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“As it stands I must say I have been converted from curious to interested in For Honor”.

When For Honor was shown at E3 in 2016 I know I was among many who weren’t quite sure what to expect.  With a seemingly enormous battle between Knights, Vikings and Samurai that looked awesome, one couldn’t help but be skeptical.  How was it going to operate when everyday users were getting stuck into the game? Well, thanks to the Closed Beta weekend, my skepticism has been eased.

When you start For Honor you are expected to join one of the factions, either Knights, Samurai or Vikings, which affects nothing but aesthetics and the global war element.  There are three gameplay modes in the Beta but there are more coming to the full game.  The first is a 1 v 1 duel, the second was a 2 v 2 Brawl mode and the third as well as best For Honor experience, the 4 v 4 Dominion mode.

The 1 v 1 duel is fairly self-explanatory. The 2 v 2 Brawl is the same as 1 v 1 but depending on your partner this can vary greatly, as reviving each other is an option if you can pull it off in battle where isn’t always easy to have enough time to pull off a revive.  Then there is 4 v 4 Dominion mode.  Each team gains points by collecting and holding zones as well as killing enemies.  On top of the four players on each team there are also a large number of AI low powered enemies and allies that spawn and try to defend your areas.  This makes for huge battles that look impressive which are fun to hack and slash your way through.  Once you get enough points the opposition gets broken which makes them go into perma-death mode and then your team needs to kill each of the opposing team one more time.

The game modes are all very fun and work well.  I hit some frame rate issues in Dominion a couple of times but with the game being in Beta, this should hopefully be fixed by launch.  The beta also had none of the campaign content which it supposedly requires online which I’m not a fan of but we will see at launch about that.

The gameplay itself feels perfect for the 1 v 1 duels, revolving around slow attacks that feel like you are welding a large weapon.  The process of attacking and defending involves using three zones dictated by the joysticks.  To successfully defend from an attack, you need to defend in the right zone. The zones are indicated via markers, but you need to watch until the attack in case your opponent changes the zone at the last second.  Nailing 1 v 1 combat is great and it means in the bigger battles it’s that much more important to not let yourself get ganged up on as you are at a severe disadvantage.

As mentioned before there is also a bigger global game between the three factions.  When you complete a match, depending on how you did, you’ll gain War Assets to contribute towards the war of the factions.  Every six hours an update is done which shows the territory held or changed depending on where War Assets have been deployed.  At launch Rounds are going to last two weeks and seasons are going to last ten weeks.  Once the season ends rewards are given based on how your faction did.  You see the current areas and who controls them at the multiplayer match selection screen, which converted me from not caring to being surprisingly invested in the system.

As it stands I must say I have been converted from curious to interested in For Honor.  Depending on how the campaigns operate and their storyalong with a potentially a lasting community, For Honor could truly be something special.

 

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