The Order 1886: For King and Country.

Few games have been talked about as much as The Order 1886 has been recently and fewer still with as much derision. For some this game seems to embody everything that’s wrong with AAA development, focusing on all the wrong areas and failing to deliver the game experience that they were expecting. Others saw the potential the title had and, whilst still not heaping praise on the overall experience, had high hopes for what Ready at Dawn could do with this IP. After avoiding much of this discussion before playing The Order 1886 I’ve since dived head first into all the discussion and, frankly, don’t disagree with the more nuanced arguments out there. Still this game has its merits and trashing everything about it, like many seem keen to do, doesn’t seem fair.

You are Sir Galahad, member of the Order of the Knights of the Round Table and devout servant to your country. You are sworn to fight the half-breed blight who seeks to destroy humanity and do so with the aid of the Holy Grail which heals all wounds and greatly extends your life. Thus the order has existed for numerous centuries with many of the knights living for just as long and those who fall in battle passing on their name and title to those who follow them. However not everything is as it first seems as turmoil within London sparks an unusual reaction from your leader, prompting you to investigate further.

If there’s one game out there that should serve as the current reference point for graphics on the PlayStation4 it has to be The Order 1886. The world is lavishly detailed in every aspect, from the environments to the weapons to the character models which have some of the best animations I’ve seen to date. The seamless transitions between cut scenes and game play sections is, I’ll admit, jarring at first but after a while they beautifully melt sections together. Best of all this is done without a hint of performance degradation even in the most action heavy scenes, something which most graphical envelope pushing games fail to achieve consistently. Suffice to say that The Order 1886 is PlayStation4’s Crysis and the effort that Ready at Dawn invested in their RAD 4 engine was not wasted.

The Order 1886 tiptoes between the cinematic story and 3rd person corridor shooter genres. The bulk of the game is spent either in cut-scene or wandering around an environment which is then inter-dispersed with sections of cover-based shooting. There are numerous mini-games as well like the unique lock-picking  and the transformer overload puzzle. There are a few sections which require you to solve a puzzle in order to progress to the next section but not enough that I could say that The Order 1886 is much of a puzzler. Lastly the fabled quick time event makes numerous appearances throughout the game, sometimes blended into the 3rd person shooting sections and later as the main boss fight mechanic. If this is sounding like a jumble of mechanics without a coherent thread to tie them all together then you’re right, it is and this is why I don’t disagree with the bulk of the criticism levelled at The Order 1886.

Whilst I’m not a huge console FPS/3rd person shooter player I have played an unhealthy amount of Destiny and so I have a feel for when janky mechanics are blame rather than my lack of skill with a controller. With that in mind the combat of The Order 1886 feels decidedly half-baked as I would often line up clear head shots only to have them inexplicably miss. This is somewhat made up for by the inclusion of a bullet-time shooting mechanic but it doesn’t help when the ability is on cooldown and all your bullets seem to miss. The more innovative weapons, like the lightning gun and the thermite rifle, are a blast to use and feel far more effective than any of the other very generic weapons but they’re unfortunately highly limited. With the lack of variety of enemies this means that most encounters are largely the same, just in different locations. Had I not invested so many hours in Destiny I might’ve written this off as just me being derpy with the controller but, unfortunately for Ready at Dawn, I feel that most of the problems stem from the decidedly below average combat mechanics.

I did enjoy the mini-games which were thankfully used sparingly throughout the game, rather than being peppered everywhere like some games tend to do. They don’t take a lot of skill honestly and once you’ve done them once it’s pretty easy to finish them without even thinking about it. Unfortunately even the best of mini-games can’t make up for the faults that the larger game has as whilst they’re fun distractions that’s all they amount to, nothing more. Perhaps some of the time dedicated to these small parts of the game could have been better spent addressing some of the more pressing issues that the game faces like the lack of coherency around what it was trying to achieve.

It’s obvious that the primary goal of The Order 1886 was to make it a kind of cinematic experience, one where there’s a little less focus on game mechanics and a little more on the story and cinematography. The problem I see with this, at least in The Order 1886’s case, is that typically such cinematic games focus on player agency (or at least the illusion there of) something which it doesn’t lack. That means that it’s more apt to compare it to all the corridor shooters which, unfortunately, it can’t hold a candle to as the various combat mechanics are incredibly weak when compared to say Call of Duty titles. So The Order 1886 straddles the boundaries of these two genres, doing neither of them well and unfortunately falling in a screaming heap.

Which is a right shame because there’s a ton of potential in all the jumbled pieces that make up The Order 1886. Each of the individual pieces feel like they’d be right at home in an open world game and there’s numerous other aspects that would translate directly without too much effort. I understand that this is a non-trivial exercise however it’s clear where most of the effort was spent and it wasn’t in making sure the game was a cohesive experience. What The Order 1886 shows us is that you can’t just have a bunch of great elements all thrown together in a pile and expect the resulting game to be great, careful attention needs to be applied in the integration so the sum of the parts exceeds the whole.

The Order 1886’s story, whilst it has strong roots, fails to develop and is utterly predictable which means it doesn’t make up for the range of mistakes that the large game makes. The story follows the well trodden trope of a righteous soldier finding out he’s on the wrong side of the fight which isn’t bad on its own however The Order 1886’s telling of it is just so predictable. I called out nearly every single one of the twists long before it occurred, something which I’m not particularly good at usually. It got to the point where I was browsing Reddit most of the time cut scenes were happening since I didn’t feel the need to hear every bit of dialogue to understand the story. Again, like most of the game, there are elements in here that have tons of potential, like the setting and back stories, but they’re just not developed or cohesive enough to formulate into a solid game experience.

The Order 1886 is a victim of its own ambition, seeking to create a truly cinematic experience but ultimately falls short, failing to even deliver a coherent experience. Without a doubt its crowning achievement is its graphics, something that Ready at Dawn should be proud of, however everything built on top of that fails to achieve the same level of excellence. The combat is repetitive and clumsy, the story predictable and uninteresting and the various other bits and pieces just don’t seem to fit well into the game’s larger picture. It’s a right shame as the different parts wouldn’t be amiss in a more coherent title it’s just that The Order 1886 lacks that one thing to bind everything together. It’s worth at least spending some time with The Order 1886 just to see what the PlayStation 4 platform is capable of, maybe later when you can grab it on special.

Rating: 6/10

The Order 1886 is available on PlayStation 4 exclusively right now for $78. Total play time was approximately 6.5 hours.