The Expanse: A Telltale Series (2023 Video Game) User Reviews

Great game how ever Episodes are quite short

[lgikl · 9/10 · 26 October 2023]

I love Deck Nines work and this game lives up to their high standard in the story telling games. The Expanse is some of their best work in my opinion. There is parts of this game that actually make you stop and think.

The game is overall really short. You could probably run through the game in about 4 to 5 hours. My playtime is 6 hours but I spent allot of time wondering round admiring things which the game really makes you want to do. I am not sure if DeckNine or Telltale are the ones who went with the shorter approach.

The story is really good. I haven't personally watched The Expanse TV show. I have started watching a couple episodes since completing this game so not far enough to compare them.

Some of the choices can be quite meaningful as others I couldn't really work out how they effected the game. There is 1 choice which was really well designed. The outcome was the furthest thing you would expect. I didn't even know that it was a choice I made until the end when I went through the list. I really hope we can see more of that in their work in the future.

One thing I really love with Deck Nine and DontNod is at the end you can see all the choices you picked and what percentage of people picked the same thing. Sometimes you will make a choice that not many people chose.

I am personally not a fan of the hole release 1 episode now then the next after and so on. I understand when really small companies or indie titles do this but, I think Telltale is at a point where they can release a full product at once now. I just grabbed the deluxe edition and they all come together. I had an issue on PS5 where the full game didn't download thou. It downloaded 2 episodes and I had to go into the PlayStation menu and download all the rest. Not a big deal, but if it says you need content half way through then check all your episodes downloaded.

An Interesting, Disappointing Experiment

[alexdiflip · 6/10 · 30 September 2023]

Not a terrible game by any means, but definitely nowhere near Telltale's best and a disappointing return for the company.

First of all, the gameplay is great. I enjoyed exploring and using the mechanics involved zero g, but also ultimately felt that many areas were devoid of interesting clues. And the shortage of explorable areas per episode was sorely disappointing.

The general story is alright. It's not really anything special in terms of sci fi, and considering how much is in the realm of possibilities, it's fairly disappointing to see a story so basic. What I WILL say about it is that your decisions do actually matter. Characters will live or die based on your decisions. How that is executed, however, is a different story...

A lot of the characters are very one note, and while I did care about a couple, many of the individual storylines given to these characters is hampered by long gaps where none of them do anything. I was interested in much of the crew, but we barely get to see any. Which speaks also to the whole "all but one can live and all but one can die" thing. They make good on this promise, but the matter of the keeping the characters involved after they are saved...is not handled well. It's unfortunate, since I was impressed with the lengths they were willing to go to make proper consequences with this series. There were many moments that made me regret my decisions, but not nearly enough.

The dialogue is tough to listen to. I know that many insist that this is accurate to the shows universe, but it sounds very stilted to me. Additionally, even when they aren't using the unique curse words of the show, they still talk very generically with each other. No character is truly unique, even the ones I enjoyed.

Overall, not what I was hoping it to be. Telltale can do better.

Yikes

[MamadNobari97 · 3/10 · 6 December 2023]

I honestly regret playing this game, and feel like giving it a 3 is way too generous!

I already don't really care for The Expanse universe that much. I appreciate the effort that went into the story from the writers of the book and all the efforts that went into making that show, but for the life of me, I can't really get into this universe and care much about what's happening in it or its characters.

And this game just made everything worse. Bland characters, the shortest episodes ever where practically nothing happens in them, the most useless dialogue options and choices, and the shallowest and most vapid story I've seen in a game. The only silver lining to this game is Cara Gee's return as Camina Drummer and her voice acting. But that alone can't carry a whole game.

What I can't understand, is that if there are so many books about this universe, how could they not find a story about Camina Drummer in them and make a game about them? Why didn't they ask the actual writer to maybe write them a new story or ask a professional writer who can actually come up with a real plot? How exactly did they think their nothingburger of a story is actually more interesting than literally anything else?

The episodes are so short that characters don't really develop past one dimension. The whole game is so short that when it ends you go "Wait, that was it?".

The illusion of choice still persists as one of the main problems with Telltale games. You basically have no choice in how the story goes or how someone may die or not, you just sit back and watch and occasionally click in the QTE. I wouldn't have much of a problem if the writing was actually good and wasn't this cringey, forced, and contrived where you roll your eyes whenever characters have to be dumb in order for the plot to happen. It's also really funny that an optional exploration mission where you have to find a tiny thing in literal space (that you have to look up on YouTube to find) can have bigger consequences than actual dialogue and action choices.

The gameplay is also outdated and apart from the walking simulation parts and space explorations that are only fun for the first five minutes, it's just pathetic QTEs. They didn't even bother adding a simple shooting mechanic.

There is also no skipping as always with these games which is more infuriating than the game itself. Couple that with the fact that there is also no save option, and some scenes and missions can go for over 10 minutes before an automatic save, and you have one of the most annoying games ever. I had to replay a part that went on for 10 minutes before saving because the game crashed 1 second before the next checkpoint. There is no skip cutscene, so I have to suffer through the whole thing again.

Telltale used to make great games like The Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us with great characters and storylines where you couldn't get up and wanted to finish all of it in a day. Now it makes these pathetic attempts at making this 3-hour game that took me a month to finish. It's just sad.

This game basically has nothing to offer and I won't wish this on my enemy. It has mobile game level of side character design, practically no story or characterization, outdated and pathetic "gameplay", no choice in how the story goes, and very boring to get through. The only reason you should play this is if you want more Cara Gee as Camina Drummer, but then again, I'd recommend just watching a full walkthrough of it on YouTube and not spending a penny on it.

Waste of time and boring

[PenetratorGod · 4/10 · 17 December 2023]

Everything moves very slowly, speaks very slowly. It's really boring to constantly explore and listen to meaningless dialogues and look for something. I don't think the choices have any impact on anything, nor do I think the story and characters are interesting. I really don't understand why Telltale wasted time with this game when they had Wolf Among Us. I guess this company will never wise up and they need to go bankrupt again. Telltale wasted time by making incredibly wrong decisions. They still continue to make the same bad decisions today. I wish a more decent company had bought the rights to this game and continued it. Wolf Among Us has serious potential, but it's being held in a cage by the wrong game company.

Short, ugly and disappointing

[markjirousek · 2/10 · 1 October 2023]

The game is outrageously short. The scenario is uninspired, stupid and poorly written, and the scope of its events, for such a huge and rich universe, is totally underwhelming and a missed opportunity. You don't see anything, don't visit anything but wreckages and rat holes. You don't go anywhere. The game does nothing to give you a glimpse of the scale of its lore and the setting it takes place in. There are barely more than ten named characters in the whole game and all are uninteresting and ugly, visually grotesque like caricatures, the main one, Camina Drummer, included. The textures, effects and animations as well as the gameplay are all from another age and so the whole game is also pretty ugly and boring, not to say a chore to play. A lazy product without soul, substance and ambition. The result of a blatant lack of care. By far the worst Telltale game I played.

Stiff

[simbiat · 2/10 · 28 February 2024]

The game felt stiff. Not just the characters and their animation, but overall. I mean, in the first 20 minutes (maybe even less) you see multiple characters, but they do not feel distinct at all, and feel like robots, even when they try to joke. What's worse, the story they are trying to follow is just... Boring. I did not get into the original show, because I felt like it had too much politics than anything else, but at least the first episode grabbed my attention for some time.

In the game, though... It's just too slow. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it makes sense to have a slow start, nothing wrong with that, but here it feels too tedious. What adds to that is how empty and sterile everything feels. As if there are no real details. Maybe it is because it is space (although the show had much more clutter around), maybe it's because the art is not using cell-shaind that worked great for previous Telltale games, but it just feels too clean, like most modern movies.

Even the gameplay feels worse. Seems like you only get 2 choices for everything, and they seem to have even less meaning than in other games. But the the way how character movement feels is extremely outdated. It reminded me of "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey", but that's a game from back in 2006, it was low-budget and still felt much better.

I guess I just expected too much. I liked most of the Telltale games, even Jurassic Park one, which a lot of people disliked. I knew they were far from perfect, but the writing was generally good, the story grabbed you and did not let go till the end. They were exciting. But not this one. Or maybe I got spoiled by all "Life is Strange" games.