Ahh... The Order: 1886. What to make of this game?... First off, let me start off with what the developer was aiming for. Ready At Dawn wanted to make this a very cinematic game experience. They have succeeded to an extent. The presentation is very well done with beautiful environments, lighting, camera work, quality music and sound effects, great performances and a pretty good story. However, what should be the game's biggest strength, is also one of it's biggest weaknesses.
The visuals are as disappointing as they are amazing. This game has a ridiculous amount of blur. There is just way too much post processing and filtering going on. The game uses a lot of different techniques such as motion blur, chromatic aberration, noise/grain filters, temporal anti aliasing and depth of field. This all results in a blurry mess. Nothing is ever very clear. Even the scene elements that are in focus have a blur to them. There is such beautiful art direction in this game and it is ruined by the blur. Enemies and objects in the distance are hard to see and you are fighting the depth of field all the time just trying to get the game to focus on what you want. Techniques that are normally used to add immersion, are doing the exact opposite and become distracting and frustrating. I don't know what cinematic effect they were going for, but if I was to review a movie that looked like this, I would rate it poorly in visuals and would say it was a bad transfer. It truly is a shame.
Ready At Dawn also makes the mistake of focusing too heavily on the cinematic elements and the gameplay is neglected as a result. The game is a generic third person shooter with little variety. All the cool things happen in the cut-scenes or QTE sequences. There are so few scripted sequences that play out during actual gameplay. The gameplay sequences are simply just stringing together the cut-scenes. You basically just follow the linear path and shoot a few enemies along the way until you trigger the next cut-scene.
That being said, I did have fun all the way through the game. The shooting and cover mechanics do work fairly well. The game actually has pretty good pacing and it ends before the gameplay starts to become tedious. So, the game's short length is actually a good thing because of how basic the game is.
Overall, the game just seems like wasted potential. It needs more variety and depth. There is a pretty good foundation here, but the overall game design needs to be fleshed out more. Not enough happens during the game. I get the feeling that this game had a much larger scope to begin with. The developer may have been overwhelmed and had to scale it back and focus on the basics to get the game finished.
The Order: 1886 is worth playing through if you can get it for cheap, but I can not recommend this game at full price.