The Expanse: Osiris Reborn's beta lacks the show's gravitas but does enough to keep me invested

Fans of The Expanse and Mass Effect will be very pleased to try The Expanse: Osiris Reborn beta (available to play now for people who bought the Miller’s Pack or Collector’s Edition of the game). It's a spacey cover shooter at heart, but between the bullets there are long dialogue options to wade through, endless boxes and lockers to turn over for crafting resources, and enough skills, choices and options to keep you busy. There's also a decent level of actual consequence to what you say and do - as one of my playthroughs didn't end with a friend being executed and hundreds of people dead, and one of them did. Basically, it sucks if you were in my 'just be rude and shoot everyone' run.

Set against the TV show and book's backdrop of space travelling, politics and encroaching ancient alien infestations, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is currently a game where no one bit it is amazing but there's enough OK stuff to make for a decent piece of sci-fi action overall (and this beta is to help gather feedback and hone the experience ahead of its release next year). Combat, for example, can feel a little weightless at times - with some basic enemy AI prone to panicking in cramped fighting areas - but with an ally to control, and different abilities, gadgets, or contextual attacks to unleash, it's still enjoyable. Especially when you can slow the action right down via an 'Active Pause' to look for opportunities, direct attacks and pick options from a radial menu.

Fights in tight space

The real fun comes from playing with combat spaces and the opportunities they present. You can move between cover by targeting areas and holding X to run there, with fights largely about repositioning yourself as you look for angles on enemies and things you can trigger to hurt them. There are panels to hack for explosions, you can blow bits of the environment out to drop things on groups and, in one memorable section, you can call in 40mm autocanon fire from your ship to shred entire sections of a space station you're escaping. Even without specific contextual moments you can use grenades, swarm drones, wrist rockets, direct attacks from your partner and more.

The potential of all these different abilities and contextual options in a firefight could be great if it builds on what's in the beta. It extends to your out-of-combat skills as well: there are two builds to play here - a soldier or hacker - with opportunities that are only available to either choice. There's a whiff of immersive sim to the way you're cut off from certain solutions or paths here if you don't have the right skills. It seems like a game where you can't have everything, adding a pleasingly solid sense of repercussions to the action and exploration that mirrors the story options.

I'm not 100% sold on either the writing or performances at the moment. The female character options fare better in their overall delivery, but dialogue generally can be painfully functional at best. It's especially noticeable when you have the show in the back of your mind, which is dominated by moody, grounded performances and people like Shohreh Aghdashloo absolutely devouring every second of screen time they get.

What makes up for this are the chunky dialogue trees to pick though, where it feels like what you say actually matters. I was worried at one point that it was all smoke and mirrors (a character turns up to help you even if you never meet them beforehand, for example) but as I mentioned, I got a lot of people killed in one playthrough. That alone felt meaningful, but if it has ramifications that echo through the rest of the story then even better.

Universal themes

For fans of the show, Osiris Reborn is set somewhere in between the Eros Incident and the first Rings. For non-fans here's your catch up: The Expanse is set roughly 300 years in the future, where space has been thoroughly colonized. Mars and Earth have fallen out and are constantly on the brink of war, while Belters, the downtrodden working masses that live in space, hate everyone. Into this simmering pot of interplanetary resentment arrives an ancient intergalactic Protomolecule; part infection, part sentient self replicating technology that infests Eros station and crashes it into Venus before starting to build alien tech from bits. But, incredibly, because everyone hates each other, this is far more of a background event than you might think, as Earth, Mars and the Belters circle each other like drunks in a parking lot telling their friends to hold them back.

The game doesn't involve any of the main series characters (that we know of yet) but instead follows a pair of Pinkwater Security operatives who get caught up in the Eros Incident. From events in the beta and bits of the trailer that seems to be setting up a storyline that's likely parallel to the show, dealing with the Protomolucule, and the political frictions of Humanity's splintered factions rubbing up against each other.

That said, the rumbling oppressive pressure of the show is entirely absent here, replaced instead with the brighter jangle of a video game. There are moments that match up - the deadened sounds of gunfire in space as you fight across a space station's hull are a highlight. As is your ship being a shameless stand-in for the series' hero craft, the Rocinante. I enjoyed it largely because I loved the show and welcomed the chance to inhabit that world, even in a game that has a very competent 2015 feel to its press button cover runs and tight closeup text box conversations. There's a 7/10 feel to it so far, but the kind of 7/10 that you'll play easily for the 30 or so hours developer Owlcat say the final game will last, without so much as blinking.

If you're looking for something to play ahead of Osiris Reborn, the same developer made one of the best CRPGs