IGN gave The Order: 1886 a 6.5 — a decimal-point verdict for a five-hour cutscene.

Let's start with the number, because the number is a crime scene. 6.5. Not 6, not 7 — six-point-five. That decimal is doing an enormous amount of load-bearing work. It's the score equivalent of a witness who saw everything and decided to describe the getaway car as 'a car-ish shape, maybe.' You do not reach for the tenths place unless you want the reader to believe a precision instrument was involved. There was no instrument. There was a vibe and a slider, and the slider got parked exactly halfway between 'gorgeous' and 'why am I holding a controller.'

Here's where the math falls off the table entirely. The review spends roughly its entire body length composing love poetry to the graphics — 'cinematic polish,' 'stylish adventure,' the works — and then docks the game for the exact same cinematic polish it just spent four paragraphs licking. That's not a review, that's a ruler made of soup. You cannot measure a thing by praising it as your prosecution's key witness AND your defense's star exhibit. Pick a lane. The 6.5 is what happens when the top of your review and the bottom of your review stop speaking to each other and communicate only through a divorce lawyer.

And let's talk denominator, because this is where I lose my professional composure. The Order: 1886 is roughly five hours long and a healthy chunk of those five hours is you watching, not you playing. IGN scored the interactive portions of a movie on a ten-point scale designed for games. That's like grading a nap out of ten for 'plot.' You gave 6.5 points to a tech demo wearing a trench coat, then wrote a verdict admitting the trench coat was empty. The score and the sentence beneath it are two men shackled together, both insisting the other one is driving.

The consumer reads '6.5' and thinks 'slightly above the middle, worth a look.' The consumer reads the actual text and learns it's a beautiful hallway with a QTE gift shop. Those two data points cannot both be true, which means one of them is a rounding error and the other is a hostage. Six-point-five out of ten, for a game that is 40% game. The math aint mathing. It never was. It's a calculator that got left out in the rain.