Camina Drummer is a badass. She is one of the best written characters in The Expanse universe, whether you’re talking books or television, and is fully deserving of such a detailed spin-off. Cara Gee returns as Drummer in The Expanse: A Telltale Series, a story that explores Drummer’s life (and the mysterious MK Core) before the events shown in Amazon’s show. Everything about this game is The Expanse; the atmosphere, the grim sci-fi themes, and stellar acting pull this experience together tightly. But it’s not without its issues. And was always going to be a tricky debris field to navigate for the newly reborn Telltale Games.
It opens with the crew of the Artemis exploring a wrecked ship. Drummer is the XO, second in command, with Cox captaining the ship, Virgil the ship’s medic, Maya the Martian engineer, Khan the pilot, and two Belter brothers, Arlen and Rayen. If you’ve watched or read The Expanse before, you’ll know all about Belter scavengers hunting through debris fields for treasure, and if you haven’t, the game positions itself from the perspective of a newcomer to James S. A. Corey’s (the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) universe. There is a core storytelling experience here that can be enjoyed by a series veteran or someone who has no clue about the world and its characters.
That being said, this experience is heavily targeted towards those who’ve enjoyed the books or the series. The Belter’s unique language, or the references to planets, systems, the MCRN, the UNN, and so many more fragments of exposition that come at you fast like the rotating fire of a PDC…you see? It can be hard to follow, even for someone who has enjoyed the books for many years. But for those who really love The Expanse, I think there’s a lot here that you’ll enjoy.
The game’s atmosphere is immediately striking.. It’s grim. It’s dark. There are severed heads and creaking shipwrecked starships. Most of the characters appear to despise each other. The storytelling tool of found family is prevalent throughout The Expanse, and it’s no different here. My issue with this is that you hardly get any time at all to know or understand your crew mates. The game moves fast, maybe too afraid to slow down at times, falling into that slightly desperate trap that the later episodes of The Expanse series also succumbed to. It’s a shame, because the acting is stellar throughout, and at times I just wished there were a few more options to really get to know my crew mates before I had to make life-altering decisions on their behalf.
You also get a lot of full-on set pieces - stuff that is truly reminiscent of those magnificent battles from the show. Huge gunfights, dramatic gunplay sequences, and vast explosions. But there are also quietly cinematic moments to balance out proceedings. A moment with Maya listening to an entire Martian song is a highlight. It’s well put together, well shot, directed like someone would a television series. At moments, I forget that I am not actually watching an episode of The Expanse, or imagining a moment from the book. That’s a great achievement and a testament to the ongoing prowess of Telltale Games, despite all the changes to the studio in recent years.
Where the game falls short is when it’s not doing any of these things, or it’s rushing. I was left wanting more - the decisions you make are definitely impactful, but it doesn’t feel like the game gives you much choice beyond a yes or a no. Your interactions do change the entire storyline, that’s for sure, and I’m already wondering if I should go back and try a few different scenarios, but in the actual moment to moment I felt weirdly powerless. At the end of those climatic moments, I just thought, “Surely there was another way of handling that?” Part of that is because the choices are limited to just two responses, mostly, which has been reduced from the four you had in Telltale’s earlier games.
Some of the pacing problems come from the way the game is split into episodes. There’s a lot of exploring that can be done throughout the game’s various levels and areas, but in terms of actual narrative, the whole thing seemed to fly past at a pace that hardly left any time to think about any of the decisions I was making. Just when things seem to get going, the episode ends, the credits roll, and it starts all over again.
The game's mechanics are sporadically defective. I kept getting hitched on random objects, and sometimes I just couldn’t walk through the door. Mouse responsiveness was a bit broken as well, and I had to switch to using the keyboard to interact with things, which drew me out of the flow of some situations.
Overall, fans of The Expanse will enjoy this story. I’m curious about what happens in the next couple of episodes, and that’s exactly the sort of narrative pull that I was looking for. But you might also get frustrated with the game at times - it’s not a flawless experience by any means, and I really wanted more from it.
