“Prepare yourselves for the Arrival.”
While I will avoid spoilers the best I can for Arrival, I will at least make the assumption that you have played Mass Effect 1 and 2.
Bioware released their final downloadable content for Mass Effect 2 yesterday, aptly named the Arrival. The point of Arrival is to further set the stage for the “imminent Reaper invasion.” Despite saving the Citadel in Mass Effect 1, dying, coming back to life like Zombie Shepard, getting a whole new ship and crew courtesy of the pro-human group Cerberus which you slaughtered mercilessly in the first game, it still seems that high ranking officials (I’m looking at you Council) and many others have a hard time believing you.
As it stands, Cerberus and the Illusive Man are the only ones who truly are invested in saving the galaxy. Until Admiral Hackett contacts you and asks you to head deep into Batarian space to rescue a friend who has proof of the Reaper invasion. If you dig through the stories and side missions (and some in the Lair of the Shadow Broker) you will find that Admiral Hackett may be a bigger supporter of you than Captain Anderson.
Either way, the task at hand is to do this personal favor for Admiral Hackett, and thus he requests that you go alone. No bringing along friends.
And once you play through it, you see why. Arrival is not a combat-centric mission. There is combat, and a few sequences of “Holy crap kill people fast” with a few points that might give you pause depending on your difficulty sending.
In the grand schemes of Mass Effect DLC, Arrival is easily the second best of all of them, taking a back seat to only the Lair of the Shadow Broker in terms of story, dialog, and what appears to be the time spent making it. A few parts in Arrival felt funny as I caught Shepard talking to himself. Yes, I know something big and terrible is going to happen. Mumbling to yourself with no one else around isn’t helping the situation.
What Arrival did for me was put a timeline on the arrival of the galaxy’s supposed doom. It also shows me that Shepard should be dead 47 times over if the bad guys would just pull the trigger once in a while. But that’s not here nor there. One minor annoyance was the “batarians” in the DLC. In previous encounters, we learn that Batarians have multiple eyes, and not quite human-shaped heads. But if you didn’t know any better, almost every enemy you encounter in the first half of the mission could be humans and you wouldn’t know the better until someone said something. It feels like Bioware forgot they had 3d models of Batarians and grabbed some left-over humans.
In total, you can easily finish Arrival in 2 hours or so if you are uninterrupted. The story also has potential for having a large effect on things that transpire in Mass Effect 3, including possible prologue situations. Whether or not Bioware incorporates it will remain to be seen. We know that the Lair of the Shadow Broker does have some direct repercussions in the character you take into the third game, so we can hope that Arrival does as well.
If you love Mass Effect, you owe it to yourself to play Arrival. Either to help hold you over till the third game comes out, or because you are a story-nut and want more. As I mentioned, Arrival falls firmly below Lair of the Shadow Broker and above Overlord in terms of quality (although Overlord did have a surprisingly emotional conclusion).
Now all we need is Mass Effect 3.
