The Order: 1886 Review

By Brandin Tyrrel Feb. 19, 2015

Though absolutely gorgeous and wonderfully atmospheric, The Order: 1886 is a deeply conflicted thing. Even more than its secret battle against the monsters of legend, The Order’s greatest struggle is ultimately its own internal tug-of-war between telling a beautifully presented story and granting the level of interactivity we've come to expect from a game. In the end, a lopsided commitment to perfecting style and plot comes at the cost of sluggish pacing, a look-but-don't-touch world, and paint-by-numbers gunplay.

On the surface, that approach pays off. The Order is thick with exquisitely detailed environments that showcase the grand opulence of London built atop poverty-stricken slums. It’s populated by characters that are generally well-developed, motivated, and believable. And there’s a concerted effort to extend that fantastic polish into a seamless experience, merging gameplay with its many lengthy cutscenes as it delivers a generally good historical-fantasy story.
In seven hours in developer Ready At Dawn’s alternate version of London, I rubbed elbows with historical figures like legendary inventor Nikola Tesla, who serves as the The Order’s gadget guy. His involvement allows for fantastic Victorian super-weapons that never were: the Arc Gun, the Thermite Rifle, and the bazooka-like Shoulder Cannon. I investigated the dealings of the famed East India Company, and heard stories of a new serial killer called Jack the Ripper. And I did all this as the strong and reserved Sir Galahad, a member of The Order – the Victorian-era incarnation of the Knights of the Round Table. By pulling these threads from history and myth, The Order: 1886 weaves an engaging and convincing patchwork of historical fiction that I want to spend time in. But I was genuinely surprised when the story abruptly ended – leaving multiple characters and secondary arcs dangling in the wind in an obvious sequel setup. It left me wanting to know what’s next for this world.

However, maintaining its scripted, linear storytelling means that when The Order must relinquish control outside of combat, it does so only enough to allow for the most basic of interactions with its world. Between lengthy cutscenes, there are long periods of restrained movement where you’re meant to simply walk, taking in the sights and listening to character dialog. It’s an issue that’s somewhat mitigated by the fact The Order: 1886 is just so damn polished, so there is plenty to keep the eye occupied, but this too suffers from diminishing returns as the super-scripted segments strip you of any freedom. Constantly being ripped from gameplay to cutscene to restrained walking segment back to cutscene is a pervasive whiplash of false starts.

Even when you’re specifically instructed to touch something, there’s rarely a moment of interactivity that isn’t expressed with a quick-time event. They’re at their best when you’re trading slashes with hulking monsters – where slow reactions or imprecision will find you watching Galahad’s throat ripped out in some impressive horror-movie gore. But these moments are the exception, rather than the rule, and most of it is simply pushing carts, pulling ropes, turning levers, or flipping over carts to climb ledges or continue down the set path.

When a quick-time event won’t do, we’re pushed into disappointingly generic cover-based shooting and stealth segments against equally generic, human enemies. And though these sequences are certainly interactive, The Order: 1886 does little to elevate them beyond their most basic elements. The encounters in which you actually fight the monsters that are billed as such a large part of the game are dwarfed by those in which you’re simply whack-a-mole shooting goons. I lost count of the times I traded small-arms fire with waves of hapless guards and fodder until an ally says “That’s all of them,” and it was time to move on.

Cover shooting falls into the old comfort zone where lining up the camera and popping out to kill an enemy becomes a rinse-and-repeat cycle of near invulnerability thanks to your vial of Blackwater – The Order’s secret serum you can drink (via a quick-time event) to revive yourself from the verge of death. While the weapons look great and pack some creative punch, it’s unfortunate we’re not given a lot of interesting tactical situations to shoot our way out of.

Though it’s not especially challenging, the whole process of shooting is made more annoying by the ever-present black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. They're intended to create a letterboxed, “cinematic” look. But when I was behind cover, I was much more interested in being able to see what was happening in my limited vertical screen space than having a wider aspect ratio. That frustration led me to avoid crouching behind cover as much as possible, which in turn led to the majority of my deaths occurring when I left cover looking for insta-kill, quick-time melee takedowns.

Rare fights against werewolves are absolutely the best parts of The Order’s action, mostly because their hit-and-run attacks are fast and less predictable than trading shots with the cookie-cutter guard, shotgunner, or sniper. Unfortunately, the knights of The Order are part-time monster hunters at best.

The Verdict

The basic conflict at the heart of The Order: 1886 is that considerations for a cinematic approach are prioritized above the needs of basic gameplay. Its best aspects are its stunning looks, atmosphere, and style – which are truly fantastic – and entertaining fiction. But the shallow, slow, and generic quick-time event-riddled gameplay make it feel like an experience that would've been better served by a non-interactive movie than a game. With no multiplayer, and no reason to revisit the short and stunted single-player campaign once it’s been completed, there just isn’t a lot to it.

Review by IGN