As the Expeditions series moves into its teens, Expeditions: Samurai shows how it has gone from strength to strength.
Now onto its fourth entry, the Expeditions series has always felt like it was following along with trends rather than breaking new ground. That doesn’t make for a bad, or even uninventive, series, but it does mean that – even as something perfectly serviceable – it isn’t often not shouted about from the rooftops. Expeditions: Samurai is, naturally, their strongest entry – combining some great writing, a fine-tuned combat system and a fantastic setting – however it also underlines the Ship of Theseus that the series has become, and will likely feel quite unfamiliar to those who really enjoyed previous entries.
The Expeditions series has always been about muddling your way from point A to point B (be that as a conquistador, Viking or Roman Legatus) and making an imprint on the world… normally through a mixture of conquest and diplomacy. Expeditions: Samurai is no different, but here you take on the role of an English former pirate who winds up as the captain of a Dutch ship that had been hired to strike up trade between Japan and England – a twist on the experiences of William Adams. Your motley crew immediately runs into some unruly Portuguese who set you aground and on a path that both upsets your mission and sets a string of events into action that will be irreversible and massively influential to Expedition: Samurai’s Sengoku-era Japan.
Religion and Culture are core points of conflict here, perhaps more than any other game of this type, with the setting actively discussing how alien, and different, not only the new world that you’ve found yourself in is, but also the differences between the Spanish and Portuguese forces and your own. If history isn’t a strong point of yours, several well-written early encounters – including the local Jesuit leader and a meeting with an elderly Dom Sancho – quickly move to fill you in.
While I’m no historian myself, I did find the careful choice of models and graphics for the game – as well as the excellent map screen – did a fantastic job of pulling me into the setting. In fact, I had zero criticisms of the setting, audio or visual design by the time I’d hit halfway through the tutorial and got over the culture shock of playing a plucky English privateer in that part of the world.
Expeditions: Samurai’s biggest issues are related to the camera. Unlike those earliest series entries, you can get right down into the world now, floating to about 20-30ft from the ground. This is amazing and makes everything feel more immersive and involved… however, everything falls apart when it comes to interiors. Sometimes the walls and ceilings simply won’t fade away; Other times you might rotate the camera near a cliff or scene-edge and the camera will scale the height of the wall (visible or not). Both of these are incredibly frustrating when you are attempting to perform any sort of stealth movements, especially because the movement controls are strictly mouse controlled. I’ve also found that when you quick-load, the camera will no longer see through any roofs.
These issues are of the quality of life type rather than the performance type and can definitely be fixed while Samurai works its way through Early Access. I hope that they are top priorities, as stealth does play a mandatory part at times and the autosave function only triggers on scene changes rather than at intervals.
Beyond this, it lacks some TLC with the user interface. An effort has been made to slimdown the exploration UI, with inventory and character skill buttons fully removed and left to keyboard shortcuts. This minification is welcome, but when you do get to the (fantastically stylised) menus they’re still trying to deliver too much information at once. The Perks screen is especially guilty of this, with a wall of over 70 perks simply being shown off with icons that change colour based on whether they’re locked, unlocked or available to unlock. The abilities menu, on the other hand, is a succinct, easy to understand path that is tailored to the character and keeps the offerings simple and sweet.
Those 70 perks certainly show off how granular the character advancement can get, however a lot of it is about finessing, which is great because right from the get-go we’re talking about a finely tuned combat system with most characters having no more than 10 options per turn, with things like armour damage, statuses and damage amounts equally easy to understand from start to finish.
Living where it does, at the intersection of strong narrative and tight, tactical combat, it is a surprise to not see auto-allocation on the skills menus, or ‘preferred’ recommendations for weapons you are skilled in, or perks that suit the class build.
Minor, Early-Access-solvable issues aside, Expeditions: Samurai is easily the strongest entry in a strong series. The writing is fantastic, with plenty of dramatic, well written (and voiced) story beats littered throughout. The willingness of the developers to drop you into a world that explains itself through actions and conversation, rather than babying you or dropping a wall of text on you, is welcome, and I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing it continue its journey through Early Access.
Expeditions: Samurai is available for PC through Steam Early Access.
