Offering a realistic and incredibly deep system of melee combat, For Honor has the guts of the most complex of fighting games, but crammed inside the frame of a third-person action experience and skinned with a variety of ancient cultures.

However, if you're the not the kind of gamer who wants to commit dozens of hours online to testing your mettle against other players around the world, there might not be a lot here for you.

As well-realised and pretty as the world of For Honor is, the narrative set-up is little more than an excuse to get a variety of cool old-timey warriors (knights, vikings, samurai) into a situation where they can fight each other.

Following a cataclysmic world event European knights, Nordic vikings and Asian samurai find themselves all occupying the same land mass and fight for eons for control of land and resources. In For Honor, the warlord Apollyon seeks to manipulate all three factions into perpetual war.

This story is played out in the game's campaign mode, which offers ample opportunity to learn the ins and outs of combat but — with repetitive scenarios and not-real-convincing characters — it's clearly not the main focus of the experience.

Battling online in a variety of modes is what this game's all about, and fans of fighting games and other competitive online combat will find a very deep hole to fall into. Each of the 12 warrior types is different, and knowing both yourself and the enemy is key to success as you chain or block attacks that can come from either side or straight for your head while blocking, feinting, throwing and more.

While the amount of content can be intimidating, there is plenty of opportunity for practice and trial runs against AI to practice your techniques, which makes me wonder why the story mode even exists.

I had a great deal of fun learning and getting better by constantly throwing my own strategies against intelligent, human opponents, but For Honor eventually lost me because it doubles down on the two things that I always struggle with in online combat.

Firstly, fights against superior opponents can be frustrating and disheartening (worse here because some modes allow you to end up facing a whole group of adversaries solo). And secondly, the entire thing is underpinned by an incredibly frugal economy that makes it difficult to just play a bit here and there and still progress.

For Honor is out now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.​