Player3Podcast

By: Luke Croft

 

16 months post-release, and the PS4 is still searching for it’s first marquee exclusive. The PS3 saw games such as The Last of Us, Uncharted, God of War, and inFamous, yet other than a remaster of The Last of Us, PS4 has yet to make its exclusive mark. 

 

Enter third-person action shooter The Order: 1886. The highly anticipated title from Ready at Dawn was supposed to be PS4’s disc-based spokesman. Early showings from the game displayed a beautifully rendered, brutal, werewolf-inspired shooter with hints of Gears of War, Nikola Tesla, and a whole lot of cinema. However, in the days leading up to release, The Order fell victim to accusations that its gameplay was too short, the cutscenes too long, and the story not as gripping as the trailers would have led you to believe. 

 

After playing through the campaign in 6.5 hours, our thoughts can be summed up in two sentences; What The Order: 1886 does well, it does very well. Where it lacks, it is glaring. 

 

What it Got Right

Production Quality

You don’t need a graphically trained eye to understand and notice that The Order: 1886 executed things visually that no other console based game has been able to hold a candle to. Lighting dispersed on surfaces as if they were real, character models leapt over the Uncanny Valley straight into hyper realistic, and the maps compact linear nature meant that no visual stone was left unturned. Each object in the world was rendered with craftsman like detail whether it be the textures of a stone building, a cloud passing overhead, or a piece of furniture in a mansion. Take a quick look at any gameplay footage, and there is no denying the game is pretty.  

 

And the production quality doesn’t end with just what your eye can see. The voice acting and other audio mixing was perfectly executed. Footsteps echoed through dank tunnels, explosions carried a weightiness, and the sound effects for the voice of the Lycans were terrifying. 

 

If nothing else, The Order: 1886 is a cinematic experience conveying years of hard work from Ready at Dawn’s art team, but even the strength of this fantastically rendered world caused them to miss the mark at times. More than a couple handfuls of time, the player is asked to look over a weapon that they have been given. 15-20 seconds after twisting the new gun around as light reflected off of it in real time, the cutscene or gameplay would continue. Ready at Dawn knew they created something beautiful and they wanted you to engage intimately with that creation as often as they could make you. 

 

Weapon Creativity

Many have described The Order as steam-punk inspired, and Ready at Dawn found a very creative way to make is as such. Inspired by an alternative history in which the Knights of the Round Table employed Nikola Tesla, the weapons show a sense of imagination and brutality that really allow the gunplay to stand out. From the arc gun delivering an hellacious AC current to the victim on the receiving end to the Essex M86/FL Thermite gun, the weapon selection is sparse, but what is available is oh-so-satisfying. 

 

Where it Fell Short

Pacing

6.5 hours of gameplay may seem short to some, but the biggest issue with the game isn’t the time it takes to complete it, but the pacing of the game as you are going through. Only about half of the 6.5 hours was spent playing the game. The rest of the game was either a long (even if beautifully render) cutscene, or moving from one cutscene to another without encountering a single enemy. 

 

If I counted right, which I’m not sure if I did, there was a handful of The Order’s 16 chapters that had no actual user input in them. They were simply short films that told large chunks of the story.

 

The Order: 1886 was plagued by the fact that the gameplay itself felt like at worst an after-thought, and at best a mild inconvenience to what could’ve been a pretty epic 5 hour CGI film if the market would have allowed it to be. 

 

The game felt micro-managed and monotonous after a time with it. Stealth missions were laborious tasks of learning the enemies movement and dying several times in order to get it right. Gun fights were all basically felt the same - kill a couple snipers, shoot a couple shotgunners, and then take out all of the riflemen. QTEs, although present in many games, made their way into some of the most head-scratching places in the game. Where most people would expect an epic boss battle, The Order put a scripted QTE fight in its place.

 

Overall, the time with a controller in my hand felt uninspired while all of the cutscenes left me wishing they’d have poured that kind of effort into the actual gameplay. 

 

Story (Spoilers ahead)

All of the production quality screamed that the story was well-written, but the beautiful wrapping paper covered over the fact that the actual gift was just kind of mediocre. 

 

I’ve debated back and forth whether or not there is a likable character in The Order 1886. Collectors editions of the game were being sold with a statue of Galahad being attacked by a Lycan, and after playing the game I almost hope that monster succeeds. Galahad was flat throughout the story showing no realistic relatable attributes. His nobility and honor were supposed to be his redeeming qualities, but they just felt overplayed. His story was archetypal, and his plight has been experienced time and time again in literature, television, film, and video games. He felt almost like a caricature and I felt no closer to knowing him when I finished as I did when I began. 

 

The overarching story was incredibly predictable and cliche. The Order has been fighting half-breeds. A couple of them uncover a secret that they should not know. They confide in a group of people they think they can trust while partnering with some shady people to get to the bottom of it. The group they trusted uses their relationship with the shady group to frame them only to discover that The Order knew about it all along. Overplayed, overplayed, overplayed. Within the first 3 chapters one of our viewers on twitch said “Lucan (one of the Knights) better not turn out to be a Lycan. I mean, his name literally means werewolf.” 

 

We are sorry, viewer. RAD did it. They told one of the most overtold stories in literary history, “The ones we trust are the ones with the darkest secrets”, and thought the audience dumb enough to not even place it under a veil in the beginning. 

 

So after our time with The Order it is safe to say that the game is beautiful, but that is about where the compliments end. The story, gameplay, and pacing leave much to be desired. We are no longer doing review scores here at P3P, but suffice it to say, this is not the marquee exclusive that PS4 has been waiting for.