I’m really enjoying Expédition 33 but there are a couple of things I still don’t get.
I could Google them in seconds but I’m a lazy lazy man and I love chatting about this game with you fine folks (I’m out of my gaming slump!)
So. I keep getting given costumes and I’m buggered if I know what to do with them. How to equip?
Probably more importantly… I’ve got a LOT of currency and I’m not sure where to spend it. When I talk to the dementor he seems to accept different gubbins for upgrading weapons and characters so I’m sitting on 29k Lumiere and no idea what to do with it. For context I’m in the part of the game where you pick up Sciel in your party and I’ve just fought a one shotting tortoise.
You know the screen where it shows everyone standing there, and you can click into an individual character to have a look at their weapons, pictos etc? On the right hand side under the main stats is a wardrobe button where you can switch outfits.
As for chroma, you will occasionally come across gestral merchants who you can trade with. The amount you’ve said is pretty small tbh, I’ve got over 100k chroma atm
Nintendo massively abusing patents in their lawsuit against Palworld. The mechanics they are attacking are so vague that its setting a dangerous precedent for gaming in general
Add Expedition 33 to my graveyard of non-completes.
18 Hours, mid-Act 2, given up. I think I did sheeldz it a lot, I think, but also I think some of my complaints are pretty valid.
Needs a fucking map. The levels are really indistinct and whilst most them are corridors, i think that a map with quest makers would hugely help. There’s a reason we’ve added them to big 3D games, lads, and it doesn’t turn it into a bad game when you have them.
The economy needs a lot of explaining. The colours of the picks up and where to spend them was well hidden and I feel like that wasn’t a me problem, a few other folk on Reddit were asking where the Curator bloke was. Odd design choice.
The Gestral are annoying. What were they thinking with their voices. I can barely read the subtitles in time before it advances.
The bosses are, for the most part, fucking incredible. I loved the parry and dodge system mechanically, and the feel of acomplishment when it all kinda falls together and works is, genuinely, brilliant! But the battles started to get annoying when they’re just getting seven hits back to back without getting a shot yourself. That’s crap.
A second phase boss battle with a re-up of health on a boss mid battle without your own health being refreshed is bullshit game design, and even worse is the missing check point in the middle. No thanks.
Pictos and Lumina are a really badly implemented system that is actually pretty cool, but the UI buries it so much that it’s hard to engage with.
Sciel and Monoco’s battle systems are so complicated that I didn’t use them at all, and Maelle’s is apparently over powered but in my playthrough she was basically weak as fuck. I think I needed an Auto-spec system to help me here.
Act 1 Spoiler: Killing off Gustave is a bold choice but I think I needed a simple battle system to lean on, and more importantly I fucking loved the character. It’s a narrative choice I think I respect, but Verso’s a smarmy prick and I didn’t like him as a replacement.
I think it’s a game I don’t regret playing, and I enjoyed my time with it, but by the mid-Act 2 ramp in difficultly I could see that the game was needing for me to engage in a much more active way and that’s not how i play games. I am never going to “re-spec” my character in a game, and that’s on me, but at the same time a game having a “story” mode that isn’t going to let me obtain and progress through the story without too much friction is, I think, a failure.
7/10 all in for the music, the battles, the story as it was, and the characters. If it had ended at mid-Act 2 with a doable boss fight I would have loved it, but when Renoir is able to fully heal after I’ve lost two of my three party members permanently and, for some reason, the other two don’t sub in… I’m done.
Only done the first mission but something seems off…the weapons feel very widdly, yet the models themselves take up a huge chunk of the screen making it feel quite claustrophobic and disorienting when you whip the camera around. Everything is too desaturated, the demons barely standout from the grey rocks of the environment. I get this is a design decision to help the coloured projectiles you can block/parry stand out but they’ve gone way too far and the game is a muddy barely discernable mess of visual noise so far.
Story is absolute crap as expected, hopefully it gets out of the way of itself soon.
Also the music is mixed incredibly badly, what the hell is going on there? You can barely hear it when it’s clearly meant to be kicking off in the massive fights.
First impression is that the game is lacking an impact and visceralness and feels quite unpolished
The UI for Pictos / Luminas is unforgivable in 2025. And having to jump back to the world map to add more Lumina points or upgrade weapons is just unnecessary really.
I’m very near what I can only assume is the run up to a final encounter (or two) and getting slapped about by general mobs. Not sure if I am underleveld or just having a few days off have lost (what little of) the parry timing I had down.
The story is genuinely excellent (and the music, art style, it all really), so if this is me falling off (about to go ok holiday for 10 days) then I quit happy and will certainly youtube a playthrough of the last bit.
tried Robocop but I couldnt believe how much it felt like a late 90s PS one game. dont care about the film so binned it off, might go abck to it later but I got the new Indiana Jones. seems well more fun already
Hopefully I’ll warm up to it and the environments will get more fun and visually striking. Doesn’t feel very Doom to be parrying all the time either…perhaps I’m just fatigued on that from E33. I hope we’re not going to see it in every game for the next 10 years now just because Elden Ring was a masterpiece.
I would also appreciate quest markers cos I get lost so easily, lol. That said I read someone say that basically, the golden path is the one that’s dotted with lamps, lights etc - go down paths with no/little light, that’s where you’ll find loot or collectibles or mini bosses. That’s generally held true for me.
Was this the chromatic something - the one with all the nevron arms? The only way to beat him is to parry, eventually enough parries trigger a counter attack. Which then leads to him breaking and you can finally get your turns in.
The rest of the party subs in in battles when all your original party has died. It flashes up THE LAST STAND OF EXPEDITION 33 which I like.
I agree the amount of pictos/lumina/attributes/weapon scaling is really hard to manage though. And I’ve played Witcher 3 twice. One thing I do like during battles is them highlighting skills that are most useful on your turn - I’ve found if I stick to the skills in gold writing then it tends to trigger their stronger attacks without me having to think too much about stances/foretell/perfection/the wheel or whatever.
