UnderRail + Expedition

I keep seeing UnderRail described as Fallout 2 with a subway map, and the comparison holds for about three hours. Then the difference that actually matters shows up: Fallout 2 lets you talk, shoot, or sneak your way out of most corners with whatever build you stumbled into, while UnderRail quietly decides your fate at character creation and refuses to discuss it further. Points you sink into throwing at level 3 are points you do not have in mechanics at level 20, and the game will not respec you, warn you, or draw an arrow on your map. That is either the best thing about it or the reason you bounce off in an evening, and you can usually tell which camp you're in by the first real ambush. Mechanically this is a grid, an action point pool, and a character sheet with teeth. You pick a mix of guns, crossbows, melee, throwing, stealth, hacking, lockpicking and the psionic schools, and each of those is a genuinely different game rather than a different damage number. A psi build spends fights juggling mental energy and crowd control. A stealth crossbow build spends them setting traps, opening from ambush, and disappearing again before the return fire lands. A crafting-heavy build spends half its playtime in menus, splicing components into gear that trivializes encounters other builds have to fight honestly. The XP system deserves a mention too, because the oddity option pays you for finding strange artifacts rather than for stacking corpses, which turns exploration into the actual progression loop and quietly kills the padded grind I usually complain about in games this long. The world earns the hours. Everything sits below the surface in a network of stations, tunnels and settlements, and the factions running them have coherent, mutually incompatible agendas: corporate interests, an authoritarian protectorate, and the people who would rather the whole arrangement burned. Quests are written for adults who read, with a couple of genuinely good investigation threads and at least one mid-game stretch that players still trade war stories about, mostly because it teaches you the hard way that you should have prepared better. Expedition, bundled in here, pushes you out onto the Black Sea with a boat and a far more open stretch of map, plus new gear, new enemy types and a native culture that is more than set dressing. It also front-loads a lot of content, which is a mixed blessing if you take the trip too early. What doesn't work: the hostility isn't always the productive kind. No quest markers is fine by me, but there's also very little signposting about when an area is simply above your pay grade, and the difficulty curve spikes without much warning. Inventory management is a chore, item juggling is constant, and the interface is dated even by isometric standards. Backtracking through long, quiet corridors eats real time you will not get back. The final stretch of the main campaign is the weak point, a maze-like slog that trades the tight encounter design of the earlier game for busywork and resource attrition, and it's the part I'd cut if Stygian ever asked. Dialogue is solid without being the main event; you're here for systems first and prose second. So who is it for. If you build characters on a notepad before you start, if you read a feat list the way other people read a menu, if you want a long campaign that rewards planning over reflexes, this is one of the sharpest things the indie CRPG scene has produced and the 86% positive review score is not an accident. If you want to wander in, improvise, and let story momentum carry you, you'll hit the first serious difficulty gate and stay there. My advice: pick a role, commit to it, take the oddity XP, and don't be too proud to drop the difficulty on your first run. Dragons are sadly not on the menu down here. Giant mutant lizards and psychic horrors will have to do, and they're better company than most.

Monika · Scout Team

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