After few painful hours trying to set my dead hard disk aside and install new Windows 7 on my workstation,
I finally managed to get this thing working.
Oh, of course the game was 100% fine, but the first drive I tried installing to was defective.
So here goes another 4 hours.
(Fuck Seagate)
What were we talking about...ah, yes. For Honor Beta.
Man, this game is beautiful. Not The Witcher 3 beautiful, but Watch Dogs 2 beautiful.
The intro, the interface, everything.
That's what I expected from Ubisoft.
Even with "High" setting and using up 98% of VRAM on my graphics card,
(which is GTX760 non-Ti version w/ 2GB VRAM)
It ran super smoothly at 60 frames per second.
Unfortunately I arrived too late and the multiplayer seems to be nonfunctional, I really enjoyed it.
This is like Chivalry: Medieval Warfare mixed with beautiful storytelling of Assassin's Creed on steroids.
The graphics were superb, with sharp and clear textures and modeling with no obvious polygons visible.
The story was interesting too; From what I have understood, some disaster happened and many people died in three kingdoms.
Surviving warriors have fought for life, but as they fought for many, many years the true meaning of the war faded into history.
As they realized this war is meaningless, they tried to stop fighting for a moment...and here's where the narrator comes in.
Oh boy. The Warmonger. Plot twist!
(Not her actual name but that's what she does; causing war everywhere she goes!)
Her soldier shoots an arrow to the Viking warrior's chest and he gets angry.
And they start fighting again!
Aaaaand now the game starts on training stage.
It teaches you basics of the gameplay -- dodging, blocking, attacking and other things.
They're well-written and easy to understand once you actually get to try them out.
You need fair amount of mouse movement to actually use the blocking and since it does not register direct backwards movement, you can reseat your mouse and reposition your hands quickly.
So basically it borrows some elements from well-known games like Overwatch and aforementioned Chivalry: MW with added functionalities.
No, not a blatant copy. It is actually well put together and unlike cheap knock-off games, it feels like original feature.
I really liked the Guard Position Marker (three-pronged icon that is in shape of a shield which is also used for loading indicator and other things) since it makes it really easy to see where the opponent is on guard.
Dodge rolling is not as smooth as "Game-like" rolling, but life-like. You can't roll that fast with all that armors!
Movement is similar to The Witcher 3's vanilla movement set; very realistic and fluid.
Some people might find it strange though. (Those people use Faster Movement mode on TW3)
That's all I remember from the gameplay aspect. Now onto the performance!
(Excuse me for the JPEG; I forgot to check "Save Uncompressed Copy" and they came out like SHIT.)
This is what the automatic settings looked like during the tutorial.
And this is how it performed in Benchmark:
In this setting:
It performed extremely well!
...Until there was some smoke cloud on the scene.
Just for shits & giggles, I set almost everything to the maximum (without SSAO):
Color me surprised! It's not so bad!
Now, onto the graphical problem.
On this view, the flaps on the helmet were jiggling like something you see on Garry's Mod videos.
Well, that's it!
Holy tits, it was incredibly stable AND polished!
I was really surprised by how solid everything was -- gameplay, graphics, performance...everything!
It was just right for releasing on time.
Good job, Ubisoft!
I love it!
Score: 9/10
Very Good!
I will wait for the official release and consider buying it.
