It’s early days for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, but I can say confidently after an hour with a beta version that I don’t want to have sex with anybody in it. The TV show (I’ve not read the books – bite me, beltalowda) has a terrific cast of seasoned character actors portraying cheesy, hard-wearing oddballs from all around a colonised, fiercely class-divided solar system. Owlcat’s third-person RPG adaptation is set alongside the events of the show’s first season, and you catch wind of the Canterbury’s destruction and mysterious events on Eos in newscasts, while exploring the beta level: a wheel-shaped Pinkwater mercenary spacebase off the shoulder of Jupiter.
It certainly has the ‘hard scifi’ texture of the Expanse. Artificial gravity, for example, is the beta’s star attraction: later on, following the arrival of a demonic Protogen hit squad, you’ll exit the station and shoot your way across its hull, on layouts that curve dizzyingly without sabotaging (or really energising) the formulaic cover-shooting. There’s also an optional treasure room you can unlock by trotting around coils of machinery in your mag boots.
The tech is appropriately rough-and-ready: scuffed helmets, meshed recesses, fizzy holoscreens, a canny tempering of Owlcat’s work in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. While progress through the station is largely linear, there are a few opportunities to scurry around small warrens of world-building, enjoying the ambience – barracks with pin-up posters that hide a secret, revealed by a shrink-the-circle searching minigame, and some hackable terminals full of blueprints and security reports and the like.
It feels like The Expanse, just about, but the characters are a disappointment. They are milky reflections who mouth the vernacular of Belters, Earthers, and Martians as though struggling to convince themselves that they belong here. There’s none of the strut and sizzle you get from Cara Gee’s Drummer, none of the himbo axe-murderer charm of Wes Chatham’s Amos. There’s nobody in the Osiris Reborn beta like Thomas Jane’s greasy Chandler knock-off Detective Miller, or Burn Gorman’s reptilian enforcer Murtry. What I’ve glimpsed of the seven-person core team has all the stage presence and shaggability of a bowl of Weetabix.
Owlcat are obviously channelling the OG Mass Effect trilogy here. There’s the same over-the-shoulder perspective, the same primary-secondary gun alternation, the same arsenal of supporting tech magic, with context-prompted companion abilities serving as a wildcard. In practice, however, the default version of Osiris Reborn’s customisable protagonist reminds me less of Shepard than Ryder, the anodyne lead of Mass Effect Andromeda, whom I cherish mostly because her head kept trying to unscrew itself and fly away.
Your character in Osiris Reborn doesn’t have any bugs like those. Instead, dialogue is lent frisson by eerily exact mouth and facial capture that feels slightly out of synch with the rest of your body, as though your lips and jaws hail from a different dimension. I’m sure many of you will find the fidelity impressive, but it wigged me out. I think it would be less jarring if fewer people in Osiris Reborn had perfect gloss and teeth. Somebody’s been looksmaxxing these poor devils. It only adds to the uncanniness that your principle sidekick is your twin.
The beta gives you a choice of backgrounds, including Belter and Earther, but these feel like light variations on the same, sanded-down omni-tool hero or heroine who speaks in barks and platitudes. Here is some sample protagonist dialogue: “You know, it used to be that the infinity of space terrified me. When I realised that, actually, it’s freedom.” Fuck off, grasshopper. I am fervently hoping that the character editor and branching script will let me kick a few wrinkles and shadows into this pandering plasticine effigy. I’m probably being uncharitable – again, this is the default character in a beta build, and the TV show has its share of howlers – but please consider that I was crying with laughter when I accidentally dinged off a girder during an emergency spacewalk, interrupting some sciency dialogue about “the Corilois force” and punting myself into the void. Oh darn, thar she goes!
The branching dialogue isn’t awful, but none of the people I’ve met seem real. I think it’s partly that there’s a discreet Chosen One template in operation, with other characters dutifully making room for you regardless of their stature. There’s an Irish space station chief, for example, who is portrayed as a ball-buster, but proves weirdly easy to bully, though this could reflect an overclocked Persuasion preset in the beta build. After bawling you out for being a loose cannon, he merrily offers to sacrifice his crew to the powersuited killers you’ve led to his door, while you make your escape. You also get the opportunity to fill in your own backstory by indulging a storekeeper’s desire for gossip, which mostly serves to illustrate that you are not very interesting. I’ll be honest, I can’t remember the bulk of it. I think there’s some rumour that I like drinking juice before entering zero-G?
As for combat, the blend of taking cover, peek-shooting and power usage hangs together well enough, but there isn’t a standout element. The enemies are unexciting and almost sheepish in their adherence to archetype, ranging from folks with power shields who run at you like idiots, to folks with rifles who lethargically reposition when flanked. Your companions are less forgettable only because you’ll see prompts with portraits when aiming at something they can use for a context-sensitive kill. There are a few dudes in armour who take a moment to whittle down, and the occasional grenade with an AOE warning indicator to keep you on your pins.
You can destroy a lot of the scenery, and the artificial gravity element does give it a certain splendour. I’m impressed that Owlcat, a studio known for turn-based top-down battles, have managed to stitch together a fluid third-person shooter, but in itself, this is extremely by the numbers. Although speaking of numbers, complexity could arrive in the form of upgrades and unlocks. Owlcat games are notorious for letting you chain together skills and passives into frightful, turn-extending carnivals of knock-on effects.
I’ll be surprised if Osiris Reborn is as fiendish on this front as Rogue Trader, but you’ve got four combat skill trees to pick from, plus two smaller exploration unlock paths, a personal trait, and a choice of guns with varying stats. Care of your Twin Bond, you’ll get +1 for your weakest skill when your sibling is present. Perhaps once you have a full crew, the combat will develop more of a feeling of alchemy.
Still, this doesn’t strike me as a stunner. There’s something hesitant and dutiful about it, next to the palpable enthusiasm of Owlcat’s work on Warhammer. Look at the boxart: everything and everybody seems so clean and clear-cut, like they’re all inwardly played by Henry Cavill before his Geralt phase. You can try out the Osiris Reborn beta yourself from today, but you’ll have to preorder first. We advise against pre-ordering in general, and this definitely feels like an asteroid colony to monitor from afar.
