Parents' Guide to For Honor

Because of its repetitive gameplay, this medieval, third-person hack-and-slash action game quickly becomes redundant and tiresome. This does manage to take longer to get dull if you play against other people. In For Honor, knights, Vikings, and samurai have to use swords, axes, and spears to prove who's the deadliest warrior. Sometimes, this means taking on waves of enemies. Other times, when battling someone tough, you have to use your controller's left thumbstick to place your weapon in just the right spot to block an incoming attack, while using the same mechanic to avoid having your swings blocked. You also can try to break their blocking position through a hockey-like body shot or do a broad sweeping swing.

The problem is that when you fight computer-controlled enemies in the game's story-driven campaign, they often telegraph their attacks. As a result, combat in the game's story mode is less like fighting to the death and more like playing a simple game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors." Thankfully, it's a bit less predictable when you play against other people, especially if they're impulsive. But even then, the only online mode worth doing is "Team Deathmatch," since you and your human-controlled opponents are augmented by waves of those easily dispatched grunts, which makes this mode rather frantic. By comparison, going mano-a-mano in the mode Duel & Brawl is like playing a low-rent fighting game, while the capture point variation Dominion is like playing a slightly less predictable version of the campaign. Also, just getting online to play these modes was problematic during this review. Either way, though, you're better off spending your money on something with a bit more variety than For Honor.