For Honor

 

I've seen For Honor around here and there but for the longest time I wasnt even aware that it had a campaign, let alone a co-op one. It seemed like yet another Ubisoft flavor of the month multiplayer deathmatch fest. Well, when I realized it had a co-op campaign I just had to get it, luckily for dirt cheap. I knew absolutely nothing about the game besides that it had a story campaign.

Main reason I got the game was to play co-op campaign so thats what I ended up doing. The game has a difficulty selection, and it recommends to play Normal unless you're already a "veteran and familliar with the mechanics" or something like that. So we just picked Normal.

The game starts with this overly verbose lengthy tutorial that tries to explain how all the mechanics work but its really a confusing mess. Once you actually start playing the game however, its clear how everything plays. Nothing is exactly uniquely done or innovative here. It has a lock-on combat system and then you point the analog stick in a direction you want to attack or block. The enemy will swing in certain directions and it will highlight in white or red where thats going to happen letting you know where to block from. At first I tried playing with Keyboard & Mouse but it became obvious very fast that it was probably a bad idea in a game like this so I quickly switched over to controller and it was a lot more intuitive.

After the tutorial you get asked what faction you want to start as. Knights, Samurai, or Vikings. Seems like it doesnt matter whichever one you pick, you'll have to play them all anyway. Essentially the game has 3 episodes, each with about a handful of missions. The game has an abundance of cutscenes, which are probably some of the highlights of the whole experience. Frequently you'll see cutscenes involving lots of sword battles and especially lots of gore like decapitations and maiming. The general storylines are loose, but broadly its something to do with following each faction throughout history as they struggle to gain influence. In typical Ubisoft fasion, the game has a lot of historical inaccuracy and stretching of truth. Like how many female Knights, Samurai, and Vikings there are. Frequently the most fearful and powerful warriors just happen to be female. Of course theres nothing wrong with women being in games, but I cant help but shake the feeling Ubisoft is just trying to push some kind of weird agenda like "Hey guys, didn't you know women are Warriors too!?" When In reality, historically they were like 0.00001%.

As for the actual missions, well theres really not much to write about. The game has a handful of objectives you do. Usually its just run to a certain area and destroy some object, defend the area, or kill specific enemies. At any given time there tends to be dozens of enemies on screen, but a few hours into the game I realized that you dont even really have to fight them. Its like an illusion of combat or threat. You can simply run past 90% of encounters and just sprint straight for the main objective. Theres no reason to really fight most of the enemies. I mean yeah you can fight them for fun, but I'm just saying the game is kind of badly designed. It shouldn't really be an option to just ignore most enemies, thats just bad design in a game like this. It should reward you for engaging in challenging combat, not rewarding you for just skipping all of it. It even despawns all the enemies when you complete objectives, further making most of the combat feel meaningless and a waste of time to engage in.

As you play through the missions of each faction you are frequently changing from all sorts of different characters. You briefly get to select what appearance you want to have (although most of them look the same). But I don't really understand that, because every other mission you'll suddenly be playing some new character with a different weapon. One moment youll be using a sword and shield, the next a two hand axe, the next a big sword. Theres hardly any player agency in what you get to use. It comes across as kind of jarring and random.

The game tries to excite you with this 'Feats' system. Where you can run around and pickup items to unlock various perks to equip before each mission. There are two types: Passive and Active. The passive perks are mundane stuff like 25% more health, 10% more damage, just small insignificant stuff. Then you have active skills that can be used with the Dpad. The active skills are stuff like: Instant heal, Do more damage for x amount of time, and our favorite: Unblockable, where for a short period of time the enemy cant block your attacks. For pretty much the entire game I just used the Health skill and then Unbreakable. The feasts try to be this big interesting deal, but really after playing the game for just a short while I no longer gave a fuck about any of it and it just felt like another tacked on pointless system to try to give the game any sense of depth. The game also has this like fighting game button combo system where you can chain together inputs to perform certain attacks, like Mortal Kombat or some shit, but I just could not give a fuck less about it. It kept popping up on the screen suggesting combos to do, the few times I tried it felt so clunky and pointless I rapidly lost interest, since spamming attack works so well anyway and most of the enemies are pointless filler you can just run past or gang up on with your coop partner. You dont even have to lock on a lot of the time, it almost seems like locking on actively makes the enemy block more often. Its totally strange. Sometimes just running in circles like a jackass and spamming attack makes you hit more often than locking on and actually trying to engage with the mechanics.

Apparently the game also has some kind of experience/level up system but thats completely pointless. I have no idea what getting experience, or leveling up does. Even after beating the game I don't know. You kill enemies and it will say +10, +20 etc. No clue what it does. I think its just a facade. At one point I looked up and it said I was level 16, ok? What does leveling up do? Who knows. Probably some multiplayer shit I don't care about.

The co-op gameplay is the best part of the game, its standard fare here. You can heal your partner when they go down, and if they go down for good then they respawn after 20 or so seconds. If you both die, you respawn at a checkpoint which you frequently get. The game is very easy, too. We played on the recommended difficulty, and at first I was sort of intimidated by the combat system and all the direction based tactics, but really the game is shallow as fuck. For the most part, All I did was spam Upward attacks or just roll around in between attacks, wait for my skills to come back, and either sprint past enemies to the main objective or team up with the co  op partner to stunlock the mandatory enemies. The game is just shallow and average or even medicore in all regards.

Luckily each episode is very short, we breezed through the Knight campaign in the blink of an eye, then we moved onto the Viking campaign and they made vikings look like clowns, the writing here was just annoying and cringe. Constantly laughing bumbling idiots or screaming at random shit constantly, it was just stupid. Then we moved onto the Samurai campaign, which was maybe the most memorable but still nothing really stands out. Sometimes you'll get these boss fights where you Duel some guy, but its still not really anything exciting cause you can just stunlock the boss in co-op. Its almost like they barely tested it for co-op gameplay how much you can stun the enemies. Also, at a certain point I started realizing the gameplay just felt like a weird shitty mod of Assassins Creed, being a Ubisoft game and all, it just has that weightless, shallow vibe to it. Especially with the lock-on system and frequent use of worthless waves of 1 hit enemies.

The graphics really arent anything special. Its a 2017 game but I've seen Xbox 360 games from 2007 look way more impressive. Everything is kind of flat and dull and without that impressive 'shine' or dynamics a modern game has. Also, the artstyle is very hit and miss. Like the armors and models are pretty cool looking and detailed, especially the Knights. But then they go and ruin it by plastering these overly vibrant saturated like crayon colors all over them. Like bright baby blue cloths and yellow. Ubisoft games do this a lot, where they expect the player will be so clueless and stupid and wont be able to understand whats going on unless you paint everything this really obvious childish color. It just sucks, they always find some way to fuck up an otherwise good artstyle.

 We beat the whole campaign in about 5 hours and 2 sessions. Its a short game, but a very mediocre one. At least it was co-op ,and the cutscenes were mildly entertaining. Its a mindless Ubislop action game, I wasnt expecting much.

Oh yeah and its clear the campaign realy isnt supposed to be the focus of this game. Its "real draw" is this yet another bullshit multiplayer 'Hero' based pvp crap where you pick your "favorite heros" and battle against other players to reclaim territories or something. Yeah, sorry. Not interested, at all. I would have never picked this game up if it didnt have a campaign. And as soon as I noticed the multiplayer was just more of this 'Hero' class based generic shit I lost all interest, I really hate that stuff. So this review says nothing about the multiplayer, maybe, just maybe, if the core mechancis and gameplay were unique and interesting enough I might care just a bit - but its not, so I'm not even gonna comment on the multiplayer stuff.

5/10