After years of isometric CRPGs, Owlcat is strapping on mag boots and aiming straight at Mass Effect with The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. After a few hours with the beta, here’s how the combat, squad play, dialogue, and Expanse atmosphere are holding up ahead of launch.
Owlcat has spent the last decade teaching people how to read tiny cooldown icons from orbit. Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous, Rogue Trader and their sprawling combat logs all lived and died on the studio’s mastery of the isometric CRPG. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is a clean break from that comfort zone. Third-person camera. Over-the-shoulder rifles. Cinematic dialogue wheels. Someone at Owlcat built a cover system.
The question hanging over the beta is simple: does any of this actually work, or is this just Mass Effect cosplay for a studio that really wants to be back in a combat log?
After a couple of hours with the current build and cross-checking other hands-on impressions, the answer is that it mostly works. It is rough in places and unmistakably a first-gen effort, but it is also confident in ways you would not expect from a team doing its first shoulder-cam RPG.
Combat: from combat log to muzzle flash
The heart of the experiment is combat. Owlcat is not trying to reinvent the cover shooter. The beta drop is a sequence of station corridors, cargo bays and outer hull walkways that follow a familiar loop: slide into cover, pop shots, rotate gadgets, bark commands at your squad, repeat. The difference is that Osiris Reborn is much harsher and busier than the early Mass Effect games it visually resembles.
Even on standard difficulty, enemies push forward aggressively, pin you with grenades and punish greedy peeks. Polygon compared the feel to Call of Duty pace inside a Mass Effect-shaped shell, and that tracks with the beta. You are seldom holding a safe line and taking potshots. You are changing cover every few seconds, using gadgets to open space and relying on your companions to stop flanking runs.
On a pure shooting level, the guns are solid rather than spectacular. Rifles and pistols have enough punch and recoil to feel weighty, with enemies staggering and armor flaking off in visible chunks, but you are not getting the crisp snap of a dedicated shooter. Where the combat comes alive is in gadgets and environmental interactions that lean into Owlcat’s systemic instincts.
The standout mechanic is the Exploit system. Certain arenas are laced with hazards and weak points that you can highlight with a companion ability, then trigger for dramatic payoffs. A shootout that might otherwise be a trading of headshots becomes a puzzle about routing enemies past an oxygen canister, overloading a junction box, or venting a maintenance tunnel. It feels like the studio took the spirit of its old “set up the encounter in turn-based space” mentality and translated it into a real-time flow.
Gadgets do similar work. Shock tethers chain arcs of electricity between clustered foes, a nano-swarm can be steered mid-flight to chase new targets, and wrist-mounted rockets give you a short cooldown panic button. All of these tools refresh quickly enough that they shape your baseline rhythm instead of sitting in the “ultimate” slot. That generosity is important because enemies hit hard and cover disintegrates or becomes unsafe quickly once grenades start landing.
It is not perfect. Eurogamer notes, and the beta backs up, that hit feedback can be muddy when the screen is busy and that auto-cover occasionally snaps you to the wrong surface at exactly the wrong time. Encounters in tight corridors can feel more chaotic than tactical when enemies spawn behind you or throw explosives from unseen angles. The shooter-focused skill tree also leans heavily on marginal stat boosts rather than interesting new verbs, which makes early weapon progression feel flatter than the gadget and survival branches.
Still, as a proof of concept that Owlcat can build a real-time, controller-first combat loop that feels tense and readable, Osiris Reborn clears the bar.
Squad dynamics: light tactics, heavy pressure
Anyone coming in with Shepard and squadmates in mind will find familiar muscle memory here. You can assign basic commands, point companions at priority targets and trigger their signature abilities. The key difference is how much the game expects you to lean on that support. These are not optional flourishes you fire off between assault rifle bursts. In the beta slice, squad abilities feel baked into encounter design.
One companion’s Exploit scanning becomes mandatory to clear certain fights efficiently. Another specializes in crowd control and can lock down lanes that would otherwise become instant death. Cooldowns are short enough that you are tapping bumper buttons constantly, almost treating the squad as secondary weapons rather than autonomous allies.
The tradeoff is that squad control remains fairly shallow compared to Owlcat’s CRPG heritage. You are not drawing complex cones or queuing multi-step commands. You are picking targets, lining up a handful of complementary abilities and trusting the AI with the rest. When it works and everyone fires at once, rooms disappear in a gratifying chain of explosions and status effects. When pathfinding hiccups or a companion gets body-blocked in a doorway, your options shrink fast.
There is also less of a sense of positional play than Mass Effect 2 or 3’s best missions. The beta arenas tend to present a few obvious flanking routes and elevated angles rather than layered verticality. With how fast enemies move and how fragile you feel, that can leave squadmates functioning more as extra cooldowns than true battlefield pieces. It is effective, but it is not yet the sort of combat chess that might satisfy long-time Owlcat players looking for the same expressive tactics they enjoyed from isometric view.
The upside is that the squad system already feels thematically right. These are Belter and Earther specialists chucking improvised tech rather than space wizards hurling biotics. They complain, bicker over bad odds and respond audibly when you put them in danger. Even this early, there is the sense that Owlcat understands squadmates are as much about texture and attitude as raw DPS.
Dialogue, choices, and that Owlcat RPG DNA
Step out of combat and Osiris Reborn starts to feel more like the Owlcat you know, just seen from ankle height instead of a god’s-eye view. Conversations unfold in fully voiced cinematic scenes with close-up framing and a visible dialogue wheel or response menu. The studio is very clearly chasing the swagger of BioWare’s golden age here, complete with hard cuts between camera angles and animatic flourishes during key lines.
You control a custom mercenary protagonist, and even in the beta the build leans on traits and skills to drive different outcomes. Perception checks sniff out alternate routes or stash locations. Athletics can brute-force a path or survive a risky jump. Social stats open persuasion options that de escalate tense encounters or secure extra rewards. These checks light up in the interface and feel closer to the heavy gating of a classic RPG than the light-touch flavor choices of many modern action games.
The writing, at least in this vertical slice, lands closer to the show’s grounded cynicism than to quippy space opera. Characters talk like people who grew up watching oxygen levels and betting on which corporation will quietly ruin their lives. There are jokes, but there is also a fatigue to most interactions that feels right for The Expanse. Owlcat’s history with dense, lore-heavy scripting shows up in the generous amount of optional background chatter you can poke at between missions.
Branching structure is harder to judge from the beta, but the glimpses are promising. Dialogue choices can lock you into taking a particular contract or ally with one faction over another, and some resource or survival perks seem to have downstream consequences. Other previews mention that poor build decisions are not easily walked back, with missed checks and closed routes staying closed rather than offering an obvious second chance nearby. That design philosophy should make replays more interesting if the full game sticks to it.
Presentation is where the seams show. Facial animation quality swings from solid to stiff within the same scene, and lip sync lags behind English VO in spots. Scene blocking sometimes struggles to sell the drama of an argument when two characters simply stand and perform canned gestures. None of it is disastrous, but this is where you most feel Owlcat wrestling with unfamiliar tools. Where the studio’s CRPGs could hide lower animation fidelity behind distance and isometric perspective, Osiris Reborn has to survive scrutinizing close-ups.
How well does it feel like The Expanse?
If you come to Osiris Reborn as an Expanse fan first and a systems nerd second, the biggest relief is that it does not feel like a generic space opera with a licensed logo slapped on top. The beta spends time on cramped station corridors, clanging bulkheads and views of rotating habitats that feel pulled from the show’s visual language. Weapons, suits and signage lean into that utilitarian, slightly grubby look rather than the glossy sci-fi sheen of many Mass Effect contemporaries.
Gravity, or its absence, is the big swing. The best combat encounters in the preview take place on the exterior of a station, your squad bolted to metal through mag boots as rounds punch holes in plating and bodies tumble into orbit. You feel the fragility of life in vacuum every time a stray shot opens the wrong panel. Those sequences instantly sell the fantasy of being a small team of desperate operators in an environment that is seconds away from killing you.
Factions and politics peek through the edges of the beta narrative. Belter slang, corporate logos and hints of wider tensions suggest a story that will move through familiar Expanse touchstones without simply retelling a season of the show. Crucially, the game is also legible if you have never read the books or watched the series. Previewers who came in cold reported being able to follow the stakes and alignments with only light exposition.
Where it feels less distinct is in the soundtrack and some interior layouts, which drift closer to generic sci-fi mood music and modular hallways than the more bespoke sets of the TV adaptation. Whether the full game finds more varied and memorable locations will matter a lot for keeping the setting from blurring into the stack of other space shooters hitting over the next few years.
Strengths and weak points ahead of launch
Taken as a whole, the beta paints a picture of a developer that understands what makes a Mass Effect style RPG tick and is finding its own angle on it. Combat is faster, more lethal and more reliant on gadgets than BioWare’s template, which should appeal to players who want more pressure and less downtime between bursts of action. Squad abilities and Exploits already push fights toward lively, reactive shootouts rather than rote corridor clearances.
On the RPG side, the use of traits, skill checks and build driven locks feels like vintage Owlcat. There is a real chance that Osiris Reborn lands in a sweet spot where story pacing stays brisk, but character builds still have teeth and close off or open up meaningful options. That combination is far rarer than it should be in big-budget third-person RPGs.
The weak points are mostly questions of refinement and scope. Gun feel and hit feedback need another pass to match the intensity of the encounter design. The shooter-focused progression tree is undercooked compared to more playful gadget paths. Facial animation and scene direction must improve if Owlcat wants its conversation system to compete with nostalgia for BioWare’s best work rather than just evoke it. And difficulty tuning will be crucial, because several previews touch on how punishing grenades and flanking can be even on default settings.
The broader structural and narrative questions also remain open. A vertical slice can make combat and a handful of choices sing, but we do not yet know how much freedom the ship hub grants between missions, how reactive the campaign is in late game, or how varied future locations will be. Those are answers that can only really come from playing the finished game.
For now, though, the headline is that Owlcat’s big genre pivot looks viable. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is not just a CRPG wearing a third-person camera, and it is not a shallow shooter glued to a lore wiki. It is a rough, hungry first draft of a new identity, one that understands why people still talk about Mass Effect and why Expanse fans obsess over airlocks and burn times. If the studio can spend the time between now and launch sanding down the rough edges, there is a real chance this could be more than just “the Mass Effect-like from the Pathfinder devs” and stand on its own boots in the vacuum.