The Order: 1886

The Order: 1886 makes a lot of promises it doesn’t intend to keep, leaving so many elements underdeveloped that it ends up feeling like the first couple of episodes of a TV series, instead of the full season.

The game opens in media res, during a prison escape. The protagonist, Grayson, is being tortured by two English soldiers, who are drowning him, intending to extract information about his collaborators. The scene goes into a first-person view each time Grayson is put underwater to make his suffering more impactful, but a simple button press is all it takes for him to fight back and even drown one of his torturers – in a gruesome touch of revenge. When he escapes prison, the narrative goes back in time to show us why he was there in the first place: he apparently betrayed the Order of Her Majesty’s Royal Knights, which he was a part of, going by the moniker of Sir Galahad.

His Arthurian name is quite appropriate, since the Order actually gathers at a round table and their leader is even said to have fought alongside Arthur himself – they drink magical stuff to live longer, of course. The setting, however, is Victorian London (it takes place in 1886 if you can believe it), and these knights now wield special guns crafted by Nikola Tesla himself in order to fight against supernatural creatures – mainly werewolves.

It’s very curious, then, the fact that the majority of enemies we face in the game are not werewolves, vampires, zombies, or anything of the kind. No, we shoot down normal human beings: soldiers, brigands, thieves, and the like. Grayson’s Order may have been created to dispatch supernatural monsters, but that doesn’t translate into the gameplay at all, as the usual gunfights are only about dispatching some quite natural thugs. Despite its premise, The Order 1886 ditches the fantastic when it comes to the actual third-person shooting and plays just like a typical cover shooter with furless, fangless enemies, as werewolves are limited to just two types of scripted fights.

The first one has Grayson in a room with werewolves coming at him one at a time. So, we shoot them when they come running or dodge their attacks when the right prompt appears on the screen: now rinse and repeat. Eventually, the beasts fall down, and we have to come to them, close and personal, and finish the job with a knife – for reasons unknown, as it doesn’t add anything to the battle. Sounds exciting? Well, it isn’t.

The second type of scripted fight is even more dull, as Grayson abandons the gun and just duels with a knife, again in a scripted fight, where we have to dodge each time, the prompt appears on the screen, and press the attack button at all other times, without even having to aim now.  In other words, the same thing as before, but now always up close and personal. These are encounters that abandon the main draw of a cover shooter – the cover, if you must know – and offer what basically amounts to quick-time events in return.

The fact that the game doesn’t make good use of its supernatural premise is just a symptom of the overall issue that plagues The Order: 1886: every element here is underused and underdeveloped – regarding both gameplay and story.

Let’s get back to Grayson. The story, after all, is about why he turned against his colleagues. Sir Galahad is the usual protagonist of a shooter: a white man with a gruff voice who embraces violence, trivializing the impact of his actions. After clearing a floor of human beings, killing them all, Grayson really says, “Just a regular London morning.” Sounds like a cop, all right.

He’s righteous, believing that his enemies are one-dimensional monsters and that all who oppose his beloved Order are terrorists who want nothing more than to sow chaos and anarchy. The game’s first half is all about showing this side of Grayson: he’s set against rebels who intend to strike at the heart of England, and he intends to kill them all on sight and ask questions later. His mentor, Sir Percival, is up to something, however – Galahad often spots him at a distance speaking with strange individuals and suspects something shady may be afoot.

As it happens with most righteous characters, the events in the story push Grayson to realize that the world is not as black and white as he thought, and that some of his enemies are not that monstrous after all. Sounds great, but the way this is portrayed in The Order: 1886 is considerably problematic.

First, there’s the big reveal behind Grayson’s change of heart. Without disclosing specific details, it involves a supernatural element that we, the players, barely even realized existed in that universe – even though Grayson clearly did – which makes the whole reveal lose a lot of its impact. To make matters worse, this element is dropped soon after the scene, with the knight never having to deal with it again. In other words, the key element that makes the protagonist change his mind and betray his Order not only comes out of nowhere but is also never seen again.

Grayson also makes a lot of annoying decisions that make no sense whatsoever and are there just to conveniently move the narrative along or create artificial moments of tension. After the big reveal, for example, he decides it’s a good idea to keep things close to his chest, denying his friends any kind of explanation – even though some of them could help him. Not only that, but when the leader of his Order outright says that he will refuse to even investigate the matter, Grayson never stops to ponder how suspicious that is, and still prefers to keep his colleagues in the dark. As most characters in Fargo would say, “Okay, then.”

Take the moment when he’s deemed a traitor to the Order and sent to prison: during the trial, Grayson could very well have made his accusations public, but chooses to remain silent. Why? Well, he’s not being threatened, so the reveal wouldn’t put his friends in danger – they’re knights just like him and can take care of themselves – and his silence would allow the villains to keep on killing innocent people. Given the nature of the accusations, they’re also easy to prove if anyone bothers to try and, given how grave they are, at least one of the knights would really bother. So, the reason for Grayson’s silence is… hard to understand.

Speaking of things that don’t make sense, things that boggle the mind, the ending here just leaves every major plot point unresolved. The werewolves, the other supernatural element, the rebels, Grayson’s friends, the Order, and even Jack the Ripper, who is introduced at one point for no good reason, they all lead nowhere. The plans of the antagonists have no consequences; there’s no confrontation with a major villain, and the credits suddenly roll. The Order 1886 basically finishes before reaching its real climax, and leaves everything to a sequel that never came.

Gameplay-wise, The Order 1886 plays just like your typical cover shooter, adding nothing new to the mix besides those quick-time events with the werewolves. Grayson goes into corridors and large rooms, finds cover, and shoots his fangless, furless enemies down, sometimes activating slow-motion to help dispatch more of them at the same time. There are some interesting Tesla-designed weapons, such as the one that allows us to fire some smoke and then shoot at it to ignite it, which keep the action from becoming too boring, but there are not nearly enough of them to make a real difference: if you’ve played any third-person cover shooter at all, you’ve already played The Order: 1886.

Levels, for example, are pretty linear and hide some collectibles that vary greatly in quality. The most interesting ones are the newspapers, which help flesh out the world: one tells of the invention of a “truly horseless carriage” while another has a man complaining about the Order of Her Majesty’s Royal Knights, “Make no mistake of it, the Order was born from an age before the signing of the Magna Carta, and their actions reflect it.” The man is commenting on the events of the first mission, when some patients from a mental institution escape and acquire weapons, and instead of subduing them, Grayson, like all great cops, just murders them all and says, “Just a regular London morning.”

On the other end of the spectrum, there are the collectibles that have no reason to exist, such as the objects that Grayson can pick up on shelves and examine closely, but which offer no insight into any subject whatsoever: they are just a waste of time that reward the player with a pointless trophy.

Presentation-wise, The Order: 1886 goes for a cinematic look, adding film grain and even black letterbox bars to the image. It also tries to build a dark and somber mood: fog and smoke fill the streets of London, which means that even during the day, the environments are never welcoming. There’s a great sequence where Galahad investigates a hospital and the place is barely lit, packed with mutilated bodies, giving the scene the feeling of a horror movie – which makes the eventual werewolf fight feel right at home. It’s a pity, then, that the fight plays out the way it does, closing the sequence with a forgettable, glorified quick-time event.

Except for its good looks – and it does indeed look good, for all that’s worth –, The Order: 1886 has nothing going for it. It’s a game marred by a severely undercooked story and repetitive gameplay mechanics.   

June 02, 2026.