THE ORDER: 1886
REVIEW
The Order: 1886’s
recreation of Victorian
London, complete
with smoking chimney
stacks and bloodsoaked cobbles, is
absolutely gorgeous.
history where blimps fill London’s
skyline, Nikola Tesla is a gun
manufacturer and The Knights
of the Round Table shoot people
in the face. You play Sir Galahad,
a knight of the titular Order,
tasked with ridding the world of
werewolves, but everything isn’t as
it seems – except it is, because not
even London’s smog could obscure
these plot twists.
It’s not just graphics, either. The
art direction is first-class: from
the detailing on the protagonist’s
cloth pauldrons to the architecture
of the period-accurate buildings.
Unfortunately, the world feels like
a movie set. It even opens with
a QTE and these are prevalent
throughout. As a result, it often
feels like the short bursts of
gunplay are interrupting the story,
and the story, while brilliantly
acted and motion captured,
unfortunately isn’t strong enough
to carry the game.
Gameplay’s a blend of shooting,
QTEs, stealth and a lot of enforced
slow walking and exposition. The
action itself feels satisfying and
the cover system – with different
buttons mapped to getting in and
out of cover – works well, with
the peeking and leaning fluid and
contextual. Guns fire with pleasing
weight and enemies react to hits
convincingly. Some of the weapons
are brilliantly imaginative: like the
arc gun, an experimental tesla
coil that fires an electric whip of
death; or the thermite rifle, which
fires a cloud of flammable gas
with one button and ignites it
with another.
The setting, however, is fantastic.
Events take place in an alternate
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The two-way gun battles feel
exciting and tense, but they’re
unfortunately too few. Werewolf
encounters attempt to mix the
action up, but end up only serving
to make it feel more repetitive
by repeating the same tricks. Old
dogs and all that. Then there’s the
stealth; what could have added
variety is instead cordoned off into
specific, frustrating sections, with
the game shooting you dead in a
cut scene when spotted, instead of
letting you react and adapt.
These insta-fail stealth sections
make even less sense in the
context of the game – one
thing The Order: 1886 does
well is marrying the story
and mechanics. The knights
all drink a healing substance
called Blackwater which grants
regenerative properties to those
who consume it – this explains
why your character can shrug off
a shotgun round to the crotch.
Most games don’t offer up a
justification for the Wolverine
powers of their heroes, so it’s