The Order: 1886

The Order: 1886 is difficult not to play, but to analyse. On one hand there is an uncompromising artistic vision, coupled with spectacular visual fidelity and political and social undertones; on the other there is a bland third-person shooter buried under monotonous quicktime events and stale level design. The Order is a tough cookie to crack indeed. By now the controversy surrounding the length of the game has reached a critical point: the Internet shattered the hype surrounding the title due to a single Youtube play through, in which the game is revealed to be five hours long (I finished the game in just under seven). This revelation crushed any excitement the game had surrounding it, and the web is still burning with the flames of discontent. It really is a shame because the experience is decent, but unfortunately there isn’t enough of The Order to go around. This is a game I wanted to love, but at every turn I was handed disappointment.

Gunplay in The Order is standard cover-based third-person shooting, nothing more. It feels a little like Gears of War, switching between cover, popping your head out briefly to lay suppressing fire only to scurry back behind protection. Sadly, the combat isn’t anywhere near as satisfying as Gears. Here the battlefield is reduced to linear narrow areas with only one path through, melee combat is stripped down to a single button press, and the eccentric armaments that truly elevate the shooting are few and far between. Entire chapters of this game are cutscenes, and if the devs simply made the guns more accessible or even sprinkled in a few more the game could have been much stronger. Notably, the arc gun and the thermite gun are the most devastating to wield, temporarily lifting the stale aura of the dated gameplay. There are only three lazy enemy designs: the standard soldier, the specialist, and the Lycan. They will respectively stay behind cover and lean out momentarily to get a shot at you, bum-rush your location with an eccentric weapon and blast you out of cover, and —most disappointing of all— charge at you with a button icon hovering over their head prompting you to dodge-roll to the side. All of this simply doesn’t work as well as Ready At Dawn would have hoped and it gives me the impression that the studio took more care to illustrate the visual detail rather than design an intelligent class of opponent for the player to surmount. 

Also there is the illusion of platforming, wherein the player is guided through a lame attempt at shimmying across ledges, bounding over gaps and climbing over obstacles. Reminiscent of the Uncharted series only in looks, the platforming is the most shallow aspect of the gameplay failing to meet the minimal expectations as to what platform navigation in a video game should be. This is abysmally disrespectful to me as a gamer because I simply relish a challenge and 1886 surprisingly did not deliver. To be fair I did die a fair number of times but at no point did I have to seriously rethink my strategy or reconsider what weapons I picked up and which ones I left, if you are looking for adversity you will find none in The Order. This is most prevalent in the final boss fight, which is a blatant rehash of a fight earlier in the game. I could forgive it, but these are the only two times in the game that you play out a fight in this manner. If it was a type of fight you’d be having every now and again, only to have the granddaddy of that style of fight as the final boss it could have gone much further in Ready At Dawn’s favour; however it comes across as lazy. Overall there is a lot of room for improvement; simply adding a generic physical attack and block dynamic would have burst open the floodgates on The Order’s depth. 

The largest (and only) redeeming quality The Order: 1886 possesses is its presentation. Story, sound design, score, plot, acting and most obviously photorealistic graphical prowess are some of the finest you will encounter in any game. The story, while painfully rife with platitudes, still gets the job done and at least makes me care enough to resent the gameplay for being so dreary. I will praise the developers for what they got right, and while the story is a rundown retelling of an old chestnut, the emotion behind the actors is what really brings the world of The Order to life. Galahad is a badass with a tough-as-nails British accent and he’s going to kill every half breed in London, “of that you can be sure”. The best narrative bits are the ones relating to the era; Jack the Ripper, Nikola Tesla and the Order of Knights themselves each nod to their real life counterparts in a very peculiar way, the kind of way that leaves you wondering about a sequel, something that I’m very open to. Ready At Dawn would do well to make a sequel continuing the plight of Sir Galahad, hopefully breathing new life into the shallow gameplay dynamics they set out in this title. 

The augmented historical drama is a proven formula. Metal Gear Solid, Assassin’s Creed and many other franchises have found success in twisting history to suit the game’s narrative and The Order couldn’t have found a better setting than steampunk London in 1886. The lowrise nature of the Victorian architecture lends itself well to The Order‘s art direction. You feel enthralled by the city even if you can only walk down a certain alleyway in any given chapter, and there is a general sense of realism, or at least as much as is necessary to facilitate the tone. 

The Order: 1886 is an unusual game, stomping on so many tropes video games currently perpetuate, and creating problems in their wake. Ready At Dawn’s first endeavour on the PS4 certainly will not go unnoticed; hopefully they have the chance to rectify the situation and build upon the mediocre yet solid foundation laid out for them in a sequel. Until then The Order will remembered as a subpar shooting game mixed with a great HBO-like miniseries.