Reviews

The Order 1886 - PS4 Game Review

Posted on: 2015-02-21

The Order 1886 is a beautiful game with the visual fidelity that takes advantage of the power of the PS4 alongside with an interesting narrative with twists, turns and betrayals - but feels more like an 8 hour movie rather than video game

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The Order 1886 is a beautiful game with the visual fidelity that takes advantage of the power of the PS4 alongside with an interesting narrative with twists, turns and betrayals with its unique and interesting setting of 19th century England. However you’ll feel as if you have sat through an 8 hour movie rather than video game with its subscription to video game clichés.

The story of The Order 1886 is that you are a part of the Knights of the Round Table in Victorian England that oversees incidents involving the rebellion and creatures known as “half breeds” or werewolves if you want to call them that. You play as Sir Galahad which is reference to the original knight of Arthur’s knights as are all of them. Galahad ends up in an investigation involving conspiracy and betrayal within their ranks and must find out who is the traitor by any means necessary. You’ll traverse iconic London areas in the period from Whitechapel to Westminster as well as references to historical criminals such as Jack the Ripper.

This narrative is interesting and will keep you hooked along with its beautiful and photorealistic graphics that give the environments atmosphere which makes walking down the cobbled streets of Whitechapel feel alive as well as dangerous. The voice acting is superb and you can really see that the actors are putting all their effort in making these characters act like real people, which helps that the actors did the motion capture as well; you really see their emotions come alive from anger to sadness.  

Where the game falls is in the gameplay department if you can call it gameplay as it is clichéd and generic, it is a third person shooter which is fine in most circumstances, however a game cannot just consist of third person cover based shooting with QTE (quick time event) button prompts flashing up every time you get into a fist fight, you got to have something else. 

The typical play through of each chapter will have you going through one area shooting some cardboard cut-out enemies, then walk for a bit, cutscene and rinse and repeat. When you are in the gameplay segments the screen aspect ratio is letterboxed which does not help when you are trying to see who is shooting at you when you are in cover it, have letterboxing in cutscenes that is fine, but not in gameplay it’s just an annoyance. There are lots of interesting, varied weapons and feel as if they do damage, but the situations presented to you to use the more exotic weapons are far and few. The only interesting combat sections are the parts when you’re fighting the werewolves, then it turns into a tense standoff as you don’t know where they are going to come from, but again these situations are few.

Overall with no replay value such as new game plus or multiplayer of any kind this game is an experience that you’ll play once and never again, but it’s a shame because it looks beautiful coupled with its dark and foreboding musical score, also with great voice acting to help the strong narrative. Unfortunately it falls short because it’s not really a game, I have no problem with story based games such as The Last of Us or Metal Gear Solid, but they have varied gameplay and don’t have chapters where you don’t do anything except walk or don’t even interact with the controller at all. You can weave narrative into a video game without sacrificing gameplay, but this game did sacrifice which makes it more suited for a non-interactive piece of media such as a television series or film. 

2.5/5 

Reviewed by Sam Coles for 365Bristol - the leading events and entertainment website for Bristol

 

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