The Order: 1886
The Order: 1886 offers little nuance or creativity to an old formula, just a fresh coat of paint.
The Order: 1886 might be the best looking game I’ve seen running on a current generation console. The characters are life-like and very responsive in and out of cut-scenes. The environments are incredibly well detailed down to the writing on the back of photographs. Victorian-era London is very well realized. The city is dirty and hazy from the enveloping smog of nearby factories. The streets are littered with trash and drunk vagabonds. While it may not be an ideal place to live, it is fantastic to look at. I wish I could give such high praise to anything else in this game though.
Set in an alternate Victorian London, The Order throws the player into the boots of Sir Galahad. A knight of King Arthur’s still present Round Table. Galahad and his crew are tasked with hunting and capturing werewolf style half-breeds. As promising as that set-up is, the story never delivers. Half-breeds are not even the The Order’s main enemy, as the game initially implies. Half-breeds are seen rarely and are few in number. The majority of the game Galahad is fighting a rebellion faction whose motivations are even less fleshed out than his own. It’s the old story of a good knight in a corrupt world. The narrative is very rote and predictable. The twists are expected and the writing is boring. So much of this game is boring. The game’s cut-scenes are at many times reminiscent of an uninspiring political thriller. Characters pulling rank on each other and trying to convince the other that they know best. Most of the cut-scenes end up being two actors trying to “out act” each other and question why the other won’t trust them. Also Jack the Ripper is lazily thrown in as a plot point that means nothing.
The Order: 1886 is a by-the-numbers third person cover based shooter. Most enemy encounters take place in open areas with knee-high cover to shoot from. The majority of weapons are pretty standard. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, grenades, the usual sort. However there are a few specialty weapons. Friend of the Order, Nikola Tesla, has made some electrically powered gadgets like a gun that shoots lightning. The few Tesla weapons in the game are fun to use and add some needed variety, but those weapons are few and far between. Whenever you do you a Tesla weapon, it is usually for a short time, like one or two engagements before the game decides you have to switch weapons or you ran out of ammo. Nearly every gunfight is like this. Now while you're killing foes a cool down is building up that triggers a sort of bullet time, called Blackwater. Since it requires a lock-on, it becomes little more than a slow way to dump ammo. I imagine it was added to help poorly-skilled players in outmatched gunfights, but the game isn’t hard, at least not on the normal recommended difficulty. So I usually just forgot that Blackwater was there and seldom used it. The non gunfight missions are slow and tedious stealth sections. These consist of hiding behind cover to learn a guard’s predictable pathing and then slowly crouch-walk behind him and press a button to take him down. These stealth missions are stealth only. If you get spotted during these missions the game auto-fails you and you must restart from the lackluster checkpoints. This kind of gameplay was fine in 2006 when cover shooters were novel, but a lot of third person shooters have come out since then and iterated. The Order does not, and it ends up coming across rather stale and rudimentary.
The only other mechanic other than quick time-events, which are just quick time events, nothing more to say there are the manipulated objects in the environment. The Order’s environments look astonishing and highly detailed. So much so that the game wants you to revel in the fact that you can read the words on an in-game newspaper. While it is neat to look at an object in the environment and admire the amount of sheer detail, it gets old fast. At many points in the campaign a photograph or shiny item is placed on a table to pick up and look at closer. After a while the trick just gets old but there are so many of them. The actual gameplay here is just twisting the character’s wrist. While this is mostly optional, it is still a very frequent mechanic. And the few times you are required to do it, it just seems silly in the middle of a gunfight.
The game took me about six hours to complete. Which to me doesn’t seem too much shorter than a lot of campaigns out there, but with no multiplayer or any real replayability, of a lackluster game already, full price might be a little too much to ask a consumer. This game is very pretty and a competent game, but it is both boring and not that fun to play. If you really want to see this game in it’s full glory rent it or watch a friend play it.
