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 Chinaās War of Resistance against the Japanese invasion have largely been overlooked.
Thatās 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 itās spotlighting a setting that feels unexplored for the World War II genre, in a singleplayer-focussed style thatās 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, youāll 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 Chinaās 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. (Iām told that an English audio dub is planned for The Defiantās eventual release.)
From rifles to pistols to hulking machine guns, The Defiantās arsenal of era-accurate weapons feel uniformly fantastic to wield, backed up by bone-rattling audio design and slick reload animations. Broadly speaking itās 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 youāll need to seek cover and wait for your vision to clear lest you become yet another casualty of war. Given how relentless The Defiantās enemies proved to be, I saw red more regularly than a bovine in a bull fight.
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