Should you buy For Honor's Marching Fire expansion for Xbox One?

The Marching Fire expansion for Ubisoft's unique medieval fighting game, For Honor, adds a brand new player-versus-environment mode (PvE) called Arcade, as well as four new heroes from a new faction into the game. However, since none of the heroes are exclusive to the expansion and cost 15,000 "Steel" for everyone, you're only paying for faster access to them, which makes the amount of content you get for $30 feel lackluster overall.

For Honor: Marching Fire is an expansion that, despite bringing forth a great new mode, fails to justify its steep price tag.

Pros:

• Arcade is fantastic for casual players
• New heroes fit seamlessly into the For Honor roster
• Cheaper than buying heroes separately

Cons:

• You can grab the heroes without paying anything by grinding
• Not a great amount of exclusive content for $30
• Difficulty of Arcade spikes oddly

The good: Arcade, new heroes

The best thing about For Honor: Marching Fire is the brand new Arcade mode, where you (and a friend, if you choose) can team up against AI enemies in a five round gauntlet run. In each round, you have to face different opponents in a randomized environment, with randomized buffs or debuffs. For example, one round I experienced while playing was having to fight two foes, both of them buffed with a fire perk that caused their attacks to light my character aflame on successful hits. I was not completely alone, though, as the game spawned me a small squad of NPC bots that I could throw opponents into and let them do some damage for me.

This scenario is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of the different modifiers and situations that you can experience in Arcade, and I found that the randomness and unique challenge of each new round made the gameplay feel dynamic and thus, more enjoyable. What's more, the progression in Arcade is seamlessly tied into the multiplayer, meaning you can level heroes up in Arcade and then take them into player-versus-player (PvP).

Lastly, the four new Chinese heroes, called the Wu Lin, bring awesome new types of playstyles to For Honor. Between the hookblade-wielding Nuxia, the polearm masters called the Jiang Jun, the dao blade adepts called the Tiandi, and the warrior-monk Shaolin, For Honor: Marching Fire is filled with a solid handful of characters to master.

The bad: Lack of exclusive content, Arcade difficulty spikes

The worst thing about Marching Fire, and the thing that makes me think you should hold off on it for now, is that none of the new heroes are exclusive to a purchase of this expansion. This means that, on October 30, everyone who owns For Honor will be able to access these new heroes, not just owners of Marching Fire. While it's arguable that this is a good thing overall for the game, I think it's an extremely good reason not to buy this expansion. If new heroes are what you're into, then it might be more cost-effective to save up that Steel.

Arcade is fantastic, but I don't think one mode alone would ever be worth paying half the game's original retail price for. It's also important to note that there's a very odd difficulty spike with Arcade that will probably turn some players off. Most difficulty systems increase the challenge gradually as you select harder modes, but Arcade goes from being moderately difficult to extremely so in just one step up from standard difficulty. This is rather jarring if you're a player that likes to play at lower settings first to learn a mode, and then slowly work your way up the difficulty ladder.

Should you buy For Honor: Marching Fire?

For Honor: Marching Fire adds brand new heroes and an excellent new PvE mode to the game, but due to the fact Arcade isn't perfect and that you'll be able to get the heroes for 15,000 Steel in the base game, earned by playing. I strongly recommend waiting to buy Marching Fire for now. Arcade is excellent and is worth purchasing, but not for $30. If you're a new player however, the Marching Fire Edition below will afford you all of the game's previous content, as well as all the new stuff here.

Alternative option

While the expansion itself is lackluster, a good idea if you haven't gotten For Honor already is to buy the new For Honor: Marching Fire Edition. This edition of the game includes both the base game and all the content in the expansion for the same price the game originally launched at: $60. This makes the Marching Fire Edition the perfect option for new players.