QCF: The Order: 1886

t’s safe to say that gaming is continually reaching new levels of spectacle and showmanship, and that next plateau of tech is never too far out of reach as the medium advances; it’s just too bad that the medium has a ways to go when it comes to expanding upon new concepts and ideas that are afforded by the advancement.

Ready At Dawn’s The Order: 1886 is a perfect example of how to squander such an opportunity—a technical achievement in presentation and production that’s sadly held back by an antiquated sense of design.

I’m fully aware of just how harsh that opening statement sounded, but that’s the take away that this PlayStation 4 exclusive left me with, and it didn’t take long before I came to it either.

This may sound cliché, but The Order’s greatest strength also happens to be its biggest weakness; the cinematic direction of its pacing and world—a trade-off that just isn’t worth it.

To start, the premise of The Order: 1886 is admittedly fascinating, a setting that’s visually stimulating and rich with fiction that has the potential to offer a lot of innovative gameplay—but the reality is a bland third-person shooting campaign that relishes in taking control away from the player at every other turn of the experience, to an unacceptable degree.

See, an intrinsic quality to playing a video game is the level of interaction it offers, that degree of agency and immersion that draws players into the world it weaves is what truly defines the appeal of the media and what makes it unique from literature or film.

The Order commits the sin of limiting the sense of interaction that gradually becomes more and more fleeting as you play it by arbitrarily pacing players through scenes of exposition that’s driven through you slowly walking through a corridor from one end to the other, or drawn out quick-time sequences.

Oh, the quick-time sequences; by present day standards, this title is absolutely saturated with them.

Whether it’s a intense escape or a life-threatening scuffle, these moments are all trivialized into a series of shallow button inputs in order to favor cinematic freedom to the action on screen, which ironically, diminishes a lot of the meaning and impact out of whatever role you do played during these simplistic successions of the game—they’re uninspired at best.

What about the game that exists in between all of this nonsense you ask, well it’s certainly isn’t something that you haven’t already done to death in some way, shape, or form.

The shooting mechanics aren’t deep by any means; they’re about as typical as you can get.

Given the freedom of creativity that the steam punk fantasy The Order’s world and what it’s capable of, it’s mind boggling to think that there are only three distinctive weapons that possess anything remotely unique to the standard arsenal of firearms found in an action title, three…

Aside from those, the remaining artillery of the venture opts for playing it safe by cramming a veritable “grocery list” of familiar weapons anyone would come to expect in shooting title. Like the pistol, the powerful handgun, the shotgun, and well; you get the idea—all the guns and the role they play in The Order come across as if they were checked off some sort of essential list of guns that are required to be included in a shooter.

Not to take anything away from these exceptional weapons mind you, experimenting with the various crowd control tactics that the thermite rifle offers with its special secondary fire function was always a satisfying time. My issue with weapon variety and selection is more to the fact that all of the innovative guns are so infrequent in appearance, and any innovation period is just so limited in scope.

The shooting mechanics are competent, but they’re also not particularly noteworthy either. Between the aliasing and recoil, to the covering fire physics, the gameplay is more serviceable than it ever is remarkable. The Blacksight dynamic adds a nice bullet time-esque ability to the mix but even that’s flawed.

As I mentioned earlier, activating Blacksight will slow down everything around you, the ability doesn’t grant you full control over your aim (notice the trend), and instead, you’re automatically auto-aim to various vital pint and limb shots of the enemy. Shooting any of the implicitly lethal target of your opponent will bring them down, allowing you to shift over to the next foe in sight. The problem lies in the need to shoot multiple times because strangely enough, even though players are shooting down enemies in a hyper-sensualized state of invulnerability like Bullet Time would imply, the ability does exhaust real-time ammo, needlessly.

Don’t get me wrong, there are moments where Balcksight is invaluable to surviving a mob of baddies, but when it’s all done, you may be worse for the wear when it comes to finding the necessary munition you need to reload your guns for the rest of the stage.

The total lack of imagination comes full circle with an obnoxious encounter rate of stand-offs that task you with taking out enemy numbers that can literally rank in the eighties, to a tepid stage design that’s made of the same dull corridors, and intersecting arena structures that have been used in over a dozen games of its kind before it.

But what about the story? It’s got to be great considering all of the invest that Ready At Dawn has stocked into the cinematic direction, portrayal right? Well, I can say it starts off strong, but somewhere along the lines, the narrative doesn’t know how to tie itself off at all.

The exploits of Galahad and his character development help carry the first half of the game, but then it just suddenly gets thrown out the window with an arbitrary plot twist that paces players through a gauntlet of misdirection after misdirection, caustically taking away most of the intrigue the game worked so hard to build prior.

If there’s one thing that I can give The Order 1886, is that it’s one of the most gorgeous looking affairs that will ever humble your High-definition display, and the impressive production value adds to the sharp cinematic flair and style that the game has to offer.

The issue is that this is all placed on the back of a game that’s just a bit too boring in comparison; a gameplay formula that does absolutely nothing to break out of the box, or redefine the mold, in a market that’s filled with over aa dozen other contemporaries that’re more enjoyable to play in hindsight.

The final nail is that there’s a complete lack of multiplayer, and about seven, (you read right) seven hours’ worth of single player content that offer little to no incentive for players to revisit once the campaign has been complete once.

If you’re still interested, then stick with a rental, or wait for the inevitable price drop because it’s surely not worth the premium price of admission it sells for at this point.