As a compelling experience in its own right, it feels disappointingly slight.ĭespite the shadow of the first game's woeful Mako tank looming large, the Hammerhead dispels any gameplay doubts almost immediately. As a diversion from the main story, it's a fun change of pace. It's hard to begrudge anything that costs you nothing (assuming, as always, that you've got access to the Cerberus Network using a free code) and this leeway also helps to paper over the nagging feeling that the five Firewalker missions are more of a tutorial for a tool that you can't use anywhere else.Īfter retrieving the Hammerhead from a downed transport, you're set on the trail of its inventor and the mysterious events that led to it becoming lost. The Firewalker pack is a good example of this, a free off-shoot that introduces the hovering Hammerhead tank to the Normandy's arsenal. What is most exciting is that the two most recent additions to the Mass Effect tapestry showcase a developer that is using DLC not to suck up more cash by offering more of the same, but to play around with parameters of the original game in novel ways.
There's not really been any DLC that can compare to Return to Ostagar for sheer pointlessness, and even the less compelling offerings have either been free (as in the case of the Normandy Crash Site interlude) or easily ignored (as in the case of downloadable sunglasses for Thane). Mass Effect 2 has fared better than Dragon Age, that much is clear. Finding ways to insert new, compelling tales into enormous pre-existing stories, and making those tales resonate on their own terms, is a skill that the RPG behemoth is arguably still grinding towards, one painstaking XP point at a time. After fumbling the ball with a drab pair of morsels for the original Mass Effect, it's been far more proactive with its sequel, as well as its sibling, Dragon Age. It's been interesting to see BioWare, consummate master of the long-form narrative, come to terms with the new storytelling territory offered by downloadable content.
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