Holdfast: Nations at War is a roleplaying gem tied up in the very best and very worst of the online world

You might have spotted a video doing the rounds in the last couple days featuring a very excited Scottish lad, taking part in a very exciting siege, inside a weirdly unfamiliar looking game. That game is Holdfast: Nations at War, a relatively unknown, historical first- and third-person shooter with a twist, and it turns out it's an absolute treasure.

Holdfast is a shooter, but really it's a roleplaying game first. Imagine an extra grounded, Napoleonic-era Battlefield, with servers that can handle up to a whopping 150 players, crossed with the cooperative, teamwork-heavy systems of something like Sea of Thieves, and you'll get a bit of an idea. Matches roll swiftly from one to the next, with a good number of rotating objectives and maps - sieging and holding forts or castle ruins, pushing war-of-attrition frontlines to reach a total team score, holding out against enemy onslaughts before a timer expires, and so on.

The roleplaying, as it does in Sea of Thieves and others like it, comes in through all the little things. For a start, Holdfast's weapons are enjoyably useless. The more standard classes, like Line Infantry, Light Infantry, Grenadiers and Guards are mostly equipped with a musket, a detachable bayonet, and your bare fists. The gunpowder-based muskets are completely terrible at anything beyond medium range, have huge bullet drop and randomised spread, and take forever to reload between each round, and the melee system, too, is wildly inaccurate, so everything has to be calculated. There's no point taking pot-shots at distant enemies that you'd usually fancy if anyone's even close to charging distance from you, as even if the melee is inaccurate, it's still a one-hit kill when someone gets it right. Immediately you start to think like a "proper" infantryman, grouping and looking for some kind of strategic direction.

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