11. Vermintide 2

Battle chaos with friends at your side

There are plenty of epic adventures that start off with a quest to kill a few giant rats, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 takes that amateur quest and jams a syringe of Chaos God power into it. Cities are crumbling, diseased, and overrun by Skaven (rat-folk) as you are launched on an epic to interject in the plans of said Chaos God. This game feels like a tabletop RPG built within a 3D universe; you take control of a single-hero within a party and venture fourth, vanquishing the unclean and creating bonds along the way.

Vermintide 2 brings hard-hitting first-person combat to a traditionally top-down system and snatches you away from turn-based combat. No auto-targeting or scripted combat here, you will face your opponents in real-time and work to perfect offense and defense. While this proves to be an excellent title for single-player, the developers went a step further and implemented multiplayer allowing up to four players to enter the game playing one of the five possible classes. What’s better than dungeon crawling than doing so with your compatriots?

What stands out:

• Five heroes. Fifteen career paths
• Four player coop experience

Choose Your Hero

Square off against hellish foes

10. For Honor

Rank amongst the strongest champions during war-torn times

For Honor is a third-person melee which drops you in the boots of an elite warrior shedding blood and making widows for the sake of your homeland. You will have the opportunity to play three heavily inspired classes: a knight, a samurai, or a Viking. Ultimately, this game is a competitive arena brawler focused on tactical combat and objective capturing. Each “class” has several sub-classes allowing freedom to customize and play as you like and makes every successful build feel like personal accomplishment.

You play For Honor for the grueling dogfights versus other players and there is no lack of variety. The roster has grown to eighteen unique warriors each with their own equipment and abilities which will keep you charging the battlefield time and time again for a rematch. One-on-one duels are by far the most entertaining, but the game does offer five other game modes such as Dominion or Tribute where you are far more likely to be ganked the second you pick a fight. What’s more, Ubisoft has just announced a new faction to the game: the Wu Lin.

While the game is gorgeous and madly entertaining, it is known to be full of glitches and a fair amount of balancing issues. For a casual player, these issues are not glaring enough to be a total turn off but I would be wary of becoming too invested.

What stands out:

• Unique warriors to master
• Innovative battle control system

Dying For Honor

Clashing For Honor

9. Mordhau

Master medieval combat

Fans of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare may already be familiar with this crowdfunded game, Mordhau is set to be released sometime later this year and has billed itself as a medieval combat centric game focusing on massive open battles including siege equipment and mounted combat. Each player will be able to personalize their combatant right down to the boots on their feet allowing you to develop a combat style and identity unique to you. The developers went through numerous prototyping phases as they worked to balance combat and make sure that it felt smooth and devastating. Hits carry weight and you will often see your death coming just before the strike lands.

As of right now, the community for the game is surprisingly honorable in that players tend to salute one another to signify they would like to enter a duel. Of course, you will get players that either ignore this system or hold no respect for it but, for the most part, people seem to be genuinely interested in chivalrous duels. Here is to hoping that the community remains much the same after the game is finally released.

You will spend hours perfecting you combat against countless players and maybe even come to know some players by name or their presence on the battlefield. It is refreshing to see a melee combat game that provides progression via learning the techniques rather than dropping loot boxes and power-ups at your feet.

What stands out:

• Skill-based, free-form combat
• Massive 64 player battles

Gripping and difficult combat

Open battle field for you to conduct epic duels