The Order: 1886

The Order: 1886 is Sony’s latest first party flagship title, a visually lush period action game set in an alternate vision of Victorian London. The game follows the escapades of Sir Galahad, also known as Grayson, as he attempts to uncover evidence of a conspiracy reaching to the highest echelons of the British Empire. Galahad is a member of The Knights of the Round table – the titular Order – direct descendants of the group of Arthurian legend replete with an impressive array of superhuman powers, including drastically increased lifespan thanks to the mysterious elixir ‘Blackwater’.

There’s no two ways about it; The Order: 1886 is a gorgeous game, perhaps the finest looking title we’ve yet seen on the PS4. Environments in its pseudo-gothic vision of Victorian London are richly detailed, if largely static, while character models look equally sumptuous both in cutscenes and during play. It’s the lighting and depth of field effects that really impress though, perfectly capturing that filmic, soft-focus period feel in a similar – if less grandiose – way to Bioshock Infinite’s Colombia.

Beautiful though the game is, it’s rendered in a 2.40:1 letterbox, leaving black bars at the bottom of the vast majority of TV screens. Although ostensibly a deliberate decision by Ready At Dawn to make the game more cinematic, it’s hard not to wonder if the choice of aspect ratio is more a technical compromise than a creative flourish. Whatever the case, the narrow frame does the game few favours, making even open areas feel tight and claustrophobic and robbing the player of their full field of view.

At its heart, The Order: 1886 is a linear third-person shooter that borrows liberally from Epic’s Gears of War and the Uncharted series. Combat mechanics are fairly routine; take cover behind chest high walls and take aim at enemies with the game’s arsenal of steampunk weapons; pistols, rifles and a variety of more exotic firepower. If things get sticky, Galahad can periodically use ‘Blacksight’ to enter a bullet time-like slow motion state and rapidly thin enemy ranks with pistol file.

Combat is solid if unspectacular. Cover mechanics work well and weapons feel powerful and satisfying but there’s nothing new or particularly exciting here and it’s not long before encounter design begins to grate. Every major chapter has at least one prolonged fight where Galahad fends off wave after wave of enemies interspersed with a predictable pattern of heavily armoured shotgun wielders and snipers. These encounters are sometimes poorly balanced, with late game difficulty spikes serving up death in a seemingly arbitrary and unfair fashion.

These frustrations carry over to the game’s numerous Quick Time Events. Cutscenes are interspersed with button prompts, as if to remind the player that they’re still playing a game, whilst a handful of tougher enemies require a QTE sequence to deliver a finishing blow. The latter type are less problematic but the former frequently border on infuriating and smack of poor design.

The Order: 1886 has an annoying habit of taking control of the action and plunging the player into a cutscene before switching back again just as rapidly. It’s a testament of sorts to the quality of the game engine that the two are indistinguishable from each other but it does mean that QTEs seem to be sprung on the player without warning. It doesn’t help that the window of opportunity for button presses tends to be short; it’s too easy to fail QTEs early in the game simply while reading the tutorial text to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing.

The story moves at a fairly brisk pace from the streets of Whitechapel to Mayfair via the London Underground and on to Westminster Palace and the docklands. Highlights include a spectacular hijacking and pursuit sequence onboard the Agamemnon, an enormous airship bound across the the Atlantic, and a nighttime infiltration of the headquarters of the United India Company. Historic landmarks, like the Crystal Palace, are seen in passing and there are various cultural references – Dickens and Darwin among them – but this is otherwise a very different London to the modern day.

The world of The Order: 1886, with its alternate history and steampunk analogues to modern technology, is intriguing but its potential remains largely unrealised. No explanation is offered for the differences between Neo-Victorian London and our own branch of history. As a result, anachronisms like the voice communicators character use during missions or Galahad’s hacking tool feel like a crutch used by developers unwilling to deviating from established gaming conceits. Ready At Dawn’s London lacks both real atmosphere and sense of place and ends up little more than a backdrop for a re-skinned version of a game we’ve played numerous times before.

The characters at the centre of the game are equally bland and fall into a familiar set of tropes. Galahad is the gruff, self-sacrificing hero, risking it all to do what’s right. Lady Ingraine, Galahad’s token love interest, is stubborn to a fault and is blinded by her duty to the Order. Marquis de Lafayette, meanwhile, serves as comic relief as the stereotypically lecherous Frenchman, although the developers are sensible enough to realise that the joke wears think early on.

Then there’s the matter of the game’s length. A week or so before release, news broke in the games press that The Order: 1886 could be completed in about five hours. While this is perhaps stretching things a little, it’s not all that much of an exaggeration. This reviewer clocked the game on medium difficulty in around seven hours. On the easiest difficulty level and ignoring the various collectables, it could easily be finished in under six.

A short running time alone shouldn’t be sufficient reason to give a game a critical mauling but The Order: 1886 hardly does enough to justify the £50 asking price. Those six to seven hours of content are all you get for your money; there’s no multiplayer mode and replay value is negligible. To add insult to injury the game feels padded out as it is, with at least half a dozen of the game’s sixteen chapters being little more than extended cutscenes, devoid of interactivity.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with The Order: 1886. It’s a stunningly pretty game, it’s mechanically sound and, unlike some of last year’s big hitters, it’s technically robust and bug free. The trouble is that it lacks any real identity or imagination of its own, instead falling back on a decade of accumulated third-person shooter cliches. The Order: 1886 feels like a game that has been designed by committee; it ticks all the right boxes but ultimately just isn’t that satisfying to play. While there’s some fun to be had, it’s simply not enough to recommend the game at full price.