#EGX2014 Preview: The Order 1886
Ah, The Order: 1886. A much anticipated title of mine for the PS4. Ever since revealed at E3 I have been excited to try out the game for myself, but unluckily haven’t had the chance, that was until EGX 2014. My first thought when queuing up to try out the title, was that I had noticed that the queue wasn’t very big, which was quite surprising considering all the hype around the title. But I later found out why the queue was as short as it was.
Once we got into Sony’s closed in quarters I picked up the pad and began to start The Order, little did I know this was the exact segment/demo shown at Gamescom this year. Of course, I was interested to still play through this segment as I’ve only seen gameplay footage via video. I was immediately disappointed, the action is repetitive of the bat. You are cornered with enemies firing from above; you would think you could just gun them down with ease, considering the machine gun in use is a beastly weapon. However, this is not the case. You have to chuck these Molotov type weapons at the enemies and shoot them as they hit, exploding and causing the enemies to set on fire. This is an interesting aspect though and combining the two is a nice little touch, but repetitive and slow, and doesn’t have all that much of an impact. This doesn’t help the fact that the enemies just keep pouring out, like we have seen in many previous 3rd person shooters. Some people may enjoy fighting waves and waves of enemies until a certain point, but quite frankly it bores me.
If I want that kind of gameplay, I would dust of the 360 and play Gears Of War 2’s horde mode. After about 2 minutes of having a shoot out with enemies that don’t seem to die by the use of the machine gun alone, you are presented with a cutscene, which forces you into a cinematic segment were you have to shoot enemies whilst dragging a fallen ally. This again, has been done before and personally I believe has been done better in other games. Once that is done, you are greeted with another cinematic, then some narrow alleyway shooting. The cinematics are nice and the game looks absolutely stunning, the voice-overs are excellent and the dialogue is interesting, it’s just a shame at this moment in time the gameplay doesn’t seem to be living up to what I was expecting, making everything else feel a bit ‘meh‘.
The only positive I can take away from this preview is just how stunning the game looks, well for a game that is pretty dark and gloomy. I have to say though, if the game releases and features constant segments like the one mentioned above, I can easily see the game being a massive disappointment. Oh, and I’ve forgotten to mention the demo was only 5 minutes long, hence the short queues and hence this short preview. They could have given us the experience of battling the Lycan that we had seen in previous footage, which looks very interesting and tense, but sadly, they let us play a very dull segment which could be the same for the rest of the game. I guess we’ll find out more when The Order: 1886 releases February 20th 2015 exclusively for the PS4.