General Impression:

This game is a lot of fun and has a lot of potential. Fairly low skill floor, and very high skill ceiling with a very varied game experience between the modes and charachters will attract a lot of different people. Personally loved the 1v1 duel mode. Just one on one, no ********, you and me, better player wins. An adrenaline fueled experience that keeps you on edge and wanting more.

For clarification I played the PC version.

Specific criticisms

- It's blatanly obvious that the game has been developed for console and ported to PC.

- Menu navigation is awful. Needs proper mouse navigation. Press tab for heroes or Q for quests? That's a no-go. Do you really need to use 90% of the screen to select between 3 different gamemodes?

- Speaking of menus, Why is the map voting under a seperate menu and not just on screen?

- Why are you unable to leave a lobby after find one after you search? I shoudn't have to ready up and load the game to leave it. It's a waste of all players time.

- The video tutorials are a great idea, but poorly implemented. Have 1 video for things all charachters have in common, having to watch the same thing over and over is dumb. Special moves should be showcased on their own, accessible from the instruction screen on how to perform them.

- The game feels very unresponsive at times with terrible netcode problems. Being to counter-guardbreak after 1.5seconds, or guarding only to still get hit. I've seen people saying it's P2P connection, which will not work. A game like this, just like fighting and shooter games, needs a good connection between players since milliseconds DO matter. Dying because of lag is never fun and always feels extreamly unfair.

- While enviormental deaths can be fun and add another layer to the game, there should be an option to play withouth them, especially in Duel mode. Having your opponent do nothing but try and push you down cliffs or onto spikes when the mode is supposed to be about 1v1 no********betterplayerwins completly ruins the experience. (same with revenge mode, why is this in duel?)

- The drop/weapon upgrade system is fine, but it needs to be reworked. If you want gear to be upgradable and give stats, it also needs to be purchable. Say you stil get cosmetic item drops, and you also get scrap dropped that can be used to then buy/upgrade your gear. Having to rely on random drops to get the gear you want is very frustrating and not very fair in a game like this where it seems to have quite the impact on your charachters stats.

- The chat system is broken to hell. Overwatch has a good chat, probably the best I've ever seen. This game has the worst. The chat key isn't even bound to Y,U or enter, which is pretty much is in EVERY OTHER ONLINE GAME EVER.

- Any thoughts about ranked play? I ran into the problem that I played 1 charcahter a lot and got really good, so the matchmaker only put me against good players, which in turn made it very difficult to learn another charachter (especially without a training dummy mode). So you'd have ranked play with a much stricter matchmaker and casual play where you might be matched against a wider span of people.

- It should be more obvious what attacks can be cancelled by guardbreaking your opponent. It looks like a stun, it acts like a stun, but it doesn't always stop your opponent attack from hitting you even if you guardbreak them while they're still mid swing, ( even if they're not daunless or w/e else) it could be that this is just another problem that has to do with poor connections, but it's still not specified anywhere of what kind of properties guardbreak has.

Minor bugs:
In the key binding section the stances are named something like stance right, guard up, guard left which makes no sense.
The decapitation execution for Orichi does not work on the Raider, head stays on body.
In post match (only tested in duel) if one player readies up, then leaves as the other player also readies up. The lobby is now unable to start the next game and the player still in there has to leave it and search again for a game.

Final thoughts

Loved the game. I've had more fun with For Honor over this Alpha weekend than I've had with any other game in quite some time. But it does have it's problems that if not fixed will still probably ruin the experience and keep me from bying the game.

First is the netcode, so many times I got hit or died unfairly really made the game really hard to enjoy sometimes. The best games where games with good conenctions, even if I lost 0-3, because it means my opponent won because they played better, which is just more motivation to try harder and beat them in a rematch.

As previously mentioned I almost exclusively played duel mode, since after trying the other modes I found them way to chaotic and not as fun as a 1v1 showdown of skill. The best of 5 format is perfect. It gives you enough time to study your opponent and adjust to what they're doing, sometimes happening inbetween every game which would lead to some intense 5th and final rounds, without dragging on too long. But the enviourmental deaths really made it a lot less fun than it should've been. Some players would do nothing but and try to throw you off cliffs, while predictable, it's just not what a 1v1 mode should be about in my opinion. Other would try and use it as a last resort when being beaten badly, insted of trying to comeback with some crazy tricks, guards and combos. If this kind of playstyle was to remain in 1v1 it would ruin the mode that's bound to attract some of the more skilled, passionatte and loyal players. While hopping into a 4v4 brawl and messing around can be fun, the game truly shines when it's just you, your opponent with your weapons in a fight to the death.