Starting this mission is kind of sly but a smart and classic move by EA. With a simple message from Aria, Shepard flies off to the Citadel for a meet up, only to be taken for a car drive with Aria to reveal her plan to retake her home.
Upon hearing her proposal, Shepard completely shoots her down, refusing to do it. But when she puts her entire force of Blood Pack, Eclipse and Blue Suns at your disposal (Much more than just the factions you collected on the Citadel) with a chance to take out The Illusive Man's near Right Hand man along with it, he reluctantly accepts. However, her only rule is that no one, absolutely no one, from your team or the Normandy can join her on this adventure. (This is kind of a cheap way of not hiring back any of the vocal actors back for the DLC, no character ever mentions the takeover of Omega throughout the entire game)
With this, you and many ships fly to Omega in Cerberus ships, attacking them while their defences are down only to fail and be shot down to crash land at the lowest level of the station.
And that's enough of the intro, more possible spoilers soon to come!
Gameplay is much of the same, while the new weapons do indeed KICK ARSE against the new enemies, not much is offered. The DLC is mostly focused for the Renegade users, especially where a stand point mid game will offer Shepard to take the Renegade option 3+ times in one cutscene. The issue? If you take the option, you kill hundreds of civillians, if you don't, there is a chance that you will kill Aria and your new found friend Nyreen Kandros (The female turian...who turns out to be Aria's old love interest...awesome), however the gameplay redeems itself with classic Mass Effect tasks and a possible shoutout to the first game as mid game, you will have to fight off multiple enemies and disarm four bombs. While there is a small fleeting mention of Mordin as you pass through his old clinic, there is barely any other attention to past or present crew members between Aria and Shepard, a return to Omega for Garrus would have been interesting or some more backstory of the system by Javik would have been inventive as well. But of course if this were to happen, Nyreen or Aria wouldn't have been available as squad members but seeing as Nyreen only appears a few times during the entire DLC, another crew member to help out would have been nice.
Voice acting by Sumalee Montano and Carrie-Anne Moss are quite well done but lack much of an "oomph", especially it comes to dramatic scenes. While the animation does save face for the sake of the melodrama between the "lovers" does kind of become lost with a near energyless projection.
Without completely spoiling the new DLC, the writing, acting and gameplay is definitely up to par with the standards of the game, however for this fan, it failed to "wow" me such like "Lair Of The Shadowbroker" did last year. Maybe EA and Bioware were hoping for something to live up to that sort of reputation, but for a DLC to have AI glitches here and there, no real effect on our War Assets and barely any on the storyline, Bioware and EA have released an ordinary DLC.
Out of 10, I give Mass Effect 3 - Omega DLC an 6.5/10
Good Points:
+ Expansion on story of Aria
+ New guns and enemies? Awesome
+ Classic ME tasks
Bad Points:
- Underwhelming voice acting
- AI glitches prevent storyline (Aria follows instead of leads)
- Barely any effect on War Assets
- No hollow return to Omega for Garrus? Aw.....
The Omega DLC is out now for 1200 MSP
No comments:
Post a Comment