You don’t have to do a lot of walking until you reach the first of many cutscenes in The Order: 1886. There’s not a lot time between them, and most of the interim is spent walking, pick up items and turning them around in your hand, shooting dudes in the face, and hitting button prompts.
This walk-and-talk drill is something you do for most of the game and it could have easily ended up both tedious and frustrating - I will, however, dare to call it “immersive” thanks to the solid line delivery of the voice actors, and the top notch dialogue writing. Conversations between characters feel natural; their relationships already established, and the world lived-in.
Together, the slow pace and the performance delivered by the actors help sell the setting and story, but unfortunately much of the game’s atmosphere and charm is lost during its many waist-high cover and horde-mode like sequences, where enemies swarm your position as you awkwardly scramble from cover to cover. The game features some form of “sticky cover” in which you have to move away from the wall to sort of “disconnect” yourself from it, which leads to some situations where you have to move out of the way quickly to dodge a grenade, but you’re unable to, because you’re stuck to the wall.
It also doesn’t help that enemies in the distance end up looking really blurry for whatever reason - I’m not sure if this is caused by graphical filters or if the game is using some dynamic resolution scaling. Either way it makes the shooting feel a bit awkward in places where you try to line up a headshot on these blurry (and almost featureless) faces.
There are times when the combat deviates from the standard formula however, such as during the more cinematic fights with werewolves where button prompts guide you through the experience. These prompts are sometimes very generous, having seemingly no effect on the outcome of the battle should you fail them, while others may cause your demise. It’s all very inconsistent and thankfully the game features some very generous check pointing should worse come to worst.
They also threw in a couple of stealth sequences which, while there aren’t that many of them, still lead me to advise you to play the game on easy if you do not want to deal with the frustration caused by the game’s stealth rules - specifically the fact that detection is a guaranteed one-hit-kill for the enemy.
But while the parts where you shoot enemies in the face is as forgettable as they come, the game shines during sequences where a bunch of dudes sit around a table and have super serious conversations about stuff. And boy is there some stuff to talk about in the game. The lore is delivered in bite sized bits over the course of the campaign, and the game slowly elaborates on what The Order is, some of their history, and their place in the world. It’s important to note however, that while some parts of the story is resolved by the end of the game, they’ve left themselves a lot of room in case they would make more games in this universe or continue the story of The Order, so the conclusion was maybe not as satisfying as I'd have hoped.
It should also be said that the game features numerous gorgeous vistas, backdrops and environments that look absolutely stunning, and while the developers have covered up a large portion of the screen using “cinematic” “black borders” (let’s assume this is an artistic choice rather than an optimization thing, yeah?) I never once noticed a drop in frame rate, which is very impressive given the visuals presented on screen and certainly something that is in stark contrast with recent console games that frequently fail to hit their target frame rate.
The Order: 1886 is an average yet playable third-person shooter that I would recommend only if it’s on sale and you’re looking for something to play on easy over a weekend and you just want to watch a bunch of dudes sit around a table and talk really seriously about Werewolves.
