Arrival & Overlord

Last month I briefly mentioned the new DLC for Mass Effect 2 entitled Arrival and my intention to play it. There's also an older one called Overlord which I had not played yet either. Over the last two days I have finally played both and also continued my second play through of the main game which I've been playing on and off for over a year now. I suppose there is no rush now that Mass Effect 3 has been pushed back to 2012 but still it's about time I finished this run.

I played Arrival first. I was led to believe this was to be a bridging story between ME2 and ME3 but I'd say that's not exactly true. You can take the mission at any point during the ME2 storyline and it still fits in. It's more about foreshadowing that bridging. It's still fun though. What is it about Batarians and rocket powered asteroids in DLC though? That's two in two games now! Play time for this one is about an hour and a half. There are two new locations to explore but the majority take place in the second (the asteroid base). Overall this is a typical Mass Effect mission, rescue, chat, betrayal, combat, huge explosion. So the Reaper invasion has been successfully delayed, but for how long? We've already seen the trailer for ME3, the answer is, not very long!


Overlord took longer to play than Arrival and the story is a little more generic, infiltrate a base taken over by a rogue AI and restore control. However some of the technical details during the mission are brilliant and make it much more interesting. The planet on which the mission takes place look stunning and is one of the best I've seen in the ME galaxy. There are some great views, interesting lava flows and a crashed Geth ship. It also makes great use of the Hammerhead hover tank from the Firewalker DLC to get from place to place. Then at the conclusion there are some awesome visual effects added, but I won't spoil those any further. That is all the ME2 extras played now. Lair of the Shadow Broker is still my favorite, but Overlord comes second.