Watch huge men clobber each other in the For Honor launch trailer

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February 14: Valentine's Day! A day for sharing your deepest feelings of affection with the ones you love, with roses, poetry, sweet candy, and fine dinner by candlelight. Also, perhaps coincidentally (although I suspect not), a good time for massive, heavily-muscled men to bludgeon each other to death with primitive weaponry for our amusement.

We have a pretty good idea of what's in store in For Honor, Ubisoft's Vikings-vs-Samurai-vs-Knight melee brawler, thanks to the recently-concluded closed and open betas. So this video is mainly for fun, and it hits all the appropriate notes: Catchy tune set to a martial beat, slow-motion carnage, machismo posing, and even the ultimate classic—walking away from an explosion without looking back. Boom!

I spent a few hours in the For Honor closed beta and even though PvP isn't really my bag, I was impressed by how well the combat system worked. The controls took me awhile to get comfortable with—they're more complex than the frantic hack-and-slash of most FPS melee modes—but they enable a good degree of precision and flexibility in combat, and the available classes seemed well balanced too (by which I mean, they all kicked my ass with equal ease).

We'll have our full review of For Honor up soon; in the meantime, you can follow along with Andy K's adventures in a "preposterously burly" medieval world in our review-in-progress.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.