Quick Review: Mass Effect 2: The Arrival
I guess it’s time for Shephard to go on another suicide machine. I swear, he must just be quoting John McClane constantly by now. “Join the Alliance, they said…have a good tiiiime, they said…”
I’ll keep this quick, because I honestly feel that if you’ve played Mass Effect 2 you know exactly what it is you’re getting into with this downloadable piece of entertainment, and if you haven’t played ME2, then you shouldn’t be reading this, you should be remedying that problem as soon as you can. This and everything else can wait.
The Arrival is a quick, roughly 2-hour long addendum to ME2 which emphasizes largely on combat, and adds a nice little story bridge between Mass Effect 2 and the upcoming Mass Effect 3. I won’t spoil anything for you, but it’s your standard “galactic-scale calamity, scaly racist aliens can’t solve their own damn problems, and it’s up to Shephard to save the day again” type situation. Only this time it involves the Reapers!
Though the dlc is quite short, they do manage to pack a decent amount of storyline tension into it, and it actually gets pretty intense by the climax. The only problem is there isn’t really enough story content to keep ME fans truly happy; The Arrival is about combat, through-and-through, and moreover it’s almost entirely one-person combat, as the mission is played solely as Shephard (under some flimsy pretext of “silence and discretion”). I feel like Bioware must know this, but in case they don’t I (along with the rest of the internet, it seems) feel like I must re-iterate: people are playing Mass Effect for the story, guys! The combat’s cool, but it’s the icing on the damn cake!
What story there is in the dlc, however, is your typically-awesome Bioware fare, and I truly enjoyed an additional, if truncated, vacation back into the galaxy of Mass Effect. It is quite short, however, and at $7 for what’s mostly additional combat, this may not be everyone’s bag. Just keep that in mind when if you’re on the fence about buying.
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