The Order 1886 Review
Throughout the last console generation, first party published Playstation 3 exclusives kept that console afloat. They were the reason why the PS3 was my preferred console and it was a rarity for any of them to be less than great. The Last Of Us, the Uncharted series, Journey, Puppeteer, the Rachet And Clank entries, the triplet of Resistance games, the Pixeljunks, God Of War 3, and Little Big Planet. All amazing. So, it's been rather strange that since the release of the Playstation 4, the exclusives have been consistently lacking. Now, The Order 1886 releases in the same state - rather quite decent, but stumbling in multiple places.
The first, and most noticeable, thing about The Order is its presentation values. It's aesthetic is spot on. A stroll around any part of any level looks and feels like nineteenth century London. Smoke stacks litter the smoggy skyline and cobbled streets wrap tightly around the poorer houses with ornate decorations defining richer abodes. The game captures the oppressive and the extravagant sides of a city in the midst of an industrial revolution. The characters, their clothes, every minute detail surrounding them is beautiful. Ready At Dawn has crafted a game universe crammed with magnificent minutia.
Of course, it helps that The Order 1886 is a technical marvel as well. It runs flawlessly. The physics are spot on. Never a dropped frame or a torn pixel. Even the cutscenes and gameplay run together seamlessly. It's bolstered by the fact that the game runs in the letterbox throughout meaning that Ready At Dawn can reach the filmic appearance they were looking for as well as getting away with rendering less onscreen. The icing on the cake is the voice acting and score - both of which are excellent and fitting.
However, that's where many of my positive notes about The Order 1886 end. The rest of the aspects that make up the game are perfectly fine, but just don't quite feel right.
The Order follows Sir Grayson Galahad, member of an old order of knights who sit around a big old round table just like the Arthurian legend. Galahad, along with his fellow knights, protect the rest of humanity from half-man half-werewolf creatures. There is also a conspiracy rife in Whitechapel as the United India Company seem to be up to something dodgy, some rebels are causing a ruckus, and the half-breeds are getting more and more boisterous. It's a really interesting set-up, except that I had zero idea what was going on until a few hours in. A story, especially one with so many factions and sci-fi elements, needs just a little exposition so the player doesn't feel totally lost.
And while the game doles out its story slow and reasonable steady, The Order doesn't exactly have a steady pace with handling its gameplay. It's actually downright atrocious. You flit between short cutscenes, long shooting sections, then spend 15 minutes walking around before getting a long cutscene with quick-time events that come out of nowhere. There are whole chapters of the game that don't even let you touch the controller, others that have you just walk, and others that seem to be a fifth of the length of the game. There are no peaks and valleys in the how the game delivers its content, which again makes the whole experience just feel, like, off.
Half the game is made up of your standard third person shooting. Duck behind cover, L2 to aim, R2 to shoot. It works totally fine. The actual shooting feels reasonably tight and in most encounters there are multiple places to attack from and numerous weapons to attack with. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and sniper rifles - all great - but where the game gets exciting are the science weapons. For example, the thermite rifle lets you spray liquid explosive over the battlefield and set it on fire with a flare. Awesome, right? Well, you only get to use it once. Same goes for the gun that shoots lightning. You don't miss those weapons and you'll get on fine until you get your hands on one for five minutes before it's ripped away. It's nothing short of disappointing.
The rest of your time with The Order will be made up from walking - rather slowly - around the fantastically beautiful levels picking things up, and then putting them down again. Some of the time, it adds to the narrative of the world, other times it shows off the flashy animation, other times you are just walking for the sake of moving from place to place. It's that part that's boring, it's the same reason why you don't ever see Jack Bauer take a piss.
Then there are the stealth sections, which involve timed stabbings and instant failure, and the handful of sections where you fight the half-breed Lycans. Both sections are fine in themselves, but just feels out of place. Instant failure in sections with bad checkpointing is utterly frustrating taking the stealth sections from a nice break in the action to an exercise in annoyance. The fights with the Lycans are again frustrating and make the half-breeds feel like a joke when they should be nightmare inducing. Even the two fights with the "big-daddy" Lycans boil down to nothing more than a quick time event. One of those fights is the final boss fight making it a repeat of a fight that happened in hour 2 - which is plain insulting. The problem with any change in the gameplay is that they are half-baked and inserted so fragrantly that they just vex and bring the experience down.
The Order 1886 is, to put it simply, a great starting point that is begging to be expanded upon. The characters and universe are so interesting, but nothing is really made from them. Most of the moment to moment gameplay is solid but just needs to be added to. There is a great game that some will enjoy playing through, I know I did, it's just buried under a mound of bad choices. But really, the biggest crime The Order 1886 commits is the biggest crime of all, it adds up to be wholly unsatisfying.
