but in this game you can't even set the resolution, there's no antialiasing, shadows keep moving, models and textures are fine instead.

3. You can't place buildings/walls where you want, there are "pre-made places" where you can choose what to build, and in an "RTS" this sucks really hard.

4. MOST IMPORTANT... You have to wait DAYS to get some resources, and yes REAL DAYS. Look, I just went to fight the army of a bot cause of a quest, my men all died, and to make the army again I should wait real days. If you get like 25 units of paesants to cut wood at the same time, in an entire day it will give you 5000 wood more or less, and you spend it all in 10 seconds. Same for food and gold. Making the army requires food and gold, and it's really really really slow.

5. Formations... I would like to "customize" more the formations of the units, like in a Total War game, I really don't like it how it is now.. and by the way, without collisions and stuff, battles are just a massive charge and the more outnumbered wins...

I won't play this game anymore untill the developers improve these points, I had literally no fun playing this game, I don't want to wait days to get some resources, and I really don't like those other bad points I listed.
This game could have potential, I hope the devs start fixing at least these 5 points.

Good game.