For Honor

In a fantasy world where samurai, knights and vikings all wage war with one another, For Honor lets you play as any of these three factions to engage in close quarters melee combat that is focused on one-on-one duels. No matter how long your history of playing games is, For Honor's core gameplay is something you haven't experienced before.

When in melee range, you can lock onto your target by holding down L2. Then, a shield graphic on your character shows your stance. You can focus on the right, left or upward direction using the right stick. This means your attacks will be performed into that direction. Similarly, another shield graphic shows the same for your opponent. Should you attack the right side, your opponent can focus his stance on his left side, so your attack will collide into his guard. Is he focused on the right or upward directions, then your attack hits, dealing damage. This means while in a duel you have to pay attention to what direction your opponent attacks come from. Dodging is also an option, but the game is very deliberate and this includes dodges. You cannot dodge attacks forever like you can block them. To top it off, each character has a certain moveset that consists of combo's and special abilities.

The directional emphasis of For Honor's combat.

This is where the combat gets interesting. Some special abilities allow you to cancel out of your attack animations and alter the direction of your attacks. Feint right, then attack left. Or perform a well known combo, light attack, heavy attack and then a top down heavy attack that is unblockable. If you have played a while, everyone will see it coming. So cancel out of that last over the top attack and instead attack right, catching your dodging opponent regardless. There are four classes to each faction. They all have one of each. The Vanguard is a well rounded fighter. But each Vanguard is very different from the next. The knight can engage in some combo's and guard breaks, while the viking lays down heavy damage and can use throws. The samurai on the other hand, is an experienced fighter that can use range and feints better. The other classes are Assassins, lightly armored but quick; the Heavy's, heavily armored but slow as you'd expect and the Hybrids that combine any role with another unexpected one. For each class, each faction has very distinct classes that play completely differently from the others.

At its core, For Honor is a multiplayer game. You can engage in duels online which are one versus one. A Brawl is two versus two and Elimination is four versus four. From my experience, people have quickly gravitated towards having 'honor' in matches and even though one man down in a Brawl means you can go two versus one to finish the round, most people will stand and wait until your one versus one is over, then step in. Beyond these modes there are also battlefields where lesser soldiers from each side that are killed by heroes (that would be you and other players) in a single hit, charge to kill each other. The objective here is to hold certain zones and help your lesser soldiers weed out theirs. For what it is worth, I have experienced an unstable connection with For Honor for all my time with it. It routinely fails to connect and sometimes boots you from a match. Though lacking in quality, I would not call the experience unplayable at all.

While there are various modes to play online, there isn't much to come back to beyond that. You unlock new gear by playing in the form of loot with statistics associated to them, as well as some cosmetic options. You receive it for completing matches and you can buy more at any time from a slot-machine style package with Steel, the ingame currency. Of course, For Honor also allows you to buy Steel with real money. That is spent on cosmetics as well as the gear that makes you deal and receive more and less damage and more. The problem is it feels completely misplaced in a game that has so little content but sells for a full price game.

The duels are the best part of For Honor.

There are no unique interesting multiplayer modes. There is no endgame content. Just straight up a handful of multiplayer modes and that's basically it. The game promises events of some sort, but I haven't seen any yet and I won't hold my breath for them to be more than just timers to get certain things done a la Iron Banner in Destiny. There is a singleplayer campaign that does a good job of introducing you to all the classes from each of the factions. There is also some light story going on, but it ultimately doesn't really go anywhere, nor is it engaging for as long as it lasts. Which, by the way, is a few hours at best. I finished the campaign in about four hours and while it prepared me for the multiplayer in a pretty good way, it has no interesting moments in it, no interesting mechanics. Titanfall 2 proved that multiplayer focused games can make a coherent, solid and awesome singleplayer experience. The campaign in For Honor feels like an afterthought in many ways. The most notable of which is 'alright, this is a multiplayer game, so now let's design the campaign so it prepares you for multiplayer and nothing else'. If you're looking for a good singleplayer, For Honor is not something I would recommend to anyone. It most certainly does not manage to stand on its own.

Final Feelings

Ubisoft has found something here that will have a bright future and the proof is in For Honor's gameplay, but that is about it for now. There really isn't too much more to say. The single player is kind of bad, the multiplayer is fun but doesn't have a ton going for it either and the addition of microtransactions to boot are a good reason to stay away from For Honor. That said, I cannot help but like the game quite a bit. The core duel combat is actually really good and interesting. It is a fantastic proof of concept, I just wish the entire game around that core would have been more than what lays before me now. I will continue to play the game as it is fun to play from time to time and really offers something you can't get anywhere else. But it is also easy to be disappointed after an hour or two that there isn't more to it. It is very easy to like what For Honor is doing, but it is ultimately a bad deal.