Review Round-up: The Order: 1886 is all style, no content

As the PlayStation 4's first blockbuster exclusive of the year, Ready at Dawn's new cinematic, third-person shooter The Order: 1886 has been the center of attention this week. And for all the wrong reasons.

While there's no denying The Order: 1886 looks amazing, a series of videos uploaded to YouTube revealed that the game's story might only take five hours of gameplay. With skepticism growing, review scores posted today have done little to quell the fire.

TL;DR: The Order: 1886 appears to be all style, no substance. A brief overview of the reviews would suggest that Ready at Dawn looked to create a cinematic masterpiece, but forgot that they were making a video game and not a movie. The gameplay was put on the backburner to make way for the "gorgeous" visuals, style, and story — which by the way leaves the door open for a sequel.

While our review will be posted soon, below you can find a round-up of The Order: 1886's current scores. Not good. Looks like Pachter may be wrong on another of his predictions.

Forbes:

While I can’t recommend you spend full price, I do think it’s worth checking out at some point—either when the price drops, or as a rental, or borrowed from a friend. It’s a really gorgeous game, and I don’t at all regret my time spent playing it. I’m certainly rooting for a sequel—one that can maintain its vision of being story-driven and compelling, but that pushes even harder to be a good game. Ambition is all well and good so long as the core mechanics are sound. And they simply aren’t sound in The Order: 1886…Beyond the game’s stunning graphics and impressive production values, the story is where The Order: 1886 is best.

6.5

IGN:

The basic conflict at the heart of The Order: 1886 is that considerations for a cinematic approach are prioritized above the needs of basic gameplay. Its best aspects are its stunning looks, atmosphere, and style – which are truly fantastic – and entertaining fiction. But the shallow, slow, and generic quick-time event-riddled gameplay make it feel like an experience that would've been better served by a non-interactive movie than a game. With no multiplayer, and no reason to revisit the short and stunted single-player campaign once it’s been completed, there just isn’t a lot to it…But I was genuinely surprised when the story abruptly ended – leaving multiple characters and secondary arcs dangling in the wind in an obvious sequel setup.

6.5/10

Videogamer:

The Order is a beautiful dud. Instead of building the core mechanics and then wrapping everything else around it, instead it appears Ready at Dawn made a movie and wondered how to put a game into it. By all accounts it still hasn't worked it out.

6/10

Gamespot:

What, then, to make of The Order: 1886? It is, at best, perfectly playable, and lovely to look at and listen to. But it is also the face of mediocrity and missed opportunities. A bad game can make a case for itself. A boring one is harder to forgive.

5/10

Escapist:

The Order: 1886 is bland gameplay wrapped in admittedly gorgeous next generation graphics. It's not bad through and through, it's just disappointing.

3/5

Polygon:

The one area where The Order surpasses the "been there, shot that" vibe is in its presentation. There is, in my estimation, no better looking game on consoles. Victorian London is rendered in beautiful, exacting, sooty detail with just enough steampunk flourishes to make it seem otherworldly. The shift in fidelity between cutscene and gameplay is so imperceptible that it's hardly worth discerning between the two. Though hopelessly outdated from a mechanical perspective, The Order: 1886 is at least decked out in its next-generation finest.

5.5/10

Jimquisiton:

Open-world games aren't going anywhere, and I don't want them to, but The Order is proof that there's still a place for linear, cinematic gaming experiences. It may look like a modern game, but The Order is a throwback to some of the best releases from the PlayStation 2: games that didn’t need a massive world to tell a cool story. It turns out I really missed that.

The Order: 1886 is a primer, not a story that feels complete or particularly worthwhile. When it allows itself to focus on action, it can provide a stimulating round of pop-and-fire combat, at least before it allows itself to drown in common distractions and intellectually insulting button prompts.

6.5/10

Giant Bomb:

There are things here worth checking out, but the action feels half-cocked and you'll be finished with it in an afternoon. I won't pretend to guess at how much $60 means to you, dear reader, but I will say that The Order is a middling experience with a couple of bright flashes that only serve to remind you that this could be a more interesting game if more of its ideas were fully formed. If you're bent on seeing The Order for yourself, you should probably rent it.

2/5

No traditional review score:

Kotaku:

The Order: 1886 doesn't feel like the product of someone's grand vision; it feels like the tatters of that vision have been gathered, taped together, and presented as complete. The best I can say of it is that its premise is just novel enough to feel wasted. As I played, I kept wishing for some hint of inspiration, a dash of spirit to warm me against the chilly downpour of mediocrity. I found none

No

Eurogamer

It's shallow fun while it lasts, but The Order feels dated before its time. Despite being the PlayStation 4's new poster child, the latest pretty face for the new generation, Ready at Dawn's truncated epic feels like a product of the year of its inception – a time when the world was in thrall to Uncharted 2 and Heavy Rain, and before the prescribed dramatics of Quantic Dream turned sour with Beyond: Two Souls. The result is an earnest game, sometimes disarmingly so. There are no levelling weapons, no branching narrative decisions, no litany of unlockables – and there's absolutely no reason to return once it's all over.

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