For Honor Review (Zero)
I've been playing For Honor on a regular basis since 2019 over multiple consoles and steam accounts but today i am quitting this game for good and cannot even imagine recommending this game to someone else unless some very glaring issues are fixed.
-EXTREMELY UNBALANCED CHARACTERS
This is the worst balanced competitive video game that I have ever seen. In no other multiplayer game where you have to choose a character is there such a humongous gap in viability between the worst and best characters. Picking some characters in this game like Conqueror for example will simply put you at an extreme disadvantage to the point where you literally lack basic tools and punishes and dont even have any options against newer or more favored characters. Im obviously aware that "power creep" is a reality in most competitive games but here it is extreme and the developers approach to fighting power creep makes it clear that they actually encourage it. let me explain.
Ubisoft's approach to balancing the characters in For Honor is the most greedy and disrespectful approach imaginable. Season after season Ubi follows the formula of first finding a character that is in a really bad place in the meta and instead of buffing or reworking them they instead will add a brand new character with a nearly identical move set except they HAVE those buffs or changes. These characters are then only able to be unlocked with a micro-transaction for a few weeks before being able to be purchased for an amount of in-game currency that would take dozens of hours of play time to aquire to encourage you to just purchase the in-game currency to buy them (more on this later).
Why buff or rework a 6 year old character that everyone already has unlocked when you can just make a new character with a nearly identical moveset but with the changes everyone asked for, and make the players with pay up or play your game for dozens of hours to earn them? This approach makes it clear that Ubisoft prioritizes squeezing as much money and playtime out of their players as possible over making a video game where some characters don't literally have a move list of only 3 non-universal moves and a single 50/50 mix up (if even that) fighting against complex characters with different stances, attacks of all properties and extensive movelist of mixups and strings.
New characters are created without any thought of how they will interact with other characters. This could be a fault of the developers literally not playing the game in matchmaking and only against each other (look it up) but im not sure. Some characters hard counter others to the point where the match up is nearly unplayable for the disadvantaged. for example Warden Vs. Highlander or Ocelotl Vs. Warden. Warden (a character with literally no move list outside of a single 50/50 charge bash mix-up im serious) is left with literally absolutely no answer against these two characters, there are many, many matchups like this.
-SLOW GRIND BY DESIGN
A great thing about For Honor is the ability to pretty freely customize your character and make them look unique but actually getting the in-game currency to purchase the customizations is unreasonably slow by design to encourage you to pay for them with real money. It would look ridiculous if the devs made every emote $5.00, every execution $4.00 and every armor color $3.00 so instead they made them all INSANELY overpriced to make you just buy the currency, called steel, to get them with.
Winning a match gets you 37 steel. Most executions are 7000 steel and most emotes are 15,000 steel.
Sure there are dailies that give you extra steel but those only give you 100-300 steal, you only get a handful of them, they are very specific task to complete that may take multiple matches to be able to find the opportunity to do and once you complete them you have to wait 24 hours for the next batch. This is made worse by the intentional design decision to only have what you do in games count towards the up to 3 dailies you have equipped. For example if i have 3 dailies equipped but have one unequipped that says "get 5 kills" and i get 5 kills in my next game it will not count towards it even though i did it. Another cheap tactic to squeeze more play time out of players.
Most executions cost 7000 steel.
If you get 37 steel per game.
you would need to play quite literally 189 games to afford one
if were not counting the 300 gold you get every 24 hours.
Once you have enough steel to customize your character with you cant simply buy the armor pieces you would like to use for your character. because that would be too easy. Instead customizations are randomly found in loot crates that cost 400 or 500 steel each depending on the type of crate. each character has at least 20 looks of each armor type (helmet, arms, body) and of each weapon part (sword blade, sword hilt, sword pommel and shield if they have one). What makes this worse is armor comes in sets and matches with each other and you are encouraged to have a matching, helmet, arms, and body. so just grinding for weeks for the steel isint enough its yet another grind to use the steel you just grinded for to get the piece of armor you want. I cannot even fathom how tedious and monotonous the grinding is in For Honor and I AM STILL NOT FINISHED IT GETS WORSE!
The "level" (how cool it looks) of the armor you get is tied to your "reputation score" of a character and from "rep" 0 up to rep 8 determines the level of armor the loot crates will give you. If you are level 0 you will get lame looking gear that looks worse that your default look most of the time, all of the good looking, flashy armor is by design locked to the higher levels or armor. How do you get reps you may ask? well by increasing your level.
Completing matches gives you XP and when you get enough you level up, once you hit level 21 your level resets to 0 and you get 1 rep. So there is an XP system inside of another XP system. fantastic. Just like grinding steel grinding XP is PAINFULLY slow but slightly better than grinding steel because of the loot box shenanigans.
- HORRIBLE PLAYERBASE
For Honor has one of the most toxic player bases in any game i have ever seen. get ready to get teabagged, emoted, quick chat spammed with "thanks! thanks! thanks!" and sent the worst messages you have ever seen. You're not having fun in a game? Just rage quit! the match making penalty for leaving in the middle of a match is only 10 minutes and dosen't stack! So all of the socially rejected losers that play this game know that they can just rage quit at the slightest inconvenience, go get a cup of coffee, beg their wife for sex and get rejected, and then sit back down again for another match! In the team based game modes as soon as your team has been losing for more than a minute or two at least 1 or 2 people will leave and be replaced by bots and this applies to the other team to. have fun fighting against bots that you can mash the same button against and perfect them! Have fun winning the first round in a 1v1 and your opponent just spams "thanks! thanks! thanks!" and quits out leaving a bot for you to mash to death for 5 minutes so you can leave.
(continued in replies...)