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

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 .

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

"The Art of Battle" at its basis gives players control. It allows them to block, attack and counter in any one of the three given directions, top, left and right freely. This mixed with different movesets and abilities allows the game to feel both strategic and like a traditional fighting game.

Robust and Strategic Fighting System; Fluid Animations; Interesting Premise; Low Bandwidth and Low Lag Online Play

Microtransactions in a Premium Game; Unmemorable Campaign; Balancing Issues

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

At around the 5 hour mark something finally clicked and I stopped treating For Honor like a glorified Dynasty Warriors game. Throwing out flurries of heavy attacks and easily telegraphed rolls wasn't working and, until then, I couldn't easily grasp why.

Looks stunning; Offers a wide range of heroes; Deep combat system; Intense PvP combat

Occasional network issues; Story mode is tedious; Steep learning curve

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...

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.