Developer: Ready at Dawn
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Genre: Third-Person Shooter
Players: 1
Console: PS4
Hours Played: ~6 hours
Progress: Completed the game
Some games are hard to review because their entertainment value depends on how much you generally enjoy games of that genre or how creative or invested you’re willing to be. Minecraft, for example, is the only game that some gamers need and they’re happy to spend thousands of hours building 1:1 scale models of the Sistine Chapel, while other gamers (like me) get maybe a half hour of fun from putzing around before they decide they’d rather have a story or some clearer objectives to tackle. The Order: 1886 is not one of those games. Read on to find out what we thought of our short time with the PS4’s big exclusive game for this season.
The first thing to get out of the way when discussing The Order: 1886 (TO) is to talk about the game’s graphics. As you have probably seen from the available media, at face value the game is gorgeous — perhaps the best looking game yet made. Additionally, the thinner widescreen format with black bars above and below and sub-60fps frame rate that were controversial when first announced do not affect gameplay in any practical way. The best thing about TO is really the RAD Engine — it handles things like soft shadows, object clipping, and bump mapping light years better than we’ve seen in the majority of AAA games over the last few years. A respectable amount of time was also spent with the game’s animations. Any gamer can tell you that animation quality is at least as important as geometry and textures when it comes to a game’s overall graphical quality and it was nice to see that most things in TO move with a proper sense of nature and weight. With that said, the RAD Engine 4.0 has a few distracting deficiencies that are sure to bother the hardcore “graphics enthusiasts” that are the primary demographic for this game.
Firstly, as you can see in our video clips from early in the game below — while there are mirrors (and other reflective surfaces) in many places, none are able to reflect the player or any other character. I’m not an expert on mythology or physics, but the last time I checked regular humans are still supposed to have reflections. It’s disappointing that a game whose main feature is its bleeding edge graphics has to resort to cutting graphical corners in a way that would be more at home on a PS2 than a PS4.
This of course means that the RAD Engine (at least insofar as its deployment for TO) uses premade reflection maps for reflective surfaces instead of actually reflecting anything or anyone. A good thing is that these reflection maps are always taken from the proper surrounding environment as you can see in the next video, unlike those in many recent games like Watch Dogs and Borderlands 2/Pre-Sequel.
I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a “design feature” of the game, but during my less than six hours of gameplay I developed a headache on a couple occasions because of TO’s overbearing depth of field in combat. When you’re shooting or behind cover your character is in sharp focus, but where you’re actually aiming (toward the enemies) is completely blurred. On several occasions this prevented me from aiming properly and in the example video below even made it difficult to discern the location of far off enemies (note: in this situation there was no way to manually enhance or change the depth of field’s focus).
There are finer details like the occasional instance where it takes a second for the high res textures to load in a scene and you’re left with lower-res ones on some of the screen elements (similar to what happens in the first Mass Effect only much quicker) and the almost complete lack of ambient occlusion that are also amiss in TO, but the most distracting (and sometimes gameplay harming) graphical shortfalls are certainly the intense depth of field and lack of character reflections.
The sound design in TO is much less flashy than the graphics are, but things generally make the sounds you would expect of them. The voice acting is good and features a host of different English and French accents — importantly, the characters’ lipsync in TO is well above average (and probably helped along by a good portion of the cast having sweet 1880s moustaches). The only thing particularly of note in TO’s sound department is that music is used quite sparingly. I’m actually not sure if I heard music in the background at all in most scenes, but there was always enough ambient noise that the game never felt dead or empty because of it.
So while not immaculate, the game’s visual and aural presentation are considerable. That means that TO is easy to review because it’s so great, right? The answer is “hardly”. I think it’s easiest to understand just what kind of game TO is by taking a step back and looking at its inception from afar. Ready at Dawn has been around since 2003 and in the last 12 years has made three original PSP games based on established series and helped port Okami to the Wii. This team decided that they wanted to do something bigger and spent around four years creating a respectable engine to be used for current generation console games. While purely conjecture, it seems like they loosely pieced together TO as a tech demo for their engine to show its versatility and when Sony saw it they decided to bankroll said demo into a title they could hock for $70 CDN apiece (to perhaps even pay for the engine’s development itself) and the rest is history.
There are numerous times throughout the game where the camera lingers on something unimportant or randomly switches viewpoints and it’s fairly blatant that the point of this, instead of some grand artistic notion, is the developers going “Look how awesome that looks! See the way the candles flicker? See the way the light refracts differently through that specific green bottle that we setup for this shot specifically?” While the graphics are such an achievement that the devs are certainly allowed to do this, in practical terms it only serves to keep reminding the player that they just paid the better part of $100 (or a lot more if they sprung for the Collector’s Editions before even knowing what the game was like) for a very thinly disguised and not terribly prolonged tech demo.
I’ll be the first to admit that as a graphics and third person shooter enthusiast I was super excited when I saw the teaser for TO. The game’s graphical style and capabilities are truly an achievement and the concept of fighting werewolves and their kin with anachronistic weaponry in one of the most interesting eras of British history is superb, but with every other element in every other way TO not only lets the gamer down, but does so in an actively antagonistic way.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll outline the larger faults I found with TO’s narrative and gameplay here as a list:
- The story starts rather slowly in medias res, poses uninteresting, predictable answers to the questions it dwells on, challenges LOST for its sheer amount of loose ends and ends even more abruptly than Too Human which used to hold the premature ending crown.
- The characters themselves are just this side of one-dimensional. Few if any have more than a single-sentence back story and it’s probably a good thing that you don’t care about them much because none of their issues are really resolved or addressed over the course of the game.
- Areas in which you fight waves of enemies are sometimes needlessly padded with about 2 or 3 waves more than the average third-person shooter. You can only shoot the same enemy in the same spot so many times before it gets even more boring.
- There are only maybe 6 kinds of enemies in total and they’re not terribly varied or interesting to fight, only the handful of werewolves you face even require more than a basic “sit behind cover and pop out occasionally” strategy.
- NPC teammates are about as useless as they come. In certain areas they just let enemies right past them when they’re supposed to be covering you so you can get unceremoniously shotgunned in the back.
- The game has no way of telling you when you have control over your character and often times he’ll be moving of his own volition or you’ll be left standing there for a while thinking that a cutscene is still going before you realize you have another minute or two of control over your character. TO plays itself for at least as much time as the gamer is given control of the character (not even counting the true cutscenes) and about half the time you have control you’re inexplicably unable to run or even check which guns you have equipped (the weapon selector only comes up when your character is in “battle mode”).
- Gun/equipment selection is weak and you only get to use the 3-4 more interesting guns once or twice max (and not for very long). As a rule, they also don’t usually work very well in your hands or in the enemies’ either.
- The third person shooter mechanics in general are unremarkable and often outright broken when the depth of field blur decides not to show you what you’re shooting at.
- For a game that’s so harshly linear with maybe three or four partially branching paths in the entire game, you still get lost a lot not knowing exactly where you’re meant to walk next because the levels are designed a little haphazardly and clicking R3 only very rarely gives you an actual waypoint you can follow.
- There’s just about nothing to do or see in the game’s world outside of your little tunnel vision to the next point you’re supposed to be in the story. There are maybe a couple of dozen paper things that you can pick up and turn over LA Noire-style, but most of them are illegible or just generally uninteresting. The only collectibles in the game are Edison Wax Cylinders with recordings reminiscent of those found in Bioshock games, but with the very large caveat that you can only listen to them when you’re in the menu looking at a text transcript of what’s said (you could always play them while you were still walking around in Bioshock as well as any other competently made game). Because it was so inconvenient, I only ever listened to half of the first one you find.
- There is only one boss fight in the game at it is repeated twice, verbatim, with the same animations and everything. The special controls and mechanics for it are so amazingly bad that they feel like they were designed with mobile smartphones in mind instead of the PS4. It comprises mostly of quick-time events (QTEs), but the first time I missed about 3/4 of them because I accidentally used the wrong stick and it literally did not matter, the fight just kept going.
- There are no puzzles or anything requiring thought or strategy in the game unless you count a couple of simple door unlocking minigames that each repeat about thrice. You wouldn’t need a million monkeys with a million controllers, I figure about five or six with a controller between them could probably manage to complete the game in a few dozen hours due to the prevalence of cutscenes/QTEs and the general lack of gamer involvement.
- There is just so little to the game’s story and the game itself that its sluggish pace feels like there’s someone standing out of frame telling the characters to stall for time rather than the developers being purposeful or meticulous. I’ve played excellent games that were the same length or shorter than TO, and a game really only needs to be as long as its narrative or gameplay concepts can sustain, but this game would have been a lot more entertaining (just not nearly as lucrative) if they maybe released it as a $9.99 hour-long tech demo on PSN that let you play around with the camera angles instead of trying to pass it off as a proper retail game.
So, that’s a lot of negatives. Did the game do anything right aside from the graphics? Well, there were a couple of things that were alright including:
- When you’re shooting you get a different hit marker for when you hit an enemy and when you kill them, so you always know for sure whether they’re bound to stand back up or not.
- There are plenty of weapons and ammo on the battlefield so you’re never caught short.
- Adjusting the difficulty doesn’t affect which trophies you can earn.
- There was maybe one halfways unexpected (but never concluded) twist in the narrative.
- Both male and female nudity are given equal opportunity.
- Umm, did I mention the graphics are great?
Every game, no matter how objectively bad, will still have proponents insisting that every flaw is purposeful and necessary, but I think the supporters of TO’s perceived “AAA status” should probably be put into the same category as those who genuinely like the Burger King Xbox 360 games or ET for Atari. TO’s graphics are undeniably sublime, but even the best graphics ever cannot keep this sorry excuse for a full retail game from being short, empty, and even a little worse than mediocre. When asked by my colleagues to describe what playing TO feels like, I think I said it best when I likened it to dating an idiotic supermodel. They may not be able to do anything for themselves, they may not even be good in bed or interesting to talk to, but damn they’re pretty to look at and maybe nice to kiss for a moment before you realize their breath stinks because they forgot to brush their teeth.
[taq_review]
A review copy of the game was provided to us by its publishers.
There is an easter egg featuring Sackboy about halfway through the game, check out a short clip of it below: