For Honor story trailer justifies vikings, samurai, knights
Tries to, I mean
I like Ubisoft's obsessive need to cram story into everything, not because their stories are good, but because their stories are required to justify some pretty odd concepts. For Honor [official site] pits vikings against samurai against knights in a game primarily designed for multiplayer melee, but of course there's a singleplayer and co-operative story mode which tells the story of how these various blade-fanciers came to fight one another. There's a trailer below.
I'd have thought that there was simply an innate dislike between the three groups, or perhaps a pub disagreement about whether swords or axes were better at cleaving a man's head in two, but no. It turns out they were all tricked by a lady obsessed with creating perpetual war? She's called Apollyon - which means destroyer in Greek, Wikipedia fans - and she is well angry. While trying to stop her, you'll hop between characters from all three factions, with promises of both "massive battles" and "intense duels" against bosses.
We've yet to try the singleplayer, but Alec had a good time with the multiplayer when he played it a couple of months back. It has you fighting other players, mobs of NPCs and has perhaps too great a focus on unlocks, but Alec ultimately enjoyed its swordplay:
"As for the fighting, inevitably we're not in reticulesas any more. This is a game about timing and blocking, not aiming. The idea For Honor's come up with is that you can hold your weapon in one of three directions – left, right, above – in order both to block which angle you think an attack is coming from, and to ensure your own hit connects rather than bounces right off the enemy’s blade with yer classic clang or donk sound effect."
If that sounds like a good time, you can sign up to a closed beta due to launch in January. The full game is due for release on February 14th 2017.