// PC GAMER — GAMING
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn turns the best Mass Effect mission into an entire game
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I played an hour of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn at Gamescom, and despite doing it in a sweltering room with a dev judging me for every death, I came away pretty impressed. It deserves to stand on its own merits, but unfortunately I am about to talk about Mass Effect quite a lot—it's hard not to.
Like the BioWare of old, Owlcat is an isometric CRPG developer now trying its hand at a cinematic third-person RPG, which turns into a cover-heavy squad-based shooter when the guns come out. Mass Effect, then, is an obvious point of comparison.
But it's a comparison that serves The Expanse well, because in the short time I played it, I saw a multitude of ways in which it has improved upon BioWare's formula. How it handles exploration, combat and crew interactions makes me think, if it can keep it up, that The Expanse is going to make Mass Effect diehards extremely happy, without leaving Owlcat's CRPG fans out in the cold.
We already wrote about The Expanse's hi-tech fights after checking it out in April. "I was worried Owlcat couldn't pull off Mass Effect-style cinematic action in its big new RPG, but after an hour of blowing stuff up in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, I'm feeling very reassured," Robin said back then. And I'm feeling the same way.
Mass Effect took three games to get its shooting up to snuff, but The Expanse might have nailed it on the first go. It's more responsive, varied, and you can order your teammates to pull off some explosively neat tricks. They're called exploits, and depending on who you have in your three-person squad, you'll see different parts of the environment highlighted in red—these are places where your pals can do their thing.
J, my identical twin who serves as the first companion, seems to mostly enjoy blowing things up. Usually that means cover. I was fighting Protogen goons—the villainous Earth corporation—and took every opportunity to stop them from cowardly hiding behind walls. But I also used J to take out bridges, a lift and other objects, with each instance rewarding me with a spectacular explosion and some dead foes.
Another companion sows chaos with their technical knowledge. If there are wires running underneath the floor in a combat area, they can electrify the floor and swiftly take out a bunch of enemies.
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Not that I needed any help electrocuting people. I was playing as the engineer class, which allowed me to deploy turrets and drones. Midway through the demo, I got access to a new type of drone that could stun foes, which was a real game-changer when I started encountering dudes with flamethrowers that seemed to ignore cover. A quick stun, a bullet in the head, job done.