The Expanse: Osiris Reborn's Closed Beta Shows A Clear Vision That I Love

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The very last appointment I had at Gamescom last year was quite possibly one of my favorites. I got to check out The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, an upcoming game from developer Owlcat, which generally makes top-down RPGs like Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader or narrative games like Rue Valley. This third-person RPG caught me off guard, but it ended up being one of the few games there that got me more excited than any other.

While I went into the beta on a clean slate, I have been seeing a lot of people on social media, making comparisons with this game and Mass Effect. What’s crazy is that there are a lot of similarities in the gameplay, and I mean that only in a positive way.

So far, the combat is phenomenal. The third-person real-time shooting feels snappy and impactful, and giving orders is relatively seamless and can change the outcome of the fight. As a fan of the Mass Effect games, it all felt very familiar in all the right ways, but The Expanse: Osiris Reborn takes it a couple of steps further, which makes the entire experience feel more dynamic, engaging, and explosive.

My favorite change has to be with the environment. Not only can you order your team to use certain abilities on other enemies, but you can also find certain elements of the environment that you can order your team to utilize. Whether it be an explosive canister behind them or something on the ceiling that can drop onto the enemies, you and your team can use the environment to your advantage. And the environments are somewhat destructible, so we can throw a grenade and destroy cover and see our shots chip away at the wall or damage screens.

What makes the destructible environments so much better is zero gravity combat. In the beta, we got to try our combat both inside the station and outside of it, and that’s where I had some jaw-dropping moments. While the general action was just as explosive, adding in the flying debris and floating bodies elevated the experience so much further than I expected. I almost died a few times because I was just in awe of all the action happening around me.

As I was looking around the place, I did find a hidden workbench where I could upgrade my guns, and it looks like we’ll be able to use materials to upgrade guns and fabricate items. The beta is short, so I wasn’t able to see much of it yet, but it looks like each gun and ability is going to have different ways to upgrade it.

And because The Expanse: Osiris Reborn's beta is on the short side, I only got a little look at the story and how it’s going to be told. The beta starts off with us having gotten away from a place called Eros, where the rest of our crew was killed. We end up on the run from Pinkwater, who finds us as we are reporting to our boss about what happened. From what I can tell, the voice acting is solid, and the story is going to be quite interesting. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the rest of it unfolds as it continues.

And it seems like there’s also going to be some branching pathways, with appropriate skill checks, on top of it. There weren’t many moments where I could change what we were going to do, but there was one where we needed to get away from this giant ship, and we had the choice to wait for help or go back into the station in a different sector. So I expect there to be other choices like this that can impact what we do or change the story a bit.

I did test this beta on the Steam Deck, but the game is still extremely early in development, and it hasn’t been optimized at all yet. So, the performance wasn’t great. However, I don’t believe this is because of the hardware, since even the ROG Xbox Ally X struggled. Because of that, we can’t evaluate how it could run on the go just yet.

If the goal from The Expanse: Osiris Reborn beta was to showcase how great this game could be, Owlcat succeeded. The combat is engaging and explosive, the fresh features make it feel more dynamic, and the story and voice acting seem very solid with branching pathways. The visuals were also stunning, even at lower settings. With the beta, I can see the vision that Owlcat has with the game, and they are more than on the right track. If they keep this up, I can see it being one of their best games yet.

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