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.
