The Order: 1886 Review
A beautiful mess
My impression of this game is that it's fantastic technically, but unimpressive in most other aspects of its design.
Released in 2015 by Ready At Dawn and Sony Santa Monica for the PS4, the overall reception for this effort was lukewarm (both from the critics and the general users). It looked and still looks fantastic, even pitted against newer releases on more powerful hardware, but other than the eye candy and a couple interesting set pieces, there isn't much holding this together; that is very unfortunate, as the world building itself is not bad at all!
The setting
The Order: 1886 is set in an alternate-universe London, where society has benefitted from a strong boom in industrial prowess, leading mostly to advanced weaponry and vehicles.
This advancement lends itself to a number of great set pieces, and a couple annoyances as well: we get to use exciting gadgets, but that also means exciting gadgets get used against us... a true conundrum.
The main character is part of a secretive and all-powerful order ( hence the name, I guess) and their job is to protect the people ( predictably). Things are not as simple as they seem, as the discovery of a conspiracy makes matters difficult.
The Story
As you can probably tell by my obsessive use of parantheses in the above paragraph, I was not overly impressed by how the story handled itself. The plot moved along quite nicely for the first 4-6h but afterwards was dragging its feet quite loudly as it tried to force a particular situation that felt very unnatural.
Story spoiler rant here (do not reveal if you want to play)
The old revenge tale that happens in the later chapters really did not do much to spur me onto the next objectives. It felt weak and cheap. Same thing can be said for the trial, where everyone is extremely mad and Isi does a 180 switch seemingly forgetting all that she and Galahad had went through just to become a bit of a turning point.
The fact that our protagonist never says anything to defend himself and quietly accepts punishment is very against his character development thus far ( where he did not care what the others told him to do).
All in all, I felt the story was rather unremarkable and even though the game was short, I was a bit tired of it at the end. It's quite shocking mostly because it had a tight grip on me at the start, but somehow through the creative choices of the writers, it lost me.
Gameplay
A tale of ups and downs once again. There are moments of brilliance, especially at the start where it feels I'm not constantly being pitted against 25 individuals just to keep me busy. I love when a game gives me room to breathe, room to look around and take in the quiet moments... There's more of that in the first half of the game, mostly due to the fact that we are being introduced to a new world; the latter half of the game is very combat heavy and it doesn't work well in my opinion.
The gunplay feels excellent in small rooms, where the shots have weight and hitting heads is rather easy, but as soon as you step into larger arenas the shortcomings are immediately apparent: guns are inaccurate at long ranges, and the reticles are floaty and imprecise. Most weapons are automatic and have a generous spread pattern when shooting, which makes hitting people at 25m extremely frustrating.
The encounter design is most of the time serviceable, but there were a handful of times where I was extremely frustrated by scripted enemy spawns that immediately put you in a tough situation, such as a shotgunner being spawned in the immediate vicinity of a corner without leaving you enough time to react ( unless you already got blasted once and now you pre-aim the spot).
Generally, I would say the combat is OK. There's a little too much of it for the quality of the experience.
Conclusion
This game has aged very gracefully from a tehnical point of view, looking better than games with higher resolutions or more sophisticate rendering techniques. This is due to the very strong art design and great implementations of motion blur, film grain and excellent materials work.
Gameplay-wise and story-wise this 2015 efforts falls short of modern standards and is overall a bit of a drag. Luckly, the entire experience clocks in at around 8h... which is neither too short nor too long ( Contrary to general reddit opinions, I do not consider this as offensively short). This duration ensures things keep interesting just about long enough to finish the game without regretting your existence.
