Overall a pretty fun game, with elements that seem to echo ubisoft's style of combat, where they want the player to react rather than act first. The game does not reward you for button mashing, but rather demands you pay attention to the enemy and let them kill themselves.
In terms of mechanics of battle, the game tends to play like an Assasin's Creed game in terms of combat. Specifically, while you can take the offensive here and there, I found myself generally avoiding this and waiting for the enemy to come at me. This gave me a chance to parry, and heavy attack. The only times I ever took the offensive was when they were out of stamina, which was when I would smack them with a guard break, and heavy attack them again. The mechanics of the game are that you must follow your enemy's weapon movement (for the most part, some heroes are unable to do this, so you must be fast and nimble with them, instead), and react on their attack. The game gives you a warning which way the strike is coming. You can either guard against it, in which case you simply won't die, or you can time it right and wait for the last possible second, allowing you to strike them back with a parry. This won't do damage but it will stagger them, allowing you to strike them with a quick hit. Speaking of which, let's talk about hits. The game contains 2 basic strikes. The first strike is a quick strike, which does minimal damage, the second is a heavy strike. The quick strike is good if you notice your opponent isn't doing much and you want to throw in a few fast jabs. The heavy strike is best used when your opponent is staggered, and unable to defend, sometimes if you are fast you can even hit them with 2 heavies in a row. Of course the game also offers you combos, however, they don't tend to be of much use, which brings me back to my strategy of waiting, and letting them kill themselves. Combos can have different effects ranging from unblock-able, to doing heavy damage, and sometimes even causing bleeding that will drain an opponent's health. Bleeding tends to be the most useful effect as it can be stacked, meaning an opponent can bleed themselves dead.
Unfortunately, this is where For Honor's biggest problem comes in. The controls are far too sluggish. To explain: the game is a slower paced game, it does not demand fast reactions, that will get you killed quickly, it demands exact timing. If you are one with slow or fast reflexes, the combos will have no use for you. Me, for example, my button timing and reflexes is remarkably quick (years of playing RTSs and JRPGs like the Tales of Games), so quick the game misses me doing anything, and will execute my commands delayed. For example, I will tell it to combo, followed by using a guard break, strike, and dodge back. The first combo won't register due to me pressing the buttons to quickly, but each button press will register one at a time, causing my hero to more or less swing his sword around disembowelling the phantoms in the air like a drunken fool, while he gets casually slashed up by the opponent. Another example is when in a fight, being in a tough spot, and choosing to use a feat (hero talents that can affect the battle and how it'll play out). I would hit the feat but it wouldn't register, even if nothing was occurring, I usually had to hit it about five times quickly to force the game to notice I needed to heal up. Unfortunately, healing is very much not present in this game unless you can execute an enemy if you don't have it equipped in your hero abilities. This means you'll spend more time playing with heavy attacks than light ones, except when activating failed combos that result in nothing due to sluggish controls. More or less, if you have fast reflexes, you will encounter a problem in this game as you must make a conscious effort to slow down, but not too slow or you won't have any affect either. May sound like anger to the controls, but reality is, the controls are a bit clunky and difficult to work, so new comers are better to stay away from playing with the community.
This brings another problem with the game, and this one will hold it back a lot. As Ubisoft had a difficult launch with this game, there is not much of a community. The game is mostly multiplayer focused, as the single-player is there but not the strong point. Without much of a community the only ones left are skilled players that have mastered the game. This means new comers should stay away from the major aspect of the game, as you will have ZERO chance of success, sadly. Your best bet will be to stick with replaying the story over and over until you can do better, and battling in the arena against AI's mastering combos before you should try online. This, however, holds the game back as multiplayer is a major aspect, without it, more than half of the game is MIA.
Last point, as for single player, I enjoyed it. This is coming from someone who is very picky of single players and a strong believer that if a game does not have a single player, it is not worth buying (sorry MMO lovers, no story in my eyes equals a bad game with low replay-ability). You won't find yourself caring about the characters, except for the villain, and maybe the Warden (MAYBE, she is the only one who has any form of a character arc). The single-player is a run of the mill linear story, which is somewhat refreshing to see as the many open world RPGs have caused single player based games to fall away, or to have sub-par stories in favour of having you run around pointlessly. I did find myself just enjoying the story for what it was, an old school action 3 way brawl between 3 factions that would never have met in reality, bringing up the question of "what would happen if a viking, a knight, and a samurai met in an arena and attacked each other?" The story premise was great, but it seemed somewhat under used. The game talked about a great disaster that affected all 3 sides, but we barely hear of it except in the intro. Taking part in a viking raid was a fun moment, and then subsequently defending the same lands as the samurai brought joy. While it's clear Ubisoft had no plans to consider single-player as an aspect of this game, or plans for a sequel, the story here could very much evolve into something great if it was given a chance. Hopefully Ubisoft will reconsider this stance and give the story more love through DLC, to allow for exploration into these factions, or the disaster that affected the land, or even how these 3 factions came to live so near each other. I would be more than willing to see why the main villain, Apollyon, did what she did at all, where she came from, or why she called herself immortal at one point in the game. Again this story is short and not a focus in the game, but it should be. It is one filled with potential, and callbacks to history; well minor callbacks, this is not an animated history textbook. Ubisoft could easily go places with this one, especially in light of the lack of a community causing new comers to be trapped without a major aspect of the game. One minor gripe would be they needed to diversify the cast. It was odd hearing British, Nordic, and Japanese characters being played by no-name Americans celebrities. Although again, the villain, Apollyon, did stand out as the best in terms of voice acting.
Final verdict, I would recommend this game. However, keep your patience on ice, and maybe play a game of how often the controls will fail to respond causing you to die. You'll have fun when you succeed, because you feel like a mighty warrior, but not an invincible God, so when an opponent challenges you you'll see a challenge and take them seriously rather than think "heh, you'll be gone in 30 seconds". However, I do NOT recommend paying full price. As you're coming late to the party you have a huge hill to climb and won't get a lot of help. Buy this game, but buy it for sale, it's not worth the full price tag if you feel you might pull your hair out to master it, but still, I would recommend it as a buy.