For Honor

In 2012 Ubisoft began developing a strategy hack and slash fighting game set in an alternative reality where an apocalypse wracks the world leaving it in ruin. Three groups of people live on beyond the destruction, that being the Viking Clans, the Knights, and the Samurai. The game released on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2017, and it quickly became the top selling game during that month. My brother and I purchased the game and played quite a bit of it to get a good feeling for how it plays and what it’s like to cut each other apart, me with a longsword (a slightly over-sized longsword) and him with a battle-axe (a slightly over-sized battle-axe).

VISUALS

The game has an interesting hybrid art style where everything is realistic but slightly exaggerated. Characters are mostly super buff crazy scary looking warrior of their age, and the environments include culturally accurate, if not suffocating so, buildings and location. I mean, I’m not sure how many more Viking stories we can have placed in snowy mountain terrain before we just get exhausted by it.

The games lighting is superb, it definitely works at setting a tone and mood in the multiplayer matches. Lighting, plus their super cool weather systems really help make the environments come alive. There was one match I was playing where it was raining hard and foggy, which almost set an ominous tone to the whole thing with the added distant screaming of the dying soldiers. Of course, all the atmosphere is shattered when the game announcer barks over the whole world “You lost zone C!”.

The games textures are muddy at times, I’m not sure if it’s just muddy, or if there’s a rendering technique going on that I’m just not noticing, either way, that is entirely forgivable. Textures are easily overlooked when the animations are so dang smooth. The cloth physics are super well done, and the fighting animations are wicked fun to watch play out, especially their brutal executions.

GAME PLAY

For Honor’s game play is one that leaves me with mixed feelings of love, hate, disgust, bitter resentment, and loathing. Notice how most of those are bad things. So, the fun of the game comes from fighting someone and having all of the blocking, evading, attacking, and special moves mechanics functions in perfect unison with one another. I’ve had tons of fun playing this game against people who completely kicked my butt in a fight, but the fight played out well. They attacked, I blocked. They attacked, I didn’t block in time. I attack, they evade then counter attack. I circle around them then push them to the ground and attack. Etc. The games fighting system is well thought out and fun…but only when it actually works.

I’ve more often than not had issues where I’ve been fighting and their attack will go through my block, or the timing won’t line up right due to latency and they will attack me despite my block already being up and running. More often than not latency ends up screwing over a fight making the game feel poorly designed. Another overwhelming issue the game has is its garbage balancing between classes. There are some classes with attack speeds that are faster than some classes block speeds. Sometimes you will come across a player who has such better gear than you that fighting them is hopeless, this wouldn’t be an issue if all the gear was earned through game play, but since it can also be purchased through micro-transactions the balancing is screwed.

Then there are classes that can poison their weapon at the end of an attack combo (if you played against these classes you’re feeling a great swell of hate in your chest.). The poison is the biggest issue I’ve come against, being that my class doesn’t get such luxuries. That, paired with the fact that poison classes are generally much, much faster than the rest, makes them extra difficult to fight against. Even further, one of the poison classes, the Nobushi, has a spear, which gives it speed, poison, and range over everyone else. Tack on the easy to nail down combo move necessary to poison your weapon and you have yourself a poorly designed, easy to use, over-powered, unbalanced class. Yes, I’m salty about it.

All in all, despite its myriad of issues, the game has the capacity to be fun. I’ve had good matches where I’ve played with my brother and some of his friends and we’ve dominated the battlefield. Those matches though included one particularly vital element that the game otherwise lacks – communication with your teammates. The game has a simple emote system and a “chat” function, but nothing that allows for coordination among your teammates. So, playing alone with random others often times leaves me dissatisfied and moving on to something else.

NARRATIVE

The game does have a single player mode, one which I, to be fair, have not finished yet. The game’s story is divided into three main chunks, the Knights, the Vikings, and the Samurai – go figure. I have finished the Knight and Viking portions, but have yet to finished the Samurai, so this is more of my first impressions.

You begin with the Knights and are thrown into a siege against an unnamed enemy, the ambiguity left me feeling like there was no back story, no motivation for the narrative what so ever. In addition, the story mode propels you into a series of tutorials on how to play the game, this element I completely hated because it was rendered obsolete by the fact that you are forced through a tutorial before you even have access to the story mode. This being, going through it again felt like poor design.

The narrative as a whole feels kind of spotty, like it’s multiple short stories patched weakly together. I never felt like I was really a part of any of the factions, and I never really got too invested in what was going on because it was all going on so bloody fast. I don’t feel like the narrative in this game is particularly fun, or well thought out, it has moments of epic scale that are quickly passed by, which is a shame because those are the more interesting moments in the story. It’s clear early on that the single player mode of the game was more tacked on, and not well done.

THE MENUS

The menus...yep…a whole section dedicated to the menus. User Interface is often something overlooked, and that is usually because it is well done, user friendly, well designed, and not intrusive. For Honor’s user interface is very much none of those things. Turn on the game, what do you see. First, a warning screen. Second, Ubisoft splash screen. Third, the great and almighty “Press Start” screen, where we get to see the For Honor title shot that is so commonly used in their marketing. And finally, after servers are contacted, we are thrown into the horror and hell that is their in-game menus.

Along the top we get to see all of our player info, party info, and the games seasonal faction war info. Directly below there is the “Play”, “Customize”, “Store”, “Social”, and “Options” tabs, which when selected will offer up their own sub menus. When you select the sub-menu you are taken to a totally new page where the buttons do different things and the layout is different.

Information on screen is not laid out in an easy to ready and easy to access format which makes for clunky navigation and in the end a subtle frustration for the player. I found myself digging through menus just to find where my daily orders were located post match. I found myself, at least initially, having trouble finding the menu where I could customize my character, which should be something that is easy to access in a game where customizing your character is a big part of gaining an edge in combat.

All in all, I personally feel like their menu’s are poorly designed and hard to navigate. I shouldn’t be very surprised though, Rainbow Six: Siege suffered the same troubles when it was first released. Here’s to hoping that For Honor follows Sieges footsteps in updated their user interface as the game goes on.

OVERVIEW

Well…I don’t hate the game, despite what you just read. I just feel that there is a plethora of balancing issues, gross micro-transactions, terrible menus, and shoddy matchmaking followed up with a tacked on single player mode. The replay ability is high, as it is in most multiplayer games, and the game play when it functions properly is actually really good. Mix in beautiful animations and sick looking executions and I’m almost forgiving. Alas, I’ve experienced far too many problems with the game and cannot over look them.

6/10