I'm 5 Months Late - For Honor

Once upon a time there was a(nother) massively hyped Ubisoft title, which looked innovative, visually impressive, fun to play and sold really well. And then it lost 95% of its user base. Now take this info with a grain of salt, as the good folks at Ubisoft state the player count is fine, which happens to be exactly the kind of thing I would say about a game I'm trying to sell. Hyperbole vs damage control, I don't know which side is lying more, but it's safe to say that For Honor isn't exactly super popular anymore.
Personally, I've ignored the game for two reasons: Dark Souls 3 and its DLC and all the complaints I've heard about For Honor - shitty netcode, lag-switchers, toxic community, macrotransactions, Pay2Win, oh joy...

15 playthroughs of Dark Souls 3 and a well-paid new job later, however, I couldn't stop wondering how awful For Honor really was. After all, I could afford it now and while some of my friends bashed the game just as much as everyone else, others said it's actually really fun, warts and all. So I took the plunge and grabbed it, jumping right into campaign mode to get the hang of things.

And it looked so damn good!

I can appreciate how they actually tried to come up with some kind of story, which explains why the fuck medieval knights, vikings and samurai are suddenly beating the shit out of each other. And I'm not gonna criticize the game, just because said story is incredibly dumb. And yeah, real vikings didn't have massive horns or wings on their helmets, real swords and shields could never withstand the amount of abuse they're being subjected to in this game, yada, yada, yada. You're not gonna play this game if you crave realism. Let's move on.

Thing is, even with a completely stupid story, the campaign is seriously fun to play, because hacking people to bits is enjoyable and the awesome cutscenes and great voice-acting are entertaining even when things make zero sense. It helps that you can choose between FemShep and Illidan Stormrage to voice your main protagonist in the knight storyline.

I was not prepared for such a fun experience.

On paper, combat is ridiculously simple, which is another reason why I had no desire to give this game a try sooner. You can swing your weapon left, right or up and you can block in these same three directions. That's not a skill-based fighting game, its rock-paper-scissors in a fancy setting. However, you also get dodge rolls, combos, parries, unblockable attacks and special abilities, so there's actually quite a lot of depth to the whole thing. Problem is, the AI can't handle most situations where you simply spam random attacks in all directions, meaning the solo campaign is laughably easy, apart from a rare few moments, where the game blatantly cheats (input reading) or where you have to fight a boss, who summons an entire pack of wolves, which take turns humping you while the boss pummels you into a mushy pink paste. It's not as unfair as it sounds and I'm currently beating the campaign on hard mode, just for the fun of it. One complete playthrough only takes about six hours, but it's good fun and you can even play it with a friend, if you actually know somebody else who still plays this.

Of course there's an obvious problem when the solo mode makes you feel like a total god of war - you'll walk into multiplayer expecting to destroy everything. And naturally, For Honor's singleplayer is about as good at preparing you for multiplayer as is the singleplayer mode in any Call of Duty game. I logged on, I got matched up with super high level players, I got destroyed and I got cussed out of my matches for being a noob. I wished I had never bought the damn game.

But... but I get all the cool executions in hard mode!

So I hated myself for a bit, hated the game, kept on playing because what the fuck else am I gonna do at 2 in the morning, followed some of my team mates around for a bit, figured out the basics and finally started killing a few people. Which is good, because the game eternally tracks your kills and deaths without mercy and if there's one thing I hate even more than being shit at a game, it's stupid stat-tracking, which rubs my nose in it whenever I look at the stupid menu screen. It took me a while, but things started looking up.

"I'm killing someone! Mom, get the camera!"

It still seemed brutally unfair how the game would match me with people in full heroic gear, with god knows how many levels under their belts, but it was good to see that they all die the same if you stab 'em hard enough. I was starting to have fun!

I gave it another try today and something weird happened. First of all, I discovered that there's a "VS AI" duel mode, which actually grants experience points and loot. So you can seriously practice against bots and progress at the same time! So I did that for a little while to get the hang of my character, then jumped into an online match and to my massive surprise, the game matched me with a whole bunch of other complete noobs! I shit ye not! Lots and lots of prestige zeros, no gear, everyone a scrub like me! But since I spent all last night fighting the most hardcore of the bunch, followed by a bunch of practice duels, I was now destroying the other lowbies in the session.

Look how heroic I am!

As for the community being toxic, I have to say it's really not any different than any competitive shooter out there. Yes, I'm happy to report that my mother seems to be really well-known in this community and by the sound of it, she's still sexually active. A lot. But really, you can disable voice and even text chat and things never got as nasty as they do in most MOBAs out there. Or Overwatch, for that matter. I can live with it.

As for the complaints about microtransactions, premium shit, the season pass, Pay2Win and all that... ehhh, it looks a lot worse than it really is. First of all, the season pass is entirely unnecessary, unless you INSTANTLY want EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER without unlocking them first. I got enough currency to unlock four characters straight away just for completing the tutorial. Add that to the three or four characters, who are already unlocked at the beginning of the game and that's half the roster right there, without forcing you to pay anything extra. Keep on playing online or offline and you'll be able to unlock the rest of them in no time. Granted, the brand new Centurion and Shinobi characters are massively expensive compared to the rest of the bunch, so if you're dying to use those, you'll have to grind or fork out. That's not great, but it's also not the big deal people make it out to be.

Of course, fiery killing animations and other such fancy stuff come much faster if you throw some cash at the screen.

I had a test run with many of the characters simply by completing the story mode, so I knew exactly which character I liked best and insta-unlocked that one via ingame currency when I started playing multiplayer. There's also a massive amount of customization options from emblems to colours to emotes, execution moves (read: finishers) and special helmets and pauldrons and shit. I love all of this stuff, though some of the more exotic dye patterns and emblems take absolutely ridiculous amounts of grinding to unlock. Real money doesn't help with that, either, since these unlockables are tied to character levels.

Speaking of real money - yes, you can buy random loot chests with ingame currency and the fastest way to obtain said currency is by spending cold, hard cash. However, you can't just fire up the game and buy your way to victory, as the really good stuff only starts to drop after your character has reached a certain level. There's also no "this sword will kill another player in one hit" or "this armor makes you unkillable" kind of gear here. Every item may raise a specific stat, possibly giving you more defense or attack power, but it does so at the cost of another stat, meaning you may require more time to regenerate stamina or your revenge mode (=more power for a few moments when you are outnumbered) could end more quickly. You can grab any fresh character with standard items and zero customization and attack a player in full heroic gear and still win if you fight better (or get lucky, that's always a factor). Bear witness to the perfection that is my fighting on the internet:

It's amazing what killstealing and matchmaking against noobs can do!

Is this game still gonna be a thing in a few months? I think so. Yes, finding a match in any of the less popular game modes is close to impossible, but that also applies to every Call of Duty on PC whenever you try to join something that isn't a team deathmatch. Duels and Domination matches are listed as 'highly active' and so far I had no difficulty getting a session going. Yes, I got disconnected once or twice or got host migration popups, which sucks. But as somebody, who has spent hundreds of hours in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, this hardly bothers me anymore. Peer2Peer matches suck, but I can tolerate them. They also mean the game could still be around in a few years, because there are no dedicated servers to shut down... I think?

If the game is as dead as some say, then maybe new seasons and additional characters will stop sooner rather than later. With that in mind, I actually found lobbies full of complete noobs today, so For Honor must still attract some new blood, right?
I've seen online stores selling this game for as little as 30 Quid now and I believe it's worth that if you're into this sort of game. I like it better than Chivalry or Mount & Blade and I've sunk quite a few hours into those. Of course, if you're already completely hooked on a similar title, then For Honor will do nothing for you. Same if you simply don't enjoy the genre. But I'm a sucker for fighting games and 'medieval' combat, so this one is right up my alley.