Mass Effect 2 Arrival Review

Designed to bridge the gap between last year's Mass Effect 2 and the upcoming Mass Effect 3, Arrival exchanges roughly £5 for a brief jaunt through two new areas.

After coughing up the cash and downloading 700-odd megabytes, Arrival will be triggered when next checking your terminal on the Normandy. Admiral Hackett (he who helped you attack Sovereign in Mass Effect 1) asks Shepard to rescue a friend currently rotting in a Batarian prison. The caveat, probably introduced because of the complexities of recording dialog for your extended squad, is that Shepard has to go it alone.

Things are a little more complex than the premise, of course: the prisoner is doing time for trying to blow up a Mass Relay, and just so happens to know something about the imminent Reaper attack on the galaxy. Events develop, stuff explodes, and Shepard punches a few people in the face against a variety of beautiful backdrops.

Anyone expecting Arrival to exhibit as much content or quality as last year's Lair of the Shadow Broker will immediately be disappointed, however. I polished the quest off in well under two hours, and that was with the trials of restarting numerous times on Insanity difficulty.

Length is not the only issue, however. There is little to propel you through Arrival's run-and-gun encounters other than a desire to see out the plot, and because Shepard is (mostly) alone there isn't much in the way of creative and tactical combat situations.

When Arrival does actually try its hand at anything more than corridor blasting, it usually falls flat. A stealth-orientated section is basically a doddle for Infiltrators but tedious for other class types, and at one point you're left knocking off waves of enemies in a particularly weak lemon drink version of Horde mode.