The Impact Factor

Disordered Teslapunk

Review

The Order: 1886, Ready at Dawn (PS4)

Abstract: Despite a great thematic foundation, The Order: 1886 falls flat. In essentially every way The Order: 1886 felt half-baked. With a story that never surpasses schlocky genre fiction, weak dialogue, and uninspired gunplay, there’s not much to recommend. The stunning visuals and novel take on alternative history are nice, but The Order: 1886 makes the same mistakes other narrative-heavy AAA 3^rd person shooters have made for nearly a decade. Let’s hope the inevitable sequel can do better.

On paper, there was a lot to be excited for with The Order: 1886. In an industry so focused on iteration and spending big development money on the same handful of intellectual properties (IP), The Order: 1886 stood out as something new. The Order: 1886 was the first big AAA game from a relatively unknown studio, Ready at Dawn, that had previously proven themselves by making excellent God of War games (Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta) for the PlayStation Portable. When it was first revealed at E3 2013, The Order: 1886 had myself and others thoroughly intrigued with its unique premise and eye-catching trailer. The game released back in February 2015 to middling reviews, however. Critics cited the game’s lack luster storytelling, recycled ideas and short length as reasons for the reviews’ low scores. But were the critics right? Curiosity and my (relatively) unabashed fanaticism for Sony’s first party development got the better of me in December 2015. I bought The Order: 1886 for $10 off a digital sale to finally see what the game was all about. Spoiler alert: the reviewers got this one right. The Order: 1886 is not a good video game.

The Order: 1886 takes place in, you guessed it, the year 1886 in an alternate history London. The setting blends elements of Victorian horror, steampunk, and historical futurism to create a compelling world. Blimps hover in the sky, Tesla is hard at work creating wireless communicators & lightning spewing rifles, and monsters hide in the shadows. You play as Sir Galahad, a knight of King Arthur’s round table (a.k.a. ‘The Order’). Galahad and the other members of The Order have been alive for centuries fighting against the forces of darkness, from monsters to malcontents, in the name of preserving peace and stability in the free world. A bulk of their recent endeavors has been against the mysterious ‘half-breeds,’ humans that can transform at will into werewolves. Armed with a devastating new arsenal supplied by none other than Nikola Tesla himself, and blackwater vials that allow members of The Order to quickly recover from any injury, Galahad and crew fight a guerrilla war against monsters in London’s damp, dark corners. The premise sounds intriguing enough, right? It is a good one. It’s what the game does to build upon this solid foundation, however, that is a total disappointment.

 

My first glimpse of The Order: 1886 had me so excited. What a cool world.

The narrative that is laid atop the excellent thematic foundation is poorly written, cliché, and uninteresting. I will not go too deep into spoilers here, but The Order: 1886 takes the player down the familiar path of your enemies not being who you think they are, betrayal at the highest level, trying to fight for what’s right, dark secrets bubbling to the surface, etc. Simply put, the story is bad. So too is the dialogue. The writing felt stiff, leading to characters that felt one note and robotic. Galahad was the lone exception having not one but two notes. The cast also suffered from a likeability problem. This isn’t to say a game’s protagonists have to be likeable, far from it, but you can tell The Order: 1886 wants you to like at least a few of its main characters. And you just don’t. Galahad in particular is an impulsive psychopath (he brutally murders every single person in sight, seriously) but is supposed to be the game’s tragic hero. Galahad is emblematic of the game’s confused tone as a whole. The Order: 1886 generally takes itself seriously, even when discovering a secret werewolf-vampire alliance. At other times the game feels lighthearted, almost comedic, especially during moments of the game’s most graphic violence. It all felt off. Am I supposed to enjoy this from a campy B-movie perspective, or does The Order: 1886 think itself to be profound? These issues pale in comparison to the game’s abrupt ending, however. The game ends at what feels like the story’s midpoint. There is no resolution to some of the bigger forces at play; whole character arcs are left up in the air. The game ends on a cliffhanger and not one that felt earned. For a game that so heavily relies on story, characters, and dialogue The Order: 1886 does all three poorly.

 

The Order: 1886 wants you to care, but never gives you a good reason to.

I briefly want to frame my thoughts on the game’s narrative. The entirety of my playthrough was done via live stream to my Twitch channel. I had never streamed a filmic, narrative heavy game before. It was an interesting experience and one I would like to repeat, but it only further reinforced how lackluster the game’s story was. I tried to appreciate the game as a schlocky piece of genre fiction, a ‘bad’ B-horror-action movie, chatting with my friends watching and cracking jokes, but still came away unimpressed. The Order: 1886 stopped at creating an interesting world, never giving me more reason to care about what happens within it.

When you’re not watching story cutscenes, The Order: 1886 is a competent cover-based 3^rd person shooter. The mechanics of shooting and taking / moving between cover were solid, though nothing that hasn’t been done as well (or better) in other titles. The shooting gameplay is fine. It served its purpose. I wish more emphasis had been placed on what made shooting feel unique, though. My favorite gunplay moments were when I was using the game’s ‘teslapunk’ weaponry like the thermite or arc rifle, or when I was utilizing blackwater’s time slowing effects. Too bad you’re often using run of the mill pistols or carbines. Unfortunately, the gunplay can only be so fun when you’re limited to trying out the game’s mechanics in routine shooting galleries. The gameplay flow is simple. Walk down a linear corridor, find an open area shooting gallery, hide in one place to pick off all enemies, move down next linear corridor, repeat. The shooting galleries weren’t bad per se, but also felt uninspired. Aside from gunplay, however, the rest of The Order: 1886’s mechanics fall flat. Often times you’ll have a ‘gameplay’ section that is just literally walking down a hallway between two cutscenes with nothing to do but walk. For a AAA shooter like this you would expect huge set piece moments, but those are few and far between. Exploring the environments is supposedly rewarded by discovering hidden collectibles (like newspapers, documents, phonograph cylinders), but the content contained within those is generally boring and at best tangentially related to what’s happening in the game. They neither meaningfully flesh out the world at large, nor shed light on character motivations. They are there just to be there.

 

The one and only decent set piece moment.

The worst gameplay offense is The Order: 1886’s heavy reliance on quick time events (QTEs). Unlike so many others I actually quite like QTEs. When done well, they are reflective of characters’ actions and can give an agency to the player during moments when previously no such control existed. When done poorly, they remove a player from the experience and insert themselves where standard gameplay should be. The Order: 1886’s QTEs are the latter. Often, the game forces you into a QTE when your regular shooting / melee attacking would have sufficed. Many QTEs come abruptly, which can result in an instant death and reload if you’re not paying attention. Perhaps most egregiously, QTEs take the place of shooting at the game’s most climatic moments. The final boss fight, for example, is fought entirely via QTEs. This really made me mad. Boss fights are supposed to test what you’ve learned throughout the game, assessing player skill. You could fight The Order: 1886’s final boss knowing nothing about the game, just how to press buttons on a controller when the prompt shows up. It’s hugely disappointing and totally unfulfilling for the player.

 

It's life or death! Better make sure I press square at the right time!

The Order: 1886 is half-baked. Upon reflection, essentially every element of the game felt half done. The story ends at what felt like a midpoint. Shooting is fun but nothing of any interest is done with it. The world is cool but the game never makes you care about it. Cutscenes look and sound great, but don’t contain anything substantive. And then finally, the game’s completion time. When The Order: 1886 release this time last year, the only thing people were talking about was how short the game was. A Let’s Play popped up on YouTube that finished the game in 4.5 hours. Even professional critics’ main sticking point was that the game lasted only 5-8 hours. I completed The Order: 1886 is 6.5 hours. I have written it here before, but most of the online discourse about the game length is preposterous (and dumb). If the game accomplishes what it sets out to, a game can be as long or as short as it needs to be. Gone Home is an exceptional game at 2 hours long; and The Witcher 3 is exceptional at 100. The Order: 1886 is not exceptional at 6.5. It is not clear if the game would have been better at the standard length for a AAA narrative-heavy 3^rd person shooter (~12-14 hours long), but perhaps many of the half done elements would have felt more complete. I don’t care that The Order: 1886 is 6.5 hours long. I care that The Order: 1886 needed to be longer to reach the goals it set out for itself.

 

If only the thermite rifle could finish cooking this half-baked game.

I would like to have hope for the future of this IP, but I’m not so sure. The Order: 1886 built a solid foundation (its world), but did so much else poorly. I hesitate to say that The Order: 1886 is a bad game, but it is not a good one. The Order: 1886 did not learn from the missteps of its predecessors. So much of what was underwhelming about The Order: 1886 is what has been wrong with narrative-heavy AAA games for so long: a trite story, weak dialogue, style over substance, poor gameplay design decisions. Hopefully for the inevitable sequel, Ready At Dawn can learn from their mistakes and build an experience worth having. The game looks and sounds beautiful at least?

With so many great games coming out these days, it is hard to recommend The Order: 1886. Why spend your time with a ‘fine’ game when you can be playing an excellent one? I discussed all this and more in the most recent The Impact Factor podcast.

The Order: 1886 is half-baked, so it gets half of the total possible score. But I don’t do half stars, so I rounded down. Sorry.

The Order: 1886

2/5