The Order: 1886 has released to a middling critical reception, with players bemoaning its gameplay and its apparent issue with viewing itself as a movie more than it does a game.
However, despite these negative opinions something that everyone can agree on is that it is an incredibly beautiful game, one which is surely the pinnacle of what consoles can achieve in terms of graphics right now.
Also See: Santa Monica Dev Threatens to Pull Ads Over Low The Order: 1886 Reviews
Unfortunately it will go down as yet another gorgeous disappointment in an industry which too often opts for visuals over gameplay, something which The Order exemplifies. It’s not the only game to have gone down this path, though. Here are 9 other games that also looked better than they played:
The Order: 1886 and 10 Other Games That Were Gorgeous But Bad
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The Order: 1886
One of the year's biggest releases will now surely go down as one of the year's biggest disappointments, as The Order: 1886 has released to a lukewarm reception with its derivative gameplay, over-reliance upon cutscenes and quick-time events, and an unwarranted fascination with its own story.
The Order: 1886's failings are now well-known, but there's no escaping that it is potentially the best-looking console game we've seen to date. If developer Ready at Dawn would have tried to match its gameplay with its visuals and unique setting we could have had a true classic on our hands here, which makes it even more frustrating that its creators seemed more intent on creating a movie, and not a particularly engrossing one, than they did a game.
Perhaps The Order: 1886 will perform better in terms of sales that its reviews suggest it should and Ready at Dawn will revisit its incredible world with refined gameplay/a better story in tow, but as it stands it's just a very expensive-looking failure.
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Assassin's Creed Unity
Though many of its performance issues have since been improved with patches and the like, Assassin's Creed Unity was a buggy mess when it first released, blighted by framerate issues and odd glitches. Aside from this, it was also thoroughly boring and a far cry from its fantastic predecessor Black Flag.
However, all of these problems were sugar-coated by some of the most powerful graphics yet seen in a video game, with huge crowds of NPCs roaming its streets and a tremendously detailed world that brought its French Revolution Paris setting to life.
Ubisoft completely nailed it when it came to replicating the time period, which makes it even more of a shame that the game the visuals were built around was so unexceptional.
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Beyond: Two Souls
Wannabe video game auteur David Cage veered into self-parody with Beyond: Two Souls, a mess of a game that so desperately wanted to be a film that it decided to take control away from the player at any given opportunity.
Cage's previous game Heavy Rain proved to be divisive due to its abundance of quick-time events and murder mystery plot that was sullied by a wildly nonsensical conclusion, but at least it was fun and offered players a great deal of choices when it came to the direction they wanted the story to take. Beyond: Two Souls merely offered the illusion of choice, coupled with an ending that was even worse than its predecessor's.
With that being said, it was certainly a beautiful game that, alongside The Last of Us, will stand as one of the best visual showcases the PS3 had to offer. The motion-capture technology utilized by Quantic Dream led to the models of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe's characters looking eerily similar to their real-life counterparts, and though we were left with a video game that so desperately wanted to be a movie (and a rather poor one at that), if nothing else it was at least startlingly pretty.
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Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball
One of the weirdest spin-off series in all of gaming is inarguably Dead or Alive's Xtreme Beach Volleyball, which placed the ludicrously proportioned ladies from the fighting game series onto a tropical island and had them playing beach-based mini-games.
Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball had detailed character models (albeit ones specifically catered towards the more lonely player) and excellent, fluid animations that made this otherwise throwaway fluff stand out from the crowd. Xtreme Beach Volleyball wasn't exactly an awful game, but it wasn't a very good one, either, and the reasoning behind its relative success was largely due to its appealing visuals.
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Def Jam: Icon
Def Jam: Fight For NY was essentially Power Stone with rappers, and was every bit as fun and ludicrous as that description suggests. Unfortunately, after developer AKI Corporation handed full control of the series over to EA Chicago, it decided to switch from four-player mayhem to one-on-one action in the form of Def Jam: Icon, losing a lot of its silly charm in the process.
Def Jam could have become a hugely successful franchise for among casual fighting game fans, but Def Jam: Icon essentially forced the series into an early grave. Though it was ultimately harmed by its steps towards realism, with the series' over-the-top grapples and attacks replaced with far less impressive move sets, it made a bold move into uncanny valley with its roster of fighters that still looks pretty impressive to this day.
The likes of Method Man, Big Boi and T.I. all looked very similar to their real-life counterparts, while the destructible environments were seemingly ripped straight from the set of a Michael Bay movie. Given how graphics become much more advanced year-upon-year, that this eight-year-old game still looks good is a testament to how much effort EA Chicago put into Def Jam: Icon's visuals. It's just a shame that its gameplay doesn't match up.
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Ryse: Son of Rome
Much was made of the PS4 being more powerful than the Xbox One prior to the consoles' respective launches, but Microsoft's system certainly had the most impressive looking game when it first made its way to store shelves.
Ryse: Son of Rome was good-looking across the board, with everything from its animations through to its lighting and textures making it one of the most visually breathtaking games we'd seen up until that point. Unfortunately it was also overwhelmingly mundane, and quickly sank into obscurity after both consoles began churning out more games.
It eventually received a PC release which inevitably looked even better than the Xbox One version, but there was no improving that mindlessly dull gameplay.
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Dear Esther
Games such as The Stanley Parable and Gone Home were each wrongly derided as "walking simulators" upon their release due to them limiting player control in favor of placing an emphasis upon exploring their surroundings, and while this rang untrue with both of those titles due to the former using the mechanic as a means of illustrating its intelligent philosophical point, and the latter using it to instead place the player in the center of a riveting story in which limited control makes sense contextually, Dear Esther literally has you doing nothing else other than walking around and listening to a narrator regurgitate a pretentious plot revolving around the mysterious titular character.
There is nothing to do in Dear Esther other than walk, and needless to say it's an altogether dull experience. The one saving grace, however, was its beautiful Hebrides setting and the competence with which developer The Chinese Room successfully replicated it in all of its haunting, foggy glory. Dear Esther wasn't exactly the most riveting of games, though it was made measurably more bearable to play through thanks to its visuals.
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EA Sports UFC
With UFC having gained more and more traction as a legitimate sport over the years, EA decided to give it the full Madden treatment with EA Sports UFC, focusing upon its presentation and providing detailed character models and animations that could easily be mistaken for the real thing.
However, it seemed that so much time was spent on perfecting its visuals that the game itself had been left by the wayside, as it felt thoroughly unfinished in almost every department aside from its graphics.
It's oddly impressive that EA managed to make two men/women beating the hell out of each other so mundane, but EA Sports UFC achieved just that.
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Resident Evil 5
The point where the Resident Evil series started to go downhill, Resident Evil 5 decided to take the franchise in a more action-oriented direction and failed miserably in doing so.
Abandoning the spooks and scares of previous entries, Resident Evil 5 focused on gunplay and introduced a companion into the mix in the form of Sheva who, unless she's being controlled by a human player, proves to be incredibly annoying and useless when controlled by AI.
While the game's African setting may have been a startling change of environment from Resi's typically foggy and dimly lit surroundings, it at least looked gorgeous even if it wasn't the Resident Evil we know and (used to) love.
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Final Fantasy XIII
Considered by many to be a severe low point in the series, Final Fantasy XIII placed players on a seemingly endless, linear grind that only opened itself up into something more interesting after hours upon hours had been put into it. For many, this was the tipping point in which they decided to give up on hoping that Square Enix could replicate the greatness of the series' early years, with the game seemingly more intent in showing off its visuals than offering players a game they could really sink their teeth into.
There was no mistaking that Final Fantasy XIII was a gorgeous game, though this was actually one of its biggest flaws. Too content with navel-gazing and guiding players around its beautiful world by their hands, FFXIII was one of the most poorly received releases in the series' history and a huge disappointment for its long-time fans.
