When The Order: 1886 was announced, I didn't care too much about it. It didn't really look like a game that would interest me. I didn't hear a lot of buzz about it and honestly I didn't even know what the game was. I mean I saw some screenshots and thought it looked nice but that was about it.

Then the game came out and got slammed pretty hard. It sits on a Metacritic score of 63, which isn't the worst score, but it's certainly not good. It has more positive reviews than negative, but more mixed reviews than positive.

I saw this, I watched the video reviews and I heard what people were saying. I thought that I had better stay away from it. It sounded like a forcefully narrative driven game that railroaded you into cutscenes at every turn, taking away control and not letting you do anything. A maybe 5 hour long game that would rather tell a story than let you play it.

Eventually, I got bored one day and decided to rent the game. I said, if this thing is as big of a piece of shit as people are saying, I'll at least be able to laugh at it and keep myself entertained for a day, right? Well, not really.

In my first few minutes with the game I mocked it pretty heavily. It was just as story driven as everyone said, it seemed to rather tell a story than let you play it. You get a gun in about the first 5 minutes but it doesn't let you aim it because it's not relevant for the story, so you can't. I thought it was stupid, to be blunt.

Honestly, I was more excited for photo-mode than the game itself. I love being able to sit around for about 5 minutes and take pictures of the game. I was very surprised to learn that you can actually play the entire game in photo-mode. Adjust the lighting, the filter, the blur, motion blur, and everything will stay that way, allowing you to customize the gaming movie going experience.

Photo-mode allows for hours of fun trying to get Galahad to make stupid faces.

Honestly, my knee-jerk reaction to the early game was not positive. There were a lot of moments where the game tells you "LOOK AT THESE GRAPHICS, AREN'T THEY SO PRETTY!?" when I just wanted to get my gun and shoot a fucking werewolf.

But when the action did get going, I was taken aback by how fun it was. The shooting felt weighty and powerful. And you could fuck people up with your assortment of guns. For a game that was basically a movie, I did not expect it to play so well.

He does it a lot

But that's when the game would take control. You'd go from these really fun moments of shooting people in their faces and then you'd open a door and no longer be able to run or pull your gun out. These moments would be filled with people talking to you about stuff and the game is almost telling you "IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT SHOOTING, LISTEN TO OUR STORY".

In a short turn of events of I went from feeling surprised about how well the game plays to immediately annoyed at how it takes control away from you for seemingly no reason. Do I need to walk down this hallway where nothing is happening? Can I not just run? Really?

The Order: 1886 is kind of like Heavy Rain. Whereas in Heavy Rain where the entire game was QTE's and the cutscenes were sometimes unintentionally fucking hilarious, The Order is an interactive experience where you watch a lot of cutscenes, do a few QTE's and then shoot guys for a little bit. Like Heavy Rain, there's some jank. The fact that the game will take control away from you and sometimes make you do stupid shit for no reason other than "cuz story duh" is annoying as shit.

And I mean a lot

The Order has quality voice acting, a great story that goes from mythological fantasy to a corporate thriller, and excellent characters. Once I stopped hating on the game because that's what I thought I was supposed to do, I actually started to really enjoy the game. Quite a bit.

Really, with as much problems as The Order has, I think that the game would have been better set at a lower price. I don't think it deserved nearly any of the hate that the game got, and from what I can tell, a lot of the people that hate the game haven't even played it.

A big example of this is the fact that the game took me 11 and a half hours to complete. You can't skip cutscenes and you are gated to what you can do based on the story, so honestly I can't even imagine how people can turn this into a "sub 5 hour game". Yet, I mostly can't even talk about it on the internet because a wave of people suddenly appear calling you a liar and that there's no way it took you 11 hours, that you are an apologist and proceed to shit vitriol all over you.

That's just par for the course with the internet. You get that no matter where you go. It's just, to me, shocking to see this game, of all games, get the brunt of the hate. A game that, while not perfect in any way, is just fine. A completely inoffensive game. Not the best game ever made, not the best of it's kind, maybe a little over-priced, maybe the A.I. rushes you down and kills you immediately in a lot of cases, maybe the shooting is so fun I'd rather just do that then walk down another corridor talking to this person, but a completely fine game.

At the start of the game I was already mocking it endlessly, but by the end of it the game I was completely enthralled. Regardless of the hate that The Order: 1886 got, I think it's the shit.

And the photo-mode isn't bad either!