For Honor is the most fun you can have wasting sixty dollars. And if you aren't sure if that is a compliment or an insult than we are on the same page. For those of you not up to date, For Honor is a multiplayer battle simulator made by Ubisoft. Players can select between three factions: you can live out the dream of every anime watching teen and be a Samurai, move to the arctic wilderness and become a scruffy Viking, or be like me and dress up like a poorly crafted homemade Halloween costume and be a knight.
“How does this choice affects my actual gameplay?” you may ask, and the answer to that is a resounding zero. This faction war system as it is called, is worthless in the larger scheme of things. The point of it was to create a system where people spend points built up during gameplay, to help defend their faction's land and take over new land. Unfortunately, this system only updates at the end of a few weeks, making anything you do before literally, the last six hours of a given round, about as worthless as giving free contact lenses to the blind.
As far as combat in the game itself, the mix bag continues. Players can choose from any of 12 classes, four from each of the three previously mentioned factions. Combat itself boils down to a big game of rock paper scissors, each player has three zones of defense, left right and top and two attacks light and heavy. The goal is to attack on the side your opponent isn't blocking while block on the side your opponent is attacking. While a simple concept, and a really cool one to just stick players into the role of three of the most known warrior groups in history, concept doesn't make a game good by itself. For honor has glaring problems, most basically with connectivity. Games will often just drop midway through, and poor connections happen more than they should for a fully developed AAA game. Game modes themselves obviously play a huge part in the quality of games as well. In 1v1 or 2v2 maps, there is a lot more personal responsibility to be able to win fights by yourself, in 4v4 maps games look less like measured battles and more like a Walmart during a Black Friday sale, with less injuries I imagine. And combining the two you have one of the most glaring problems of For Honor, matchmaking. It's pretty hard to play a game where you and everyone else on in the game have to hurt each other by smacking one another with pool noodles, except for one guy came to the fight with Excalibur and Kevlar armor, the gear discrepancy found in games is bad.
All that said, when the game works and you find people that are on the same gear level, experience level, and when the game doesn't decide to die halfway through, it is fun and deep. But these glaring problems make it so hard to have fun with a game that should be so much better than it is.
