Reviews
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Review
This game is a short (7-8 hours), linear story-driven action game. It has a high cut scene to action ratio. This is not a good game. It’s not a completely terrible game either, there were some things to like about this game. Here are the main things I didn’t like about it:
Incredibly slow movement when not in combat. The game starts off on the wrong foot here with one of those “the character is hurt and so you stagger slowly” sequences that lasts for the entirety of the tutorial/prologue. When you’re healed you’re not much faster—your character just lopes around everywhere. You can move faster with R3, but even strafing pops you back to slow walk mode, so it’s only really useful on straightaways.
Insta-death-on-alert stealth sequences with no checkpoints. There are 2 of these! I love stealth but the one where you have to find a key on a guard was infuriating. It’s set in a garden, it’s pitch black and so it’s very difficult to see where the corners are until the lantern holding guards come near you and then it’s too late if you’re not quite hidden. The movement is even slower than normal and the game keeps automatically putting you in cover which makes getting around corners a real chore.
QTE boss battles, and really just QTEs in general. Oh I hit the wrong button and now I died and have to reload. Fun. To the game’s credit, the checkpoints around QTEs are generous—you usually just get to retry the one you missed and not the entire sequence.
The story ends abruptly without any real resolution! The main bad guy is at large! I was shocked when credits rolled after what I assumed was the 2nd to last boss. Maybe they were hoping this would be a huge game and have lots of sequels? “The Order | 1887” or 1890 or 1920? Either way it didn’t happen and the story suffers tremendously.
The story was predictable. The prologue/tutorial sequence has you being tortured and then escaping from your captors. This then time shifts back in the first chapter and hey!, you’re friends with all your captors? How did this happen? Oh hey, you catch a glimpse of the evil rebel leader—I’m sure you’ll never end up siding with them!
Pointless in world trinkets. When you’re not in an action sequence there are things lying around the world—newspapers, audio logs, photographs, handwritten letters, plain objects. You can pick them up turn them over in your hand, look at the backs… but none of them matter in the slightest. They also don’t translate them like most games do now—so I gave up reading the handwritten notes/letters since they’re all in cursive which is just unreadable to me. The objects were the most baffling—none that I saw seemed to relate to the story at all. I think they were all just flavor? Also the audio logs are only listenable in menu, grrrr.
They introduce enemies that can 2 shot you midway through the game. They mercifully use them sparingly until the end, but they are annoying—any battle they were in ended up with me dying on the first run. I had to memorize when they would be spawning and take care of them early or else I’d surely be playing that part again.
It’s not all bad. Here are a couple things I thought the game did well:
It’s exceptionally pretty, especially considering it’s a PS4 game from 2014. I’ve seen worse facial animation on current gen games. The textures are high quality, and the world generally looks very good (drab palette notwithstanding).
The shooting is mostly ok.
Gun designs were inventive. The charged lightning gun was interesting, and mostly a one hit kill, but the real standout to me was the thermite gun—the normal trigger shoots a mist of thermite at the enemy and then the alt fire fires a flare that ignites it, lighting anyone near it on fire. This never ceased being fun.
Over all though, I’d recommend giving it a pass. I bought it on sale for $9.99 and even that feels like too much to spend.