For Honor (2017)

This title is a multiplayer-focused action game that stands out for its unique melee combat system. Instead of button-mashing, fights rely on timing, positioning, and reading opponents, making duels feel tense and rewarding. The factions, Knights, Vikings, and Samurai, are brought to life with distinct playstyles and strong visual design, which adds variety and personality to the battlefield.

I honestly couldn't get into this title due to the lack of servers here in South America, but the very few matches that I managed to play showed me the potential this game has. At launch, technical issues like peer-to-peer networking and connection problems also frustrated a lot of people, including myself, as already mentioned. And the progression system felt grind-heavy with its reliance on in-game currency and microtransactions, which is a common plague of this company's games nowadays.

Despite its flaws, For Honor delivers an intense and strategic multiplayer experience that rewards patience and skill. For people who value competitive melee combat, it offers something distinct and memorable, even if it demands time and persistence to fully enjoy. It is definitely a standout in the competitive online multiplayer world, since most games are either a fighting or a shooter, this is a nice change of pace, unfortunately not everybody could enjoy playing it.

I wish this was more focused on Co-Op vs AI than PVP.

Singleplayer campaign felt good to me, giving me chance to enjoy the beauty of detailed maps and character models, impactful attack animations and pleasant sound design. The combat system is very good IMO.
Also, glad I could take my time to practice stuff vs AI without getting obliterated in a stunlock by experienced opponents.

Multiplayer is a mixed bag, as it is with most PvP games.
Sometimes it feels good and you get an epic close fight with a lot of variety and tension.
Other times you just just wanna punch your opponent through the screen for spamming light attacks non-stop or repeating one combo over and over.

I’m not a multiplayer gamer so I decided to try For Honor for the story mode alone because the combat looked very appealing. Unfortunately, a number of issues plagued my experience with the game, resulting in a very lackluster experience by the end of my playthrough. In a campaign that is essentially made up of 18 short missions, having to literally restart two of them several times, simply because checkpoints failed to register, is a complete turnoff. To make matters worse, the boss fight in mission 5 of the Samurai campaign, easily one of the highlights of all faction missions, jumped to the post-battle cutscene almost immediately after it started - I had barely hit him by then. Couple these with several technical hiccups - the main one being how combat vs bosses would sometimes take place in tight spaces that made it very difficult to maneuver, and often meant you were pinned down against a corner unable to move while the enemy just kept unloading on you -, and it’s obvious that this game suffers from a big lack of polish that affects several of its aspects. Which is too bad, because when For Honor works the way it was meant to, the combat actually shines, the world is beautiful to look at, the story - which I initially thought was non-existent - is at least decent with some goofy moments (that is if you can get past the voice acting), and the experience feels pretty good. The problem is that these moments were few and far between.

I don’t know if any of these issues are prevalent on multiplayer, but it seems to me that, for Ubisoft, the single player mode was a clear afterthought. For the story mode, I wouldn’t give it more than 4.5/10, which makes it quite a disappointing game considering what it could’ve been, and impossible to recommend outside a subscription service.

The game is graphically dull and ugly. There is no gore, barely any blood, and no dismemberment except for really chaste head pops. The enemies just disappear when they die, very "game-y". The story is always a mess but sometimes it is a weird libertarian/Ayn Randian mess.

I get why some might enjoy the gameplay because the battle system is very demanding but for me, it does not pay off. I want a more visceral or ridiculous payoff for what the game demands. If you are ok with mastering the gameplay as its own reward, maybe worth playing.

Also, the multiplayer has some neat ideas, mostly just F2P asynchronous mobile game stuff to wrap around the gameplay. Unfortunately, the real players I have encountered online have all been weird and not fun.

Between For Honor and Chivalry i've come to the conclusion that games where you have this sort of block/attack system really aren't for me. It just feels really unnatural with a mouse.

The tutorial fails to tell you how to activate things (E), the game keeps you locked to enemies that have died and disappeared, and it displays objectives you can't currently complete. I kept fighting the same enemy waiting for it to do a high attack so i could dodge it. These are the kind of things that should've been fixed in beta.

Finally, i would like to point out how dumb the story is. Something made an earthquake and in the medieval post-apocalyptic world people have been fighting... for a thousand years?! Holy shit, this game makes Fallout 4 look logical in comparison. A thousand years! And they're still using the same armour and weapons? How do they eat? Why are there vikings, knights and samurai in the same place? I mean, the intro movie is quite realistic looking but how do you even come up with something this stupid?