Do not stray from the beaten path
You walk down a long hallway, a linear path if you will. It’s a nice looking hallway but you feel its missing something, maybe you could try going through one of these doors, there are many doors in this hallway. To no avail, stay on your path, its a waste of time trying to stray from the beaten path so why bother? Turns out that all the nice looking doors are all locked anyway, so you must continue down this long hallway to have some sort of purpose or fulfillment.
With limited room to explore sometimes you feel your mind wandering but you can not turn away, all your attention must be on the hallway and what the narrative is trying to convey which can be testing at times because it can fail to grab you. If your mind wanders at all you can be sure that you will die, that is the problem with a game that has cutscenes and gameplay that merge into each other.
Enough with the hallway analogy. This game is extremely linear if you didn’t gather by the first two paragraphs. It merges cutscenes and gameplay together because they are both rendered in-engine so you always have to be alert, which is a real pain because the story just isn’t that good. You watch and occasionally play as Sir Galahad a knight of “The Order” which currently is in a sticky situation of fighting a rebel alliance (which isn’t as cool as the one in star wars) and also some mystical creatures called Lycans. These are half breeds of werewolfs and human but they like to kill things and be generally nasty. You soon find out that everything is not what it seems and that the journey of Sir Galahad and “The Order” is the one that spans the whole game.
If the story was gripping like a “Last of Us” that would not be a problem but most of the time it just feels like you are going for a ride which you have no real reason to be on. Galahad is going to be a grumpy old man who kills hundreds of people whatever way you play because the game does not offer much in terms of variety and you get tired of him pretty quickly.
Gameplay is mostly third person cover based, similar to Gears of War with a whole lot of quick time events thrown in there for good measure. Sometimes you can pick things up to look at them by rotating the analog stick, I found myself skipping most items however because they do not add anything to the game except adding little pieces of story and the time it takes to pick it up isn’t worth the reward of a story tidbit, again do not stray from the beaten path.
The Order 1886 is a short game and does not offer much in terms of variety. It does however look gorgeous, probably one of the best looking games the Playstation 4 has to offer currently. It definitely is a quality and not quantity with this game and because of that I would only recommend it if you can get it at a discount or get it packed in with your console. Do not stray from the beaten path.
