From the D-Day landing that opened Medal of Honor: Frontline to the Battle of the Bulge that capped off the American campaign in the original Call of Duty, it feels like videogames have already told and retold most of the major conflicts that occurred during the second world war. However, while players have previously stepped into the combat boots of soldiers on the ground in various settings from Sicily to Stalingrad, the events of China’s War of Resistance against the Japanese invasion have largely been overlooked.
That’s where The Defiant comes in. This story-driven singleplayer shooter from developer Hangzhou Hoothanes Entertainment is set to explore the prolonged and devastating conflict from the perspective of multiple Chinese soldiers. After getting hands-on with it at a recent BiliBili: First Look event in Shanghai, my first impression of The Defiant is that it’s spotlighting a setting that feels unexplored for the World War II genre, in a singleplayer-focussed style that’s a welcome throwback to a bygone era of story-driven shooters.
The Defiant is structured into four main chapters that span a significant stretch of the Second Sino-Japanese War, each centred around a different soldier and setting and featuring contrasting gameplay styles. For example, one chapter will allow you to become a Chinese spy in the neon-soaked streets of Shanghai, gathering intelligence on the Imperial Japanese Army and heavily relying on stealth and puzzle-solving to complete your underhanded objectives. In another, you’ll be tasked with reducing rail lines to rubble via the use of explosive-based sabotage in order to paralyze Japanese supply lines. The characters you play are fictional, but the battles you fight are based on real encounters and set in locations rebuilt through an exhaustive research process undertaken by the development team.
My brief hands-on demo of The Defiant took place in the snowy mountains of China’s northeast region and was extremely combat-heavy, tasking me with desperately rushing through caves and trenches and fending off overwhelming hordes of Japanese infantry seeking to steal some more turf. Armed with a Liao Type 13, a booming, bolt-action rifle produced in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation, I battled my way alongside my band of brothers through a string of intense firefights, weaving through forest trees and flaming homesteads in an effort to repel the invaders and make it to a secret camp unscathed. Such was the overwhelming nature of the onslaught, that I barely had time to read the translated subtitles of the orders being barked at me by Chinese compatriots and the threats screamed by the Japanese enemies. (I’m told that an English audio dub is planned for The Defiant’s eventual release.)
From rifles to pistols to hulking machine guns, The Defiant’s arsenal of era-accurate weapons feel uniformly fantastic to wield, backed up by bone-rattling audio design and slick reload animations. Broadly speaking it’s a pretty standard shooter setup, with the ability to carry two guns at a time plus grenades, and instead of bandages or medkits The Defiant indicates how close you are to death by the drops of blood and vignetteing at the edges of the screen. See too much red and you’ll need to seek cover and wait for your vision to clear lest you become yet another casualty of war. Given how relentless The Defiant’s enemies proved to be, I saw red more regularly than a bovine in a bull fight.
There were also a number of thrillingly cinematic moments during the short mission I played, such as when I fought my way to a chokepoint and was startled by an enemy soldier surging at me bayonet-first through the smoky haze. At another time I was ambushed in a ruined farmhouse by a knife-wielding assailant, and had to desperately button-mash through a quicktime event in order to fend him off and brutalize him with his own blade. Then at the very end of the level it seemed like the resistance of my squad had proven to be futile, with the enemy calmly executing my remaining comrades down on their haunches while I was forced to watch on helplessly, before an unseen ally opened fire on them from offscreen and the image faded to black, thus bringing the brief but breathless battle to a close.
Outside of this short slice of the story, I was also given free reign to test a selection of The Defiant’s guns and grenades in a shooting range, with weapons ranging from basic bolt-actions and submachine guns through to scoped sniper rifles and heavy mounted belt-fed bullet-spitters. There were also basic hand grenades and potato masher types too, and even a broadsword for up close and personal attacks. The developers told me that this was just a small sample of the full arsenal that will be present in the finished game, and the weapons on offer will evolve and expand as the story shifts from one chapter to the next.
While I’m excited to explore this rarely seen side of World War II, what really appeals to me about The Defiant is that it’s almost entirely a solo experience. While other modern shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield feature singleplayer modes almost as an afterthought – a short, Michael Bay-inspired blast ‘em up that can be completed in an evening and effectively designed to onboard you into months of microtransaction-heavy multiplayer – The Defiant’s main mode is set to be a chunky, 15-hour campaign that makes it seem like somewhat of a throwback to an era when EA’s Medal of Honor series was at its peak. I’ve got nothing against anyone who wants to spend their evenings racking up killstreaks, moving through military ranks, and earning prestige rewards, but absolutely none of that is for me. I prefer to immerse myself in a captivating and cinematic singleplayer war story, and that’s exactly what The Defiant is aiming to deliver.
I say almost entirely a singleplayer experience, because the developers revealed to me that there will also be co-op included with The Defiant at launch. However, you won’t be able to team up with a friend in the story, but rather indulge in a separate PvE mode that will feature maps and missions based on those from the main campaign. It seems like it’s still in a conceptual phase of development, though, and the team behind it is still workshopping the number of players (currently estimated to be four to eight) and what sort of match types will be featured, though based on what I’ve played it would be safe to assume that some sort of horde mode would be likely. What’s clear, though, is that co-op is being positioned as an entertaining but entirely optional side to The Defiant’s meaty story-driven main course.
There are fundamentals that still need work, however. Presently you can run and slide into cover, but you can’t jump or vault over obstacles in the terrain, which means your general mobility feels noticeably sluggish compared to the standards set by other modern shooters. I was also somewhat frustrated to find that although you can crouch in The Defiant, you can’t go prone, and occasionally there were times that I was being shot even when I was behind cover because I simply couldn’t get low enough to properly shield myself from enemy attacks. Lastly, this preview build may have featured plenty of guns and a couple of grenade types, but considering that so much of it involved taking up defensive positions against mobs of marauding Japanese soldiers, there was a notable absence of any kind of traps to lay down like the brick and ceramic landmines that Chinese forces adopted during the conflict using ancient gunpowder techniques.
However, the developers indicated to me that issues and features like these – along with quirky AI behaviours that are frequently suicidal and a HUD design that doesn’t always properly communicate the direction of incoming enemy fire – are still very much being addressed and iterated on based on player feedback, and thankfully there still seems like there’s plenty of time for the team to get these things right. The Defiant is currently in development for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with a release date that’s still to be determined. Although it’s been in the works since 2023, I get the sense that The Defiant is still another year or two from being finished. From what I’ve seen so far, though, this could be well worth the wait for anyone keen for a substantial singleplayer shooter that will take you to areas of World War II that you’ve never seen before.
Tristan Ogilvie is a senior video editor at IGN’s Sydney office. He attended the BiliBili: First Look event as a guest of the organisers.
