About Expedition Antarctica:
An excellent addition to an excellent game. Expedition adds something in the neighborhood of 50-60 hours of content to the base game (assuming you want to see all of it – the main questline can be rushed through in much less than that if you prefer), along with all manner of new locations, enemies, items, crafting recipes, feats, and so much more. The new Expedition maps are placed in the mid-game, but some of the items and all of the mechanics are available from the beginning, so if you have already played UnderRail and don’t fancy replaying all the same old stuff, don’t worry – you don’t have to. From the minute you start your new character, you can be wielding swords and spears and using the new Temporal Manipulation psi school, if you like. There’s a huge amount of stuff in this expansion. It’s practically an entirely new game layered on top of the existing UnderRail. Characters you knew from the base game suddenly have expanded questlines for you to explore (coughcough Dude cough); old areas have new ways to approach solutions for whatever trouble may be waiting for you; new options are available for faster travel through UnderRail and Expedition. And of course, you can buy yourself a fancy new jet ski and zip around the hugely expanded map area of UnderRail. Story-wise, Expedition gives a whole lot of lore on how UnderRail came to be. It’s a great addition for those who enjoy the history behind the game. If you know the name BioCorp from playing through the base game and wonder what exactly happened with them, well – Expedition will let you in on a bunch of secrets. If you wished there were just a few more tidbits about North UnderRail which is only barely mentioned in the base game, well – Expedition has a whole bunch of characters and their stories that will flesh out what you know about that previously mysterious place. And all of it is written with the same informative-yet-lightly-humorous tone that made so many encounters in the base game fun enough to want to try again on further replays. Difficulty-wise, Expedition is really great. It’s a strong challenge for characters of level 15 or so, but because you can go when you’re ready, if you don’t feel like your character is prepared, you can delay. And since Expedition raises the level cap from 25 to 30, there’s even more top-end available. By the time your characters hit level 30, they’ll be epic heroes, crushing anything foolish enough to stand in their path. Well, except maybe on DOMINATING. If you get too confident on DOMINATING, there’s still plenty that will kill your level 30 character dead as a stone. Because Expedition takes place in the middle of the game, it allows characters to level up and get a bit stronger before Deep Caverns, too. That’s helpful because DC is, typically, the one place that most new players find the least rewarding and the least fun. With Expedition, you can tune up your character so that DC no longer is a difficult slog. By putting Expedition in the mid-game, the developers made DC a more enjoyable endgame. An excellent plan. This isn’t to say that Expedition is absolutely perfect. There’s at least one puzzle that has a high likelihood of frustrating people if they don’t go look up the answer online. Some builds have been given so much attention (psi of course) that others which have for a long time needed some care get even worse by comparison (gunpowder pistols, of course). If you don’t pay attention it’s possible to miss the fast travel option to get between Expedition and UnderRail, meaning some players might think that there’s way more forced travel time than there really is. And of course, like in the base game, Expedition is not terribly friendly to unoptimized builds, unless you’re playing on Easy or Normal. All that said, Expedition is a hell of a bargain at ten bucks. If you like to replay RPGs and see everything, you may get over 100 hours of fun gaming for your money. Even if you have a character waiting on standby, and only intend to play once, you’re going to get your money’s worth several times over. If you liked Fallout, if you liked Age of Decadence, and especially if you liked UnderRail, you really need to pick up this expansion. (I was one of the original alpha testers for the game. I have about 150-200 hours in Expedition, which is why I can tell you how much gameplay you can expect to get from it, even on release day.)
