When I first heard about For Honor, I was ready to dismiss it as a pointless hack and slash attempting to cash in on the Dark Souls hype. It's embarrassing to admit this given how wrong I was, and given how little I knew about the game, but having spent some serious time with For Honor, it's obvious...

The campaign's story falls to earth with a thud, and technical problems are currently marring its online component, but For Honor 's masterful presentation and combat rescue it from mediocrity. Given a few patches, it'll be a force to be reckoned with.

Fluid, tactical combat; Clever level design; Beautiful presentation

Connection problems and other technical quirks hamper the multiplayer; Campaign story has lofty goals, but doesn't manage to reach them

For Honor is a fast-paced, competitive experience mixing skill, strategy, and team play with visceral melee combat.

"Held back by its own ambition, For Honor isn't a masterpiece, but delivers where it counts."

For Honor tells the story of a land shattered by natural disasters, where the scant remaining resources are fought over by three different factions: Knights, Samurai and Vikings.

Positives + Well-executed combat system + Easy to learn; but hard to master + Intriguing cross-platform metagame

Negatives; Single-player feels tacked on; Some cheap tactics too easily available; Currency takes a long time to acquire

Distilled way down to one-on-one medieval combat, For Honor is both instinctual and smart. It's bloody and entertainingly over-the-top, but much more than a button-masher. It's a game that repays thoughtful practice.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite games on the NES was "Defender of the Crown", a fantastic game about warring factions trying to take over the land after the death of a king. It was almost like a videogame version of Risk but with a Middle Aged theme and other fantastic features such as being...

For Honor is a fighting game. I had to keep repeating that to myself every time I got frustrated. The third-person camera, the medieval settings and the melee weapons had caught me off guard, thinking this was an action-adventure, or a hack-and-slash somewhat like Ryse .

awesome game they're updating all the time and the gameplay is simply brilliant

Melee combat games come in many forms, and when blended with mechanics from a wide variety of genres the end results can vary pretty wildly. That's how you end up with Ninja Gaiden, Dark Souls, and even the Batman Arkham trilogy sharing some semblance of, for lack of a better term, design DNA.