During an early firefight in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn beta, I paused time, highlighted an enemy, and told my combat partner to blast them with a fire grenade. That’s when it became clear to me that The Expanse: Osiris Reborn was truly trying to be a spiritual continuation of Mass Effect. And after playing the hour-long beta of the upcoming Expanse game, I think the team at Owlcat Games is on the right track for delivering the game Mass Effect fans have wanted for years.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn beta (or demo or whatever you want to call it) released earlier this week for folks who pre-ordered the more expensive versions of the upcoming third-person action-focused space RPG. It’s based on the sci-fi books and TV show and will apparently feature some actors from the show reprising their characters.
As someone who has never seen a second of The Expanse or read a single word of its books, I wasn’t sure if the beta would grab me. But the demo smartly focuses on your main character, your twin sibling, and a very small group of characters on a space station as they deal with the violent ramifications of a failed mission. By the end of the one quest included in the demo, I was invested in learning more about the key players and groups in this universe and wanted to see what happens next. Heck, I might even check out the show now. Synergy!
What I did during that hour or so of the demo will sound very familiar and comfy to anyone who has played Mass Effect. I walked around a space station, chatted up some people, made a few dialogue choices, helped a few people out with tiny problems, opened some crates, and eventually got into some cover-based firefights where I could use a handful of abilities and partner commands to help even the odds. I leveled up at one point and popped a skill point in a skill tree.
All of this feels and plays similarly to Mass Effect, in a good way. As mentioned earlier, you can straight-up pause time and select commands just like in Mass Effect. It’s not the most original sci-fi RPG I’ve played, but then again, a lot of people excited about this game aren’t here for something new. Instead, they want that dish they used to eat all the time before the owners removed it from the menu.
This is a beta, so I’m hesitant to criticize The Expanse’s wonky performance on PS5, but the framerate was all over the place. I also found the cutscene quality to be very uneven. Some were great, others felt unfinished and lacked energy. That’s probably because they are unfinished.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn isn’t a reinvention of the wheel. It is instead an obvious attempt by a studio to build a space RPG to fill the Mass Effect-shaped void that EA and BioWare have been unable or unwilling to fill over the last few years. If the full game is as good as this demo and can offer up more choices and improved performance, Osiris Reborn might just be the comfort food that Mass Effect fans, like myself, have been craving for a long time. And as a bonus, if the devs succeed, Expanse fans will end up with a damn fine RPG. Let’s hope everything works out and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn sticks the landing when it arrives in 2027. Though I’m still concerned about the studio using genAI and will be curious how that affects its final version, too.
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