Expeditions: Samurai is a turn-based RPG where you lead a crew of English-backed Dutch privateers on a diplomatic mission to Japan in 1600, telling an original story inspired by real events in a rich historical setting.
Right off the bat, I have to make it clear that I haven’t played any of the other Expeditions games. My understanding is that Expeditions: Samurai is something of a departure from the typical experience fans of the series have come to expect, and so it deviates in many ways. If I were a fan of the past games, I might have a different opinion on how the game holds up compared to the others. However, since I never played any of the previous entries in the series, I can’t really speak to that.
Therefore, as a newcomer to the series, my overall impression was that Expeditions: Samurai is a pretty good, albeit clunky, Early Access RPG that could use a bit of work before launch.
Mechanically speaking, the game plays like something between Divinity: Original Sin and the kind of map traversal system you might find in a roguelike. In the game’s levels, you control your party from a top-down perspective and navigate by right-clicking the map to move from place to place. When you enter combat, the game switches to a turn-based mode where you use action points to defeat enemies before they defeat you.
Overall, combat happens pretty quickly and feels punchy and dangerous. The game does something I think is clever by having a separate “health” bar, in the form of guard, that tank classes can use to survive melee attacks but that ranged damage completely ignores. This simultaneously makes tanks feel effective, letting them shrug off damage in the thick of melee encounters by constantly refilling a secondary damage bar, while also allowing ranged attacks to feel punchy and dangerous. This, intentional or not, is actually a really clever commentary on the state of Japan at the time and how firearms slowly made the honorable warfare of the samurai redundant. Your veteran ronin companion will die incredibly quickly to a bandit with a Tanegashima if you don’t play carefully.
Though the game starts off pretty slowly, bogging you down with wordy tutorials and hand-holding practice areas that simply take a bit too long to complete, I did find myself perking up as I engaged with the combat more. The game uses a class-based ability system that can become pretty complex as you round out your characters, but more or less falls into the traditional turn-based RPG roles of tanks, DPS, and supports. Though not all status effects or abilities are explained as clearly as they could be, I found the combat system to be pretty engaging thanks to small elements like positional attacks of opportunity, as well as the more complicated ranged-versus-guard system I mentioned above.
Combat and level navigation become less fun when you realize just how janky the movement can be. I’m not quite sure what the root of the problem is, but something about navigating the world in Expeditions: Samurai feels sluggish and awkward. Sometimes you have to right-click multiple times to get your character to move or interact with something. Sometimes environmental elements block your click inputs, and sometimes your pathfinding is so bad it can outright harm you. This is especially true in stealth segments, where characters sometimes take less obvious and clearly dangerous routes that expose them, or when you send a character toward a mission objective, and they trigger combat in a way that leaves them separated from the party in an awkward position. Moving the camera is also awkward and slow, which does nothing to improve the overall feel of movement.
Something else that is somewhat awkward is the writing and story direction.
Expeditions: Samurai seems to want to encourage you to explore. I mean, it’s right there in the name, as an “expedition” often includes a bit of discovery. However, the game’s story is incredibly linear, essentially taking you from point A to point B with very little variation along the way, few chances to branch out and do something else, and almost no meaningful choices that change how the story plays out. In the game’s current Early Access build, the story isn’t even fully playable yet. There may be hope that later additions provide a little more in the way of player agency. Even the game’s levels are barren, lacking loot to discover or really anything to interact with outside of the combat encounters and NPC conversations that advance the story.
The writing varies from decent to somewhat bad, placing heavy emphasis on cool-guy sarcasm and humor in almost every dialogue tree. That being said, the writing is not nearly as bad as some other, more “Marvel movie-like” games I’ve reviewed. While I certainly started skipping a lot of the dialogue, the game still managed to keep me hooked in certain areas, particularly through a few of its characters. Not many of those characters, however, were part of the crew you begin the game with.
Overall, I think Expeditions: Samurai has the potential to be a solid roleplaying game with a genuinely engaging combat system. However, this Early Access title still has room for improvement, particularly with movement, controls, and its overly linear storytelling. As it stands, I recommend waiting for the game’s full launch before trying it, especially since the full story isn’t available yet.
Pros:
- Engaging turn-based combat that can feel fast and dangerous for both sides
- Character progression can offer meaningful complexity
- Some interesting characters and an overall engaging setting
Cons:
- Movement and pathfinding feel rough and unreliable, with sluggish camera movement
- Story is extremely linear with what feels like little player agency
- Levels lack incentivized exploration, or anything to explore at all
- Writing relies heavily on sarcastic dialogue and can sometimes miss
- Early Access is missing content
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Expeditions: Samurai. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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