Omega Review

The first thing to say is that this is an obvious attempt to make Lair of the Shadow Broker, Part 2.

You have the asari you met in the previous game who spends the entirety of this game lounging around in the most decadent part of the explorable galaxy suddenly deciding to get off her blue butt and kick some. She's all "revenge, revenge, revenge," and it's up to you whether to support her all the way through or not.

The second thing to say is that the attempt to make Lair of the Shadow Broker, Part 2 was an abject failure.

Shadow Broker was personal, funny, epic. Omega was none of these things. And ironically, the very thing that I'd badly wanted to show up in Mass Effect 3 (getting to re-visit a location from the previous game and see it torn to shreds by the war) was undermined by the fact that I just didn't recognize a few stretches of brown hallway.

On the subject of things from the previous games, how the hell come Harrot suddenly looks extraordinarily different?

And on the subject of things being obviously phoned in, Aria's first speech is so full of glitches that it's just impossible to imagine I just paid $15 for this.

Full review below the jump (because my blog has jumps now! I'm so professional) but as a reminder, here's how all the ME1, 2, and 3 DLC (that I've played) stacks up (note: the rubric I used takes cost into account.  That's why Zaeed is so high).

Shadow Broker
Leviathan
Zaeed
Overlord
Bring Down the Sky
Omega
From Ashes
Kasumi
Arrival

So here's the plot: Aria picks you up in her aircar and takes you for a ride through the Citadel's ventilation system while explaining that she's put together a mercenary team to take Omega back.  Hey, howzabout you just give me the mercenary team instead? Oh, because Omega has a whopping three hundred war assets on it whereas the mercenary team I built in the vanilla game for Aria is worth only 200. Got it.

I'm knocking that a little, but the fact is that this was the most promising start a DLC has ever had. If I have to knock Shadow Broker at all, I think it was phenomenally dumb for Liara to make some vague excuse, leave the office, and then make you suffer through a dull investigation scene. Yes yes, Tela Vasir turning out to be a traitor was kinda interesting, but she dies before you can point out how actually, yeah, there are some pretty substantial differences between you and her.  But anyway, here in Omega, we've got this secretive car ride, which is a cliche in certain sub-genres but has never been done in Mass Effect before, so that was promising.   James approves+5.

Weirdly, Aria doesn't recruit you then and there but instead tells you to go to rendezvous with her fleet when you're ready. Basically it means waiting through another loading screen, so James disapproves -1 here.

You're also introduced to Aria's batarian sidekick, who is either named Bray or Vray. I can't find him on the Mass Effect Wiki and he's (alas) not a squad member. I took my Ruthless ("What Would Starbuck Tywin Lannister* Do?") Shepard, so it was a bit disconcerting for him to think the Butcher of Torfan (oh, and Aratoht too) was overhyped. I liked Bray for the one scene he was in, and it was nice to have a meaningful (i.e, actual cutscene) interaction with a batarian who doesn't hate Shepard on sight (no, the priest in the refugee camp doesn't count; see actual cutscene). Hell, Bray has more character than Narl, that one-shot Batarian from the "recruit the Blood Pack" mission in the vanilla game, so it's not like the DLC writers completely forgot how to write. James approves +1.

*It was "What Would Starbuck Do?" for the first two games. Then I decided that the war for Earth would push Shepard into SOB territory for the third game.

So then you find yourself on Aria's Big Badass Flagship, and she employs violence. But it ends badly because for once the bad guy isn't a total idiot. (In fact the only reason he loses is because Shepard is, well, Shepard.) So then you find yourself on Omega near the wreckage of your escape pod, and you and Aria have to fight your way to her command bunker. Because this particular Shepard had already been through the entire game, I had the difficulty on Hardcore, and I couldn't detect any noticeable upgrade in the enemy AI. It's the usual mix of the vanilla grunts, the ones with the riot shields, and the guys who spam the smoke-bombs. And then suddenly it's not; there are these new shotgun-wielding robots that love to get in your face. And their corpses bleed your shields if you get too close. These enemies are awesome frakking evil awesome. James approves +7.

So you get there and find out that there's a totally new merc gang, because the other three weren't enough. This is a tad hand-waved by saying that they only came to power after that plague that you dealt with back in the second game. Okay, fair enough, I'll buy it, because it's not like they wanted the plot of the DLC to be affected by, say, decisions you made in the "recruit the Terminus gangs" missions in the vanilla game. That'd be way too much effort.

There's a female turian named Nyreen. She and Aria have a past. Yes, that kind of past. James approves +10. But she's apparently too much of a goody-two-shoes (despite being the leader of a merc gang) (oh by the way that's a plot twist). So now we're back to ME1 and the usual Token Paragon Squadmate and Token Renegade Squadmate options for every moral choice. James disapproves -2.

Oh, right, Aria won't let you bring any of your squadmates with. Because Archangel, the Shadow Broker, and Vengeance Incarnate are all too goody-two-shoes for her but she'll let her old flame wander around the base. Okay then. This in and of itself is not a problem, but then the game saddles you with Aria (vanguard) alone for several segments full of shield-happy enemies, so if you're a vanguard or adept, you're in for a long hard slog.

Now, honestly, I didn't mind the "no regular squadmates" thing. Despite the snark above, this was handled better than it was in Arrival. And it was only in Leviathan where your squadmates actually got any new content (From Ashes doesn't count, being Day-One DLC). Did you guys really think that was going to happen every time? It never happened in ME1, and the only reason it happened at all in ME2 was because there happened to be some dialogue left lying around from the vanilla game for half of your squadmates to be able to yell in surprise when the trade center gets bombed in Shadow Broker. What I did mind was that neither of the two squadmates you're saddled with for the game have an ammo power. Because I find such things important when playing as a class that has no ammo power itself.

So you get to the Talon (that's the new merc gang) base and find out that Nyreen is their leader, not this random Darius character Aria thinks will be there. (P.S, as someone who was full Renegade in the first game, I thought this was going somewhere else...) Well, Aria decides to manipulate Nyreen and the Talons, so she gives a glitch-laden speech in a room that I swear was ripped straight from Alien 3. By the way, this speech is just swarmed with glitches, so Aria does this bizarre little pirouette right before the camera angle changes. I may have mentioned earlier that this speech has a glitch or two in it. Just in case I didn't make it clear, there's a large number of glitches in this scene.

I PAID FIFTEEN F#CKING DOLLARS FOR THIS! DO THE WORDS "QUALITY ASSURANCE" MEAN NOTHING AT EA ANYMORE?

James disapproves -20.

By the way, even if it weren't glitching, Aria's actions don't really match what she says all that well anyway.

So you, Aria and Nyreen go to shut down the Death Barriers Cerberus has put up around the place. Meanwhile, you run into the Adjutants. They're the things the Reapers created from that race that lived on Ilos, and they're still around for... some reason. They're totally not the Hunters from Half-Life 2 Episode 2. Once you fight your way through a horde of them, Shepard has to decide whether to try to hack the generator or just shut it down (and kill thousands of civilians in the process). Well, when Renegade Shep sees a Renegade Interrupt...

Either Aria or Nyreen will be pissed at you, but now it's time to launch an assault on Afterlife. Nyreen won't be with you for what is the coolest firefight in the game - you're making your way through a water treatment facility with pretty awesome lighting. Especially if you're using incendiary ammo, because the light's red and your ammo is red, and it is pretty awesome. 

Then Aria's temper gets the better of her again and she falls into another of Petrovsky's traps.  So it's up to you, alone, to run around the main room of Afterlife and blow up some generators while dealing with an Adjutant/Cerberus rush. Apparently this defeats the entire Cerberus army, because Petrovsky surrenders. Aria isn't having any of it and will strangle him to death unless you interrupt her. 

And that's it.

No, seriously, that's it. After Nyreen made all that fuss about Aria only caring about Omega and not the people on it, Aria just makes another speech and everyone is under her thumb again. Nyreen can't exactly challenge her on this, and it's not like Shepard's ever coming back to Omega. Oh, and you get about 400 war assets. It doesn't matter what you did. If Petrovsky lives, you get him. If he dies, you get Aria's hacker, who breaks into the Cerberus databases and gives you all the information he would have anyway. They're worth 30 points each and all the other scores are the same. Yay.

So, I have two questions for BioWare/EA. Number one, what the F#CK did you do to you QA team? And number two, what was the point of Nyreen? Was it really fan obsession for a female turian? Yay, now I know what a female turian looks like. Yipee skip. This is as momentous an occasion as all those Talimancers finally getting to see what's under that helmet.

But Nyreen... Nyreen feels like she's pointlessly shoehorned in there to be a counterpoint to Aria going all Captain Ahab on us. We didn't need that character in Shadow Broker, and we didn't need it here. Aria had a lover in her past. Yay. I am so. Surprised. Nyreen says some cryptic mumbo-jumbo about not actually leaving Omega when Aria thinks she did, which doesn't do anything for my opinion of Aria's intel guy (which was exactly zero to begin with, seeing as how the merc gangs in 2 were just leaving their datapads with their plans against her lying around). But anyway, that's never touched on again. Aria is exactly as competent as the plot demands.

Besides, Aria's One True Love is Omega itself, so Nyreen is pretty damn egregious. I would have preferred having Bray as a squadmate. As improbable as it sounds, here's a batarian who doesn't believe the legend/propaganda. Seeing his opinion of Shepard change as he watches the Shep in action first hand? Hell, that would have helped blunt the other fan complaint I'm seeing, which is that you're really just Aria's hired gun for three hours or so. This isn't about you. It's not about your relationship with Aria. It's just a story that you happen to be in.

Meh.