The Order: 1886 is the Kim Kardashian of games, fun to look at, but not a whole lot going on under the hood. Ready At Dawn’s cinematic 3rd person shooter is everything you would expect from a console launch title. It’s short, it’s gorgeous, and it does a great job of showing off the hardware it was designed for. It’s a shame the game’s about a year too late to make a splash.
The Order: 1886 tells the story of an ancient order of knights residing in an alternate history version of London. Originally headed up by the famous King Arthur, The Order’s responsibility is to keep the world safe from a collection of vampires and lycans (referred to as half breeds) polluting the world. They have largely failed at this responsibility up until a surge of technological innovations finally turned the tides of war against the half breeds. You play as Sir Galahad whose normal monster killing day to day life is disrupted when his good friend Sir Perceval begins to defy direct orders from his superiors, stirring a proverbial pot for everyone.
Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat, The Order: 1886 is easily the best looking game on any next gen console to date. Of course looking good has its costs, the game runs at 30 FPS and Ready At Dawn did have to add some “cinematic” black bars to the top and bottom of the screen just to get that far. And while we can complain all day about not hitting 60 FPS, it’s hard to ignore what an achievement The Order’s visuals are, especially from a studio who up until now had primarily been making PSP and Wii games. The Evil Within was saddled with bars and 30 FPS and it looks about half as good as The Order.
When the game’s not relaying its story to you traditional gameplay arrives in the form of cover based shooting. Is it any good? Eh, sometimes. Combat can be fun enough, but there are a lot of times where I grew particularly frustrated with the cover elements themselves. It’s not uncommon for Galahad to fail to snap to cover or become unsnapped when you don’t want him to. I found plenty of tall flat items in the environment that I would have really liked to take cover behind that simply never allowed it. The shooting itself feels fine, aiming is solid, the weapons are often creative and fun to shoot, and the game makes it nice and easy to see when you’ve successfully killed an opponent. Perhaps the most egregious gameplay quirk to me is the game’s insistence that I hold down triangle whenever I want to pick up ammo.
There’s more to The Order than just shooting, but almost everything that’s been added in on top of it feels half cocked. Lockpicking is probably the most fleshed out bonus activity, but there’s also a small minigame to be played when sabotaging electronic equipment, and some ill-advised (and mandatory) stealth sections. You may also find yourself picking up and examining objects, rotating them in your hand LA Noire style, be it a gun, an apple, or a photograph of some old men, the feature just ultimately feels like a way to pass the time.
Much has been said already about the game’s brief runtime and unfortunately it looms over the entire presentation. Every unskippable cutscene, or meaningless object examination session will make you wonder if it’s there because it actually mattered, or because the developer just wanted to pad out the runtime. I’m fairly certain the game runs at about 6 hours but all I have are my own time estimates to go off of.
The unskippable cutscenes become particularly painful when you get stuck. Even just getting into position for combat feels like it takes forever, and if you’re having trouble getting past a particularly tough encounter you may also get frustrated with the amount of time it takes to simply get back into the action and start again after you die. To make matters worse the game makes liberal use of QTEs so you’re oftentimes not even safe while watching some of the lengthy cutscenes. I don’t mind long story bits, I do mind having to repeat long story bits because I wasn’t holding the controller when a knife fight broke out.
The game’s plot has its own set of problems. There’s plenty of clumsy dialogue and exposition and that’s to say nothing of the overall story structure that follows every cliche beat it can think of. If you’ve seen more than two movies in your lifetime you will almost certainly be able to predict every character death and betrayal long before they happen on screen. I’m not saying a game’s plot has to surprise me all the time but when its made up of 50% cutscenes it would be nice to see something that pushes story boundaries just a little bit.
Perhaps no story element is more disappointing than our main character, Galahad. Galahad is a walking corpse with a mustache, a Sprite soda in character form, he may as well be a lead in a post AC2 Assassin’s Creed game. By the time he shows any real emotion or personality it’s too late, you don’t care anymore. It’s too bad too because The Order’s setting is particularly intriguing to me. You can tell a lot of love and care went into designing the world in which the game takes place, but Galahad’s story ultimately falls flat in a lot of ways.
By the end of the game very little of its main conflict has been resolved. In fact The Order can’t even make it all the way through the credits before it inserts a final scene to presumptuously tantalize you with its unannounced sequel. Had The Order felt more complete by the time it wrapped up I might have been inclined to raise the score a bit but ultimately the developer’s attempt to excite me just left me more bitter that I paid $60 for an incomplete experience.
There’s so much stuff out right now to spend your money on. If we were back in 2013 and there were 3 games for the Playstation 4 I’d probably recommend The Order but as it stands right now there’s way too much other stuff worth your time and money. If the setting and theme feels like your thing then find a way to rent or borrow the game, I can almost guarantee that you’ll be feeling buyer’s remorse otherwise.
