The Defiant, the upcoming World War II first-person shooter from Hoothanes and 4Divinity, was one of six games the publisher brought to Gamescom 2026. While Showa: American Story occupied a rather enormous space in the consumer area, my appointment took me behind the scenes in business area for a hands-on session with something immediately more familiar on paper: a cinematic WWII shooter.
Except The Defiant approaches that familiar conflict from somewhere games have explored far less often — China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
My own family suffered heavily during World War II, so growing up in Europe meant the war was never limited to history lessons. Family stories sat alongside books, films, museums and memorials, and over the years the European theater became extremely familiar territory to me. China’s experience during the same period is another matter entirely. My knowledge there is comparatively shallow, and I suspect I’m hardly alone among European players. The scale of the conflict was enormous, yet China’s part in the war is almost absent from the WWII games many of us grew up playing.
The Defiant therefore offered something I rarely get from this setting anymore: the same era and broadly familiar technology, but different uniforms, weapons, landscapes and stories. A familiar war viewed from an unfamiliar front.
Table of Contents
From the Shooting Range Into the Battle
Before the demo began, the developers kindly offered me a choice between controller and keyboard and mouse. As someone who plays first-person shooters almost exclusively with a mouse and keyboard, this wasn’t exactly a difficult decision. My session effectively had two sides. One area worked as a small shooting range, giving me time to look through a collection of weapons and actually try them. Some were immediately recognizable from countless other WWII games; others were completely unfamiliar to me, which was already a good reminder that this battlefield came with its own military history.
Then came the actual mission, and there was considerably less time for careful inspection.
The combat slice begins in what appeared to be an underground command position with the situation already falling apart. You’re surrounded, explosions are shaking everything around you, and together with a handful of Chinese soldiers you’re trying to break through while the battle steadily tears that group apart.
I started with one weapon, but ammunition quickly became part of the pressure. Once I ran dry, there was no convenient pause to reorganize a perfect loadout. I found myself grabbing rifles from fallen comrades and carrying on with whatever ammunition was available while trying to defend an increasingly fragile position. That simple sequence did a lot for the atmosphere. Picking up another gun wasn’t about chasing better stats or swapping to something more fashionable; I needed something that could still fire.
Cold, Loud and Completely Chaotic
“Cinematic” is an easy word to throw around when describing a single-player shooter, but here it genuinely fits. The Defiant feels raw and gritty. The environment looked cold enough that I could almost feel it sitting there at Gamescom, while the soundscape was constantly working against any sense of comfort. Gunfire, explosions, shouting, impacts nearby — everything blends into the feeling of a battle that is already bigger than you.
At times I felt genuinely disoriented, and I mean that entirely as praise. The controls weren’t confusing and the UI wasn’t fighting me. It was the setting itself that created that sensation. I knew where I needed to go and what I was doing, but there was so much happening around me that the comfortable Gamescom booth briefly stopped registering.
Some moments are very deliberately staged. A soldier can be talking to you, turn his head to check around a corner and a second later collapse with a fresh hole through his helmet. Another explosion goes off before you’ve really processed what happened, somebody starts shouting, and suddenly you’re moving again. Played at the pace the level expects, it worked extremely well on me. By the time I was properly inside the firefight, I had sweaty palms, adrenaline running, and that wonderful tunnel vision a good FPS can produce when you stop consciously thinking about the controls and simply react. At one point I wanted to grab a grenade, throw it toward the enemy position and then, with an internal ‘A-A-A-A-A’, charge straight toward their trench.
That probably describes the demo better than any technical breakdown I could give it.
A War Film You Can Play
The comparison that kept coming to mind wasn’t actually another shooter, but Band of Brothers, The Pacific and Saving Private Ryan.
The Defiant speaks much of the same cinematic language: soldiers disappearing abruptly, explosions interrupting conversations, desperate advances under fire and small human moments squeezed between firefights. It feels directed rather than systemic, with Hoothanes controlling when the next piece of battlefield chaos erupts.
Except the uniforms are different. The surroundings are different. Some of the weapons are different.
That contrast may ultimately be The Defiant’s greatest strength. Hoothanes doesn’t necessarily need to reinvent the WWII shooter to show players something they haven’t seen before. Changing whose story we’re following already changes a great deal. The demo was also clearly designed around momentum. Barricades and invisible boundaries kept me on the intended route, while some enemy waves and battlefield events were triggered as I advanced. I only really noticed the machinery because I was doing something an ordinary player probably won’t: stopping during a firefight to write notes to my notepad for a future review.
Stand around for long enough and the illusion weakens. Friendly and enemy NPCs can keep exchanging fire while the next event patiently waits for you to move forward. Keep playing normally, however, and I barely noticed it.
That’s an important distinction. The Defiant isn’t pretending this particular battle is an open sandbox simulation. It’s closer to a playable war film, with scripting used to maintain pressure and keep the spectacle moving. My strange routine of advancing twenty meters, shooting somebody, stopping a war to scribble something into a notebook and then continuing was simply never the intended way to experience it.
Whether that approach can sustain an entire campaign is something a short Gamescom demo obviously cannot answer. The broader game is expected to vary its missions with quieter approaches, stealth, sniping, close-quarters fighting and larger battles, which should give the campaign room to breathe between these intense set pieces. For this particular mission, though, the direction worked.
A Different Side of a Familiar Conflict
This is where The Defiant becomes more interesting to me than simply another competent historical FPS. After decades of WWII games, many of us recognize the genre almost instinctively. We know what a bolt-action rifle does. We understand what an enemy trench means. We know standing in the open when a machine gun starts firing is generally a poor career decision. The Defiant can use that familiarity as a bridge into history that many Western players know much less about.
That was certainly true for me. I didn’t need the game to teach me how a WWII shooter works; what interested me was everything surrounding those familiar mechanics. Why were these soldiers equipped this way? Where did these weapons come from? What was happening on this particular front while the events we know so well from European history were unfolding elsewhere?
A game doesn’t need to become a history textbook to spark those questions. Sometimes simply putting an unfamiliar rifle in your hands, changing the uniform beside you and telling a different story is enough. Hoothanes itself grew from a similar observation. The studio’s developers have talked about being fans of WWII shooters while seeing comparatively few games dealing with China’s experience of the conflict. The Defiant is their attempt to tell that side of the war using a format players already understand. And after playing it, that approach makes a lot of sense.
Six Games From 4Divinity
The Defiant was only one part of a much larger 4Divinity presence at Gamescom 2026.
The publisher brought six games to Cologne: The Defiant, Genigods Nezha, Guns of Eschaton, Jinyiwei: A Whisper of Fall, Showa: American Story, and Sword Sage: Awakening. Showa: American Story was particularly difficult to miss in the consumer halls, but taken together the lineup covered a surprisingly broad collection of settings and styles.
The Defiant may actually have been the easiest of the six to explain at first glance. “Single-player WWII FPS” doesn’t require much introduction.
Yet after sitting down with it, it became one of the more unfamiliar WWII experiences I’ve played in quite some time.
Leaving the Booth
Only a handful of minutes isn’t enough to review The Defiant, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. I can’t tell you whether the full campaign maintains this level of atmosphere, whether the scripting eventually becomes too visible, or how well its storyline missions will balance against these heavily directed battles.
What I can tell you is how those fifteen minutes felt: Cold, loud, raw and surprisingly immersive.
The strongest memory I carried away from the booth wasn’t a particular weapon model or explosion. It was the physical response: sweaty palms on the keyboard and mouse, adrenaline climbing as the battle became louder, running out of ammunition and grabbing a fallen soldier’s rifle because I still needed something to shoot with.
I’ve played plenty of World War II shooters over the years. The Defiant didn’t make that formula feel different by throwing it away. It made the war around it feel unfamiliar again.
After my Gamescom session, I very much want to see where Hoothanes takes that idea next.
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