For Honor closed alpha

I got an invite for the For Honor closed alpha on PS4 this weekend (9/15-9/18). I've been mildly interested in this after I heard Aim Assist Gaming discuss it on their E3 recap podcast. I'm not sure what to expect but I'll give it a try. I didn't see anything about a NDA, so I'll post up some thoughts afterwards, assuming by don't have me sign off on an NDA after downloading it.

Played a little bit of this this afternoon and it feels like a mix between Dynasty Warriors and domination from COD, BF or any other shooter, but that being said I only played he 4v4 dominion mode and didn't get into the 1v1 duel or 2v2 brawl modes.  

When you start, you pick which faction you wish to play for: knights, samurais, or Vikings.  I haven't seen any difference between them, as the game says your faction doesn't affect which hero you can play.  After selecting your faction, you go thru a quick training on how to enter and adjust your stance, how to block and parry, how to attack and how to dodge and roll from combat. From there you go into a brief dominion match against AI to see how that game mode plays.  

After the training, you can start playing the MP modes (campaign wasn't open).  Before picking your mode, you can customize the 3 heros (1 for each faction) outfit and emblem.  This includes colors, designs, and such to create a shield and markings on your outfit.  I played for the Knights and played the initial knight hero, so this may be different for the samurais and Vikings.  

Once you're set on making your emblem and marking up your character, you can pick the game type: 1v1 duel, 2v2 brawl and 4v4 dominon.  From what I saw, duel is either matchmade or private and brawl and dominon are matchmade or vs AI.  I think for brawl and dominion you can party up and go in, but I'm not positive.  

Dominon matches start with the four heros from your team starting in a neutral location on the opposite side of one of three maps from your opponents.  You then have A and C points that are on the left and right sides of the map.  These points are taken by one or more players from a side occupying the area for a short time with no enemy players in the area.  

The middle point, B, is the frontline and has to be taken in a different fashion.  At the start, both teams have grunts that are in the middle mixing it up.  In order to take B, your team has to kill enough grunts to force the opposing team's grunts to their side of area, or basically push the frontline to the opponents side of B area.  The grunts are 1-hit kills, but they do swarm and they can nickel and dime your health enough to give an opposing hero an edge over you.

During the matches, your player can either be revived or you can respawn after a spawn timer (about 10-15 sec).  You can do this an unlimited number of times until the game gets into the final phase, during which players can't respawn and can only be revived.  

I haven't completely figured out scoring, but teams get 100 points for taking a point and you lose 100 points for losing one.  I'm not sure how much you get for maintaining one.  You also get points for kills (including 1 point/frontline grunt killed), but I'm not sure if you lose points for dying.  Once a team reaches 1k points for a set period of time, the game moves to the final phase.  The game ends when one team is completely killed and the winning team is the one with the most points, not necessarily the one that didn't get completely killed.  

After the matches, players are awarded XP, gold, and a chance at getting loot to ugrade your character.  My one gripe about the game is that you can't customize or upgrade your character's gear unless you leave the match.  This isn't a huge deal, but this would be something I'd like to see changed before the beta, even if it's just a small like 20-30 sec window.

When you upgrade your gear, you can buy bundles that have 2, 3, 4, etc. pieces to use for your character and you can use what you loot from the battlefield.  You can equip a helm, chestpiece, and then create a sword from various blades, handles, and guards (unsure if this is the same for the samuaris and Vikings).  If you don't want an item or have duplicates, they can be broken down for XP or they can be worked into another piece of gear to improve its stats.  I didn't do much of this, but it seems similar to what destiny does, except I think you can infuse any item into any other item.  

Well, I think that's about all I've got from what I've played.  The game was entertaining, but I'm not sure how much I would play a full version.  I'm interested to see campaign, if there's more heroes (there are two from each faction, but I don't think you can play the second one at the start), and whether or not you can run your heros in campaign and MP and then back again.  

Overall the game was entertaining and would probably be a good time with more practice on the block/parry/attack system and I could definitely have some fun running with 3 friends.  The only issue I had was the lack of character customization between matches, but that's not terrible.  I'm not sure if I'll get back to it during the alpha, but I'm interested to see the beta and what they package in the final game.