For Honor: Marching Fire Edition

This action game's expansion brings a new faction and gameplay modes onto the battlefield, refreshing the medieval combat game from top to bottom. For Honor: Marching Fire Edition pits knights, samurai, and Vikings in one massive arena with a new faction, the Wu Lin from ancient China, as well as a number of new additions and enhancements meant to improve and expand on the original experience. The new Arcade mode gives players, especially solo players, something extra to do after the campaign wraps up, fighting against waves of AI enemies in randomly generated challenges. Various modifiers and disadvantages add an extra layer of strategy to these encounters but still feel repetitive after the first few rounds. Breach, on the other hand, adds a grander scale to the combat, with players fighting to either defend the walls of a castle from invasion or lead the charge and deliver a battering ram to the castle gates.

While the new game modes add something extra to the For Honor experience, one thing that has been left surprisingly untouched is the actual gameplay. One of the problems with For Honor when it was first released was that the combat, though visually destructive, was sluggish. It often felt as if you were fighting in a field of molasses. While it adds a level of realism to the combat for factions like the knights, who wield cumbersome broadswords while weighted down with bulky armor, it still feels plodding and slow. Trying to counter attacks is a chore too, simply because it seems to take so long for some characters to respond to the controls. It's not the end of the world, as it's something that players can adjust to over time, but for fans used to more fast-paced action, this is like watching a movie at half-speed. That said, it's still oddly satisfying to see these fantasy matchups in motion and see who might win between a Viking berserker and a Shaolin monk. It's these moments when For Honor truly shines, and when Marching Fire's extra polish shows.