TechRadar Preview: The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Feels Like an Xbox 360-Era Cover Shooter

TechRadar said Osiris Reborn drew on nine books and six seasons of acclaimed television, making it a likely candidate for a deep, narrative-led role-playing experience. Instead, the preview described a game that starts from the Phoebe incident and is set between Season 1 and Season 2 of the TV series, within the first two books.

Lead level designer Natalia Turina told TechRadar: "We start the game from the Phoebe incident... It's set between Season 1 and Season 2 of the TV series... within the first two books." In the demo, the player protagonist and her twin, J, infiltrate a space station owned by the shady private military corporation Protogen. After a recent shipjacking by their crew, the duo sneaks into enemy territory to delete virtual evidence of the shipjacking from Protogen servers and escape.

TechRadar wrote that the fiction of The Expanse promises a complex future, but playing Osiris Reborn felt like traveling back into console gaming's beige-looking past. The demo involved inspecting a busy cargo ship undercover, ducking and weaving between armed enemy forces without arousing suspicion, eavesdropping on ship personnel, and heading to the ship's computers. The preview said this should have been a masterclass in tension and subterfuge, but the tasks instead involved walking back and forth between computer terminals and learning the minutiae of intergalactic shipping logistics.

Turina defended the environmental detail. "For choices in an RPG to feel meaningful, you need to believe in this world," she said. "Every space needs to make sense — what is this place, how does it operate? This is why we spend so much time on the environment." TechRadar said the answer made sense on paper, but the lore nuggets uncovered during the demo were not exciting, though the world was rich in detail.

After more perfunctory dialogue, the player's cover is blown. As the alarm sounds and the station is alerted, a squad from a rival militia faction breaches the airlock, and the formerly mundane depot erupts into gunfire. TechRadar said combat fares better than world-building. The firefights feel part Gears of War and part Binary Domain, with a retro 2010 feel for better and worse. The player sprints between cover, deploys a drone, blind-fires into heavily armored mercenaries, swaps between an assault rifle and shotgun, tosses grenades at advancing militia, and shatters glass over crouching enemies. Players can change specialisms on the fly and tweak their tactical approach through extensive skill trees, according to the preview.

Still, TechRadar said the combat felt functional and enjoyable but not dynamic enough to rise above the Xbox 360 era of cover shooters, let alone compete with modern peers. Character interactions also struggled. When the player encounters a lone marine whose hardened status is signaled mainly by relentless swearing, the protagonist and her companion accept him as an ally almost immediately despite being deep in enemy territory and under fire from multiple forces. TechRadar called it a jarring, immersion-breaking moment and said characterization and dialogue currently feel paper-thin.

A late-demo pivot sees the player stalked by a Protogen-developed experimental mutant that broke containment amid the gunfire. The creature is impervious to bullets and forces a frantic sprint down half-lit corridors, according to the preview. TechRadar's hands-on impression was that Osiris Reborn's lavish environments carry granular detail, but its dialogue, characters, and combat so far do not deliver the narrative-led Mass Effect revival the source material might have suggested.