Thinking about getting The Order 1886

[binary solo]

I'm liking it so far. I have just finished the airship mission been playing it for 3 or 4 hours now (on hard), maybe a bit longer. I've died a few times partly from being stupid, well mostly from being stupid actually. There's nothing I think is bad about the game per se, but there are some odd gameplay design choices which I think could have been done better.

One pet peeve of mine is invisible walls, but this is not unique to The Order so I can't single this game out for having them. But really levels should be able to be designed without having small wooden trolleys be the thing that blocks your path and stops you going towards what is inevitably a dead end anyway.

I'm not a TPS aficionado so I can't really say how the Order is in the TPS department. But I'm OK with the gunfights as they have been. Some of the fights have been perhaps a bit too much like whackamole with the enemy AI being a bit on the dull side, but again I don't think it's been all that much different to other TPS games I've played.

The game isn't exciting enough and the story not engaging enough to make me stay up well past when I should be in bed. But it's pretty good. Some parts of the script are not so great, but again over all the script is pretty good.

In terms of review scores I normally score games lower than critics who seem to like a game as much as I do. Si The Order is heading towards a 7/10 from me. But I think most critics who have about the same opinion of the game would probably be giving it a 7.5 or 8/10. Basically it's a good game but aside from the visuals it doesn't do anything to a great, let alone excellent level. The visuals are great, but even with that there seem to have been some compromises made to achieve the sort of visual performance they have, two notable compromises are, no water splash or ripples when walking through puddles, and no reflections of people in mirrors or glass. When this was first mentioned in a review I thought that perhaps there was a narrative reason why members of the Orde might not reflect. But I got to one place where there were civilian bystanders and their reflections (and Sir Galahad's) did not show. So it's kind of funny that in the pursuit of realism, they have had to do some things that are noticeably unreal.