Biggest discounts, free games, and limited-time offers across every major gaming store.
Never pay full price again.
Overview
The Order: 1886 drops players into an alternate 1886 London where the Knights of the Round Table never disbanded. Instead, they discovered Black Water, a mystical liquid that grants near-immortality and accelerated healing, turning Arthur's original knights into an ageless military order still fighting centuries-old enemies. The result is a PS4 exclusive that leans hard into cinematic presentation, treating every cutscene and gameplay moment as part of a single, unbroken experience.
The game follows Sir Galahad, third knight to carry that title, alongside fellow knights Sir Percival, Lady Igraine, and the Marquis de Lafayette. The squad dynamic is one of the more interesting parts of the setup: Lafayette is technically still an apprentice, Percival serves as the group's elder statesman, and Galahad's complicated relationship with Igraine adds personal stakes to what would otherwise be a straightforward monster-hunting plot. The story pulls in a secondary conflict too, with London's lower classes rising against the aristocracy while the Order sides with the nobility.
The Order: 1886 content image
Gameplay and mechanics
At its core, The Order: 1886 is a cover-based third-person shooter. Players move through largely linear environments, using waist-high obstacles for cover while engaging half-breeds and human enemies with a selection of period-appropriate but fantastical weapons. The standout tools include:
The Order: 1886 content image
- Thermite Rifle: ignites metal particles mid-air, then detonates them
- Arc Induction Lance: channels electricity across multiple targets
- Grenade-mine hybrid launcher with dual detonation modes
- Standard rifles and pistols with period-accurate designs
- Black Water vials for in-combat healing
The shooting is competent without being exceptional. Enemy AI follows predictable patterns, and the game rarely demands the kind of creative problem-solving that pushes cover shooting into memorable territory. What it does offer is a consistent mechanical language that never fights the story pacing.
The Order: 1886 content image
World and setting
Ready At Dawn built an alternate London with genuine attention to detail. The city feels like a place where the industrial revolution arrived twenty years early, with gas lamps sitting alongside wireless communication towers and zeppelin docks. The half-breed mythology runs deep: centuries before the game's events, a small number of humans developed animal traits, triggering a war that human numbers alone couldn't win. The Knights' discovery of Black Water shifted the balance just enough to prevent total collapse, but never enough to actually end the conflict.
The Order: 1886 content image
The historical cameos are a nice touch. Lafayette, the actual French officer who fought in both the French and American Revolutions, appears here as the squad's youngest member despite his real-world birth year of 1757. The game treats his centuries of globe-trotting as character texture rather than just backstory, giving him a lighter energy that offsets the more weathered knights around him.
Visual and audio design
The Order: 1886 arrived in early 2015 as one of the most technically impressive PS4 games at the time. Ready At Dawn rendered the game at a native 1920x800 resolution with cinematic black bars, a deliberate choice that gave the game a film-like aspect ratio. The fog-thick streets of Victorian London, the firelight on ornate architecture, and the character model detail across the four main knights still hold up as a benchmark for atmospheric third-person presentation.
The audio design matches the visual ambition. Weapons sound heavy and mechanical, the half-breeds communicate in unsettling animal-human hybrid sounds, and the orchestral score shifts between tense industrial textures and more classical arrangements depending on whether the scene calls for action or weight. The voice performances across the main cast are consistently strong, which matters for a game that spends a significant portion of its runtime in cutscenes.
The Order: 1886 is a short, dense experience that prioritizes story and atmosphere over mechanical complexity or replay value. Players who want a cinematic adventure shooter set in one of gaming's more original alternate histories will find something genuinely worth their time here.