Game:

For Honor (2017)

Category:

Review

Duration: 19:51

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8

Welcome to New Release Friday, where this week we are taking a look at a For Honor Beta Gameplay and Review. This episode is a special TILTED edition, because I get pretty annoyed at the way this game works. It may have been my own fault for taking a swing at For Honor gameplay with a mouse and keyboard since people seems to believe that it is more of a controller game, but fuck that. They should make the game feel good on all input devices, right? Right. Anyway, Ubisoft did a pretty good job with optimizing this game and seemed to put a lot of work into a lot of the right places. I really appreciate seeing this, because they don’t exactly have the best track record, especially regarding optimization in new AAA titles, so the fact that For Honor runs so smoothly in the beta already is a good sign of things to come. Just because the game is well polished doesn’t mean a whole lot paired against the gameplay for me, but we will talk a bit more about that further down.

First off, what the fuck is NRF? New Release Friday is a series in which (hopefully) every week I will hop over to the “New Releases” section of Steam and pick-up a game to play for a few hours and give a first-thought review on. This series is an attempt to not only keep content fresh and relevant around the channel by covering current games in a concise and genuine fashion, but also to offer exposure to new games via a relaxed review format to inform potential, unsure buyers. Check out the playlist for more!

New Release Friday has played an important role in making me step out of my comfort zone and play new types of games, however I wasn’t really expecting this For Honor Beta gameplay and review to be too out of the ordinary for me. I used to play a decent amount of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and figured this game was just going to be a simplified version of it. Boy was I ever wrong. For Honor utilizes a unique gameplay element that is reminiscent of quick time events by giving you a visual UI element that tells you what kind of attack an enemy is about to throw at you or how they are blocking. Assuming you can review this info in time, you can adjust your block or attack accordingly to hit one of their two blind spots. It almost reminds me of the game Nidhogg, in which you are a fencer against others and can adjust your sword height to three different levels. If the enemy attacks when your sword is at a certain level, it will either be blocked or they will die.

Now, this For Honor gameplay element is pretty cool and I could definitely see it being appealing to a large audience, but I just don’t see the appeal myself and actually got quite tilted while playing. It completely takes me out of the game and doesn’t allow me to focus on the actual combat interaction between myself and the enemy. Instead I am staring at a little triangle and playing a simplified Simon Says. In this For Honor review, it is only fair to mention that there are other aspects to the gameplay including shield blocking, guard breaking, special moves/combos, and accessories. Additionally there is a relatively expansive skill set, customizable move sets for each hero, and you can even change the armor and weapons you wield. A lot of this stuff isn’t implemented yet or is just too expensive to justify buying during the For Honor Beta, but will be welcome with the game comes out next week. Hopefully the game doesn’t get fucked by a shitty DLC model, but Ubisoft claims that they have fixed their DLC schemes to not be paywalls.

The large scale battles in For Honor are pretty cool and add a lot of atmosphere to the gameplay, but that is as far as the benefits go in Dominion. The soldiers running around only complicate the battles and make it very difficult to not only navigate the field but to even just identify where the fuck you are. With the focus that goes in to “honor” you know, since the game is called For Honor, it is pretty fucked up how you can’t even properly see the guys who are apparently your rivals in battle. The other issue I ran into during the beta gameplay was that my cursor was always visible while playing. This was not only distracting but seemed to negatively impact the controls and made it quite difficult to properly execute the already clunky For Honor gameplay.

Diving further down the For Honor Beta gameplay and review, let’s talk about some of the good stuff. The game is super well optimized. I only felt one chug in the framerate and that was in the menu, I assume while it was loading in textures and preparing the map. Normally, you would expect that to mean the game doesn’t look all the impressive, but it is really quite pretty and there is a lot going on during a game. This doesn’t seem to bog the game down and their recommended specs is a GTX 680, which was the card I was playing For Honor with. They really did do a lot of things right with this game and I think that it will be a very good launch that will review well with critics.

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