It's quite heavy on exposition to begin with, but I found myself warming to this lot regardless, even if a lot of the opening episode is mostly on rails. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Telltale Gamesįor the most part, each scene barrels along at a good clip, and the crew's well-established banter makes it easy to see where everyone fits in. Here's hoping this isn't a sign of what's to come for you and your own crew. When you arrive on the ship, it's clear something's gone very wrong with the previous crew. Finally, there's the very sound egg that is Virgil the doctor, whose cool head and rational approach to problem solving is a welcome balm amid the tensions elsewhere. There's also Maya, who's quite good pals with Drummer, and I suspect their obvious bias towards one another will become a source of contention with the crew later on. Belter twins Arlen and Rayen, meanwhile, are affable but chaotic humans constantly getting into trouble, and in this episode are the main fulcrums for the bigger story decisions. Your pilot Khan clearly thinks you're a royal pain in her ass, but she's tough as nails and the option to riff off her insults feels like the start of a begrudging but mutual respect. You only really get a single character beat with each of them in this opening episode, but the seeds of future conflicts are sown reasonably well. The crew introductions are playfully done. But as the game steadily introduces them to you one by one, it's clear that some of these people probably deserve their own cut - because this job is of course extremely bad news right from the off. No need to worry about the rest of the crew, Cox assures you - they're just here to get paid. It begins like any great heist story - the promise of 'a job to end all jobs', and an equal split of the spoils between you, Drummer, and your boss Cox, who's the captain of a Belter scavenger ship called The Artemis. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Telltale Games I'm still not particularly enamoured with The Expanse's Belter slang, but I get that it's an established part of the books and the show, and most of the time it was fairly easy to follow along with what it all meant. It does a reasonable job of laying down what I hope is some good groundwork for the origin story for TV favourite Camina Drummer, and her fellow crewmates are a fun, bubbling pressure cooker of personalities just waiting to spill over into conflict, but I do also worry that the game will have the same truncated fate as my attempts to watch the show. Still, its centrepiece of exploring a big exploded battleship to find some sort of money-printing macguffin is also like such a sedate, threat-free version of Dead Space that it can't help but feel a little lightweight at the same time - and that's not just because you're floating around in zero gravity for half of it. As you'd perhaps expect from a first episode, the plot scales lean heavily toward setup here as opposed to actionable 'so and so will remember that' choices. The Expanse: A Telltale Series started the fortnightly release of its five episodes on the Epic Games Store last week, and I played through the first, Archer's Paradox, over the weekend. One day, though, I do hope to finish the first season of The Expanse, and my ideal scenario is for the episodic prequel game from Telltale and current Life Is Stange custodians Deck Nine to be just the kick up the bum I need to get through it. We get a couple of episodes in, determined to make it a little bit further than we did before, but there's just something about it that can't quite hold our interest long enough to properly stick with it. Matthew (RPS in peace) and I keep hearing great things about it, but every attempt we make has always ended the same way. The Expanse is one of those TV shows that I've started to watch about three times now.
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