I thought after playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which I adored, that I’d follow up with The Expanse: A Telltale Series. I’m a fan of both series and The Expanse seems just as well suited to the format, I’ve enjoyed the other Telltale games I’ve played and I really like Camina Drummer. Recipe for a slam dunk.
Off the bat, The Expanse has a lot of advantages over Resurgence. It’s far better on a technical level - it never crashed, I didn’t have any visual bugs, I didn’t have any performance problems and there were no input issues. All things Resurgence was rife with.
But here’s where the problems start. The Expanse, in a technical sense, is better graphically. It doesn’t look better though. It’s just creatively kind of dull. This is going to be a running theme with the game - it suffers any time an artistic choice had to be made.
There’s only a brief moment in the first episode - of five - where we escape the uninspired industrial corridors. You might point out those industrial corridors are part of the show’s aesthetic, but they don’t convey the same details about how these machines work and how the people live in them. They miss details like how the decks are laid out in relation to the direction of thrust, and are weirdly wide rather than that utilitarian claustrophobia. The show also had no problem finding spectacular space vistas that are largely absent here.
But visuals are not why we are here. It’s the story, right? But for the first time in any Expanse media - from the books, novellas, show, etc - I was incredibly bored. None of these characters are remotely interesting. The Camina I know is intense, driven and decisive. This Camina is unsure, anxious and just all around unimpressive. The politics are gone - not that the faction don’t get a lot of lip service, but everything said is incredibly surface level and dull.
The game is blatantly obvious in how it forces outcomes regardless of choice. I was particularly frustrated when I shot a mutinous crew member multiple times, saw him floating limp in space, only for him to teleport mere moments later and have a gun pointed at another crew member again. I had these whiplash moments pretty often, where it felt like there needed to be an intermediary set up scene but instead we just awkwardly jump to something.
More important than decisions in story outcomes is stuff you find while exploring. People live or die based on these. Except you have no idea whether clicking something or walking somewhere is going to trigger a cutscene that’ll push you past a threshold where you can’t return to find something. Locations of items rely on moon logic - you don’t find meds in any of the med bays you go through, you them on a random crate floating in space. The result is an anxiety over whether you’ll miss something, and butchered pacing as you aimlessly walk around trying to find these things that could be anywhere.
The voice acting is sadly sub par. I really liked Camina’s actress in the show, but she sounds like she is phoning it in here. The others aren’t any better. The belter accents were particularly awkward.
It feels weird to talk about game play in this genre, but with dialogue choices this weak I couldn’t help but notice how much worse The Expanse’s were. There is a lot of tedious filler walking, jarring video game-y avoiding patrolling “drones” with comical red laser beam search lights and holding a button until a thing is collected. Resurgence had plenty of issues in this regard but, to it’s credit, it mostly just cut to the next scene (at least in the first half).
The one puzzle I remember was moon logic. You need to work out a password, which is connecting a series of shapes, and are encouraged to look around the environment for shapes that might have been important to the previous inhabitants. Is it any of the pseudo-religious iconography? Anything of sentimental importance? No, it’s the path of the silly connect the power lines chore you did earlier.
Ugh, I could go on. This is already way longer than anyone should read. The TL;DR is The Expanse gets a 3/10 for me, compared to Resurgence at a 9/10. It should have been an easy passing grade given my investment in the series and it’s suitability for this format but it’s just so creatively bankrupt.
Diablo 3: Season 30 - Still working on the Destroyer chapter. Thinking about trying out a different build for my Monk, so I'm farming Nephalem Rifts and gambling blood shards at Kadala for specific legendary items.
Alan Wake 2 - Finally finished The Final Draft aka new game plus. Very happy that I replayed it immediately, because the ending made it worth it. Even with all the problems this game has, I'm eager to see what comes next. There's been a patch that just came out that apparently fixes a lot of bugs, but I finished the game too soon to see any of it.
Diablo 4: Season 3 - Working on Chapter 4 of the season journey and my endgame Barbarian build. Finally moved myself to World Tier 3 because things were getting too easy. I did have a little trouble until I got better gear, and now things are back to being easy again lol. If I get too comfortable, I might have to attempt the capstone dungeon for World Tier 4 to humble myself. Either that or face one of the endgame bosses on my own.
Vampyr - Been having a shit couple days and decided the best way to combat it was by being a moody vampire doctor running around London.
I played a few hours of Palworld, and it's serving the role of a podcast or second-screen game quite well. It's still early goings, and I'm around level 10 or so, but it's doing for me what Pokemon hasn't done in decades while simultaneously combining it with aspects I really enjoy from Factorio.
I'm also coming close to the end of Pillars of Eternity, I think. I'm in the second DLC, and I hit a huge difficulty spike, as quests available around my level have seemingly started to dry up, but I ended up grinding a few bounties and got to level 14, which got me over one difficulty spike and hopefully paved the way to keep me moving.
Besides that, I picked up Tekken 8. This is the most I've enjoyed Tekken since the third game, and I also think I'm done with it. A lot of the game makes sense to me in a way that Tekken 7 didn't, and I've come to respect it more than its predecessor for that and other reasons, but I don't think it's for me as far as being a fighting game I'd like to compete in. I can see the path to improving from here, and it looks like a lot of memorization rather than application, where I just need to know what each move or string looks like to be ready to defend it, and until I reach that point, it's just a lot of frustration. So instead, I choose to avoid that frustration and go back to fighters that I enjoy more. It's a lot of fun at a casual level and in single player mode though.
LBreakout[1] is the best Arkanoid clone, period. There has been many attempts by Taito (or Square Enix by proxy) to reboot the franchise but each of their releases just flopped terribly because they keep removing features that people come back to Arkanoid for (the latest PC release, Eternal Battle, has no level editor). In similar vein is Apotris[2] (whose developer is being hunted by the Tetris Company like a fugitive the last few months) is the greatest iteration of Tetris IMO, and it is open-source and developed by a one-man team.
Definitely throw in my hat for Hidden and Dangerous 2. It has by the the most varied environments of any shooter I’ve played. Everything from icebergs, pacific jungles, forests, fjords, deserts, mountains, no man’s lands, and more.
As a kid I liked the original Deadly Dozen, but I’ve tried replaying it about 10 years ago, and realized that the only reason it ever worked was because of save-scumming.
Nier Automata on the Switch, it is the only version I have played so far I think it is a great port… The anime motivated me to get around this title BTW (I think it is usually the other way around) so far I like it, even if it is the same genre that seems to reign the gaming market nowadays, open world action RPG…
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