First of all, I want to start off this anniversary piece by just stating the shocking but obvious… I can’t believe The Order: 1886 is already ten years old. More than any other anniversary piece I’ve done thus far for this website, this is the one that has made me realize the most how quickly time is passing by. I still remember the whole controversy surrounding this Playstation 4 exclusive as if it had happened yesterday. “Barely playable”. “Pretty but shallow”. “Just five hours long”. “A game about werewolves with like half a dozen werewolves in it”. This is my first time playing the now nearly-retro game by Ready at Dawn, and I’ll finally find out if it was really that bad, worthy of so much vitriol.

It’s hard to believe these visuals are already ten years old. The Order: 1886 still looks amazing to this day.

The Order: 1886 starts off in a very impressive manner, showcasing its downright jawdropping visuals right from the first scene. I’ll be very honest; I don’t think I have seen that many better-looking games in 2025, let alone stuff made ten years ago. Ready at Dawn took advantage of some smart tricks in order to ensure a perfect balance between astonishing visuals and a decent performance: it’s capped at 30 frames per second, which wasn’t unheard of back in the day, and it actually just uses half of the overall screen real estate. Black bars were added with the excuse of giving the game a “cinematic feel”, but you and I know this is also a trick used to render less stuff onscreen at once. To be fair, it works.

This is still a downright impressive visual experience for 2025 standards. But that’s not all that really impressed me about this game. Even the biggest critics and naysayers will admit that The Order‘s setting is absolutely fantastic. It’s set in an alternative version of Victorian London, in a “Penny Dreadful meets Steampunk” kind of way. Humanity has been in a centuries-long fight against half-breeds (as in, vampires and werewolves), which has led to quicker enhancements in technology in order to deal with these supernatural menaces. In 1886, we already have aerial flights, wireless communications, electricity, sonars, radars, and railguns. A good chunk of these inventions were coined by none other than Nikola Tesla himself, who’s a supporting character in the story. He’s basically this version of James Bond’s Q.

This is a werewolf. You’re gonna meet like… ten of them during the entire game. Tops.

You play as one of the members of… King Arthur’s Round Table Knights. Yep. You heard it. The Order itself is basically the continuation of the Knights of Arthurian Legend, but with some caveats. Names such as Percival and whatnot are honorific titles passed down from a deceased member to a new one, so that doesn’t mean the millennium-old knights are still around. With that being said, most knights are hundreds of years old, as they are able to keep themselves alive with a substance called Blackwater, which was found inside the Holy Grail. As a result, you are a guy bearing the title of Sir Galahad, who’s hundreds of years old, but you are not THE original Galahad. Not that it matters. You’re still a badass.

The Royal Knights are basically the elite force of the British Empire. Their main task is to fight against the supernatural, but they are also tasked with fighting against rebels and other threats to the British Crown. The setting had a lot of potential, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth due to how the story was presented.

A young Nikola Tesla is the genius behind your crazy arsenal.

Let’s put it this way: the whole “The Order: 1886 is too short” schtick is absolutely true. I beat the game in a steady pace in about six-ish hours. The first four hours or so were the most interesting, as the game was taking its time to set up mysteries, characters, plot points, and so on. Unknown figures are shown onscreen, but are never discussed again. Ready at Dawn was clearly aiming at turning this game into a franchise, so these had never been supposed to become big plotholes. Sadly, the game wasn’t well-received to allow the team to further explore this amazing world, so you have two halves of completely different qualities: a slow-paced and interesting first four hours, and a gigantic and rushed mess in the last two, where the quality of the storytelling takes a deep plunge, and the events shown onscreen become more and more pointless.

I certainly could not forgive the terrible last couple of hours. What was once supposed to be a neat tale of London’s supernatural underground was quickly shifted into your run-of-the-mill Call of Duty-esque “maybe the rebels aren’t so evil after all” cliché. The script, the animations, the pacing of the plot, everything becomes increasingly crappier up until the very end, when the game finishes with one of the absolutely worst final boss fights of the past few decades. Uncharted 1 levels of bad. Not surprisingly, also completely QTE-based. You can clearly see Ready at Dawn had little time to wrap the game up, and was behind schedule; they had to rush the hell out of The Order‘s development in order to even be able to come up with a “finished” product. One that’s a mere six hours long.

QTEs galore. This was back when studios actually thought QTEs were going to be the future of gaming.

But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t able to enjoy a lot of what The Order: 1886 had to offer, and that’s the most suprising thing I can say about it. I thought I was going to play a crappy game and rejoice in laughing at it, ten years after its release. Nope, that wasn’t the case. The first half of it was incredible. The visuals are magnificent. I immediately fell in love for its setting. And, to be honest, I kinda liked the gameplay, generic as it was… but with some caveats.

I don’t know if it’s the sheer simplicity of the easygoing gameplay, or the fact cover shooters have plummeted in quality over the past decade (looking at you, Star Wars Outlaws), but I had no qualms with The Order: 1886‘s cover shooting mechanics. Its stash of weapons was quite varied, with some of them really packing one hell of a punch. There are two kinds of weapons: “normal” and science ones. Normal weapons were your run-of-the-mill pistols, revolvers and carbines; those were the fun ones, due to their simplicity and strength. Sadly, that wasn’t what Ready at Dawn wanted you to dedicate your attention to. They really bet all of their chips that Nikola Tesla’s wacky science guns would be one of the game’s main selling points.

The Order: 1886’s combat is very basic, but serviceable. I loved pulling one headshot after the other.

It’s not that the science weapons were bad… they just felt way too bureaucratic for a hectic cover shooter. In the heat of battle, I didn’t want to use a gun that required me to blast the battlefield with thermite powder, only for me to then press another button to set said thermite on fire; I would have been able to shoot three or four cockney rebels in the head with a pistol in the same timeframe. I appreciated the creativity behind some of these designs, but considering there weren’t that many reasons to stick to science guns over normal carbines (not to mention ammo scarcity for special weapons), I ended up ignoring them.

Had The Order been a straightforward shooter during its entire (brief) runtime, I don’t think people would have complained about the gameplay that much. But that’s just one third of what the gameplay has to offer. One other third is comprised of pointless quick-time events (including the previously mentioned final boss), and the other third is made of pure meandering down hallways. The game just wants you to digest all of its amazing visuals whilst slowly walking down a corridor. It was fun at first, but if I complained about Hellblade II doing the same damn thing, I can’t give The Order a pass.

Look, I’m not a fan of motion blur either, but it’s not like the game lets you play it without the damn effect.

Finally, the biggest point of criticism, and one I fully agree wth the naysayers: the lack of supernatural confrontations. When people said The Order: 1886 was “a game about werewolves with like half a dozen werewolves in it”, they weren’t exactly wrong. I fought ten werewolves in total, and killed about three hundred normal dudes with guns. There is a brief mention of vampires being part of this world, but you never fight one. The setting was perfect for confrontations against dozens of types of supernatural beings, but due to time constraints and the possible fact they were keeping some of the surprises for a sequel, all you have is a handful of really boring fights against a few lycanthropes. That’s basically it.

Still, I was able to have a good time with the game, despite its metric barrage of issues. Maybe I expected so little of it, due to the internet’s campaign of hatred towards it over the past ten years, that finding out it was just merely “alright” made me leave my play session feeling somewhat pleased with it. There’s also the fact I paid a mere five bucks for it, on a random PSN sale over the years (and I had totally forgotten about having this game in my library), so I may have felt that, for a small pricetag, The Order: 1886 is fine. Now, had I paid full price for it back in 2015, I am pretty sure I would have legit hated it. Besides its many flaws, there’s just no reason to replay it after the credits roll. Nothing is unlocked. One playthrough, and you’re done.

A final pretty pic for a pretty, shallow, but still somewhat enjoyable game. At least for the pricetag of like ten bucks.

After finally playing the now decade-old The Order: 1886, what do I think about it? Is it really worthy of all the hate it has received over the past decade? Or is it some kind of hidden gem? I honestly think it falls somewhere in the middle. I loved the setting, the story is initially fine, the combat isn’t half-bad, and the potential for some awesome world building was there. It was all bogged down by too much ambition against a tight deadline, as well as poor marketing. As a result, it’s short, full of plotholes, infested with QTEs, and not exactly memorable as a whole. As a game you can grab for less than ten bucks today, I absolutely think it’s worth checking out. It’s one hell of a wasted potential, but for such a discount, I had some fun with it, and I’m sure you will too.