The Shepardiest Shepard They Make

That's the best Hawaiian shirt you're getting. No one promised you good art.

... okay, so technically Mass Effect 2 is over and done. However, Bioware has given us the gift of Arrival, the DLC that connects Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3. Personally, I think this makes the beginning of ME3 make sense, so let's do it.

I feel like Arrival gets mixed reviews. I dunno, I like it, if you were going to ask me, I'd say get it.

Let's go into Shepard's cabin and see what Hackett wants.

This is the first time we get to see Admiral Hackett! He was just a disembodied voice in ME1, but Bioware got some extra funding or wrote a grant or something and now we get to see him!

That's the main game mechanic of Arrival: no squadmates. Shepard talks to herself a lot.

I mean, there's good and bad. For example?

When Arrival first game out?

Everyone was gettin' their lunch ate.

The AI for the squadmates is really good, so it's kind of easy to lay back and let them do the heavy lifting. (Sometimes I just run around a level hitting everything that moves with pull and letting Garrus and Miranda shoot them down.) This just means, however, that you notice when they're gone big time.

I'd argue that no one really learned how to play Mass Effect well until multiplayer came out and we all had to learn how to not shit team missions down our legs. So when I played it for MSPixel, I was fine, but the first time? Painful.

(There's no save point either, if you die, the game dumps you at the beginning of the mission!)

But the good? Here, let's take this scenario, where Shepard finds a pipe maze:

So. Huh. I guess Tali or Legion could maybe take the pipes apart for us, but they're not here. Is there any other way to get through this pipe maze without calling on another legendary video game hero?

Yup, Shepard just, like, burns her way through the damn pipe maze. Holy crap, Shepard, I love you.

This is a batarian prison, and as such, Shepard keeps coming up on batarians talking about Hackett's friend, their prisoner. Her name is Dr. Kenson, by the way. But what the hell is all this about destroying a mass relay?

Okay, so here's another moment. Let's say you're Shepard, right?

And you come up on a batarian guard who's torturing the lady you're trying to rescue?

Well, shit. If Jacob were here, he could probably talk him down, or Thane could sneak around and kill him from the vents, or Mordin could use some farm implements, or ...

Or Shepard could just clock him, because Shepard is totally the best.

Shepard, ladies and gentlemen.

Shepard and Kenson go deeper into the prison in order to escape.

Well, Shepard, were you going to hack that terminal?

Finally, they come to a hangar.

You know what? I could make start listing other ways that those lesser squad mates would solve that, but I think we all know what happens.

NEXT TIME: ... amazingly, Arrival doesn't have anything sexy in it. So more violence then!