Yesterday, Bioware made available the Firewalker Mission pack DLC for free to Cerberus Network members. Is this content worth your time, especially if you already finished the main game? It’s certainly not necessary. If you are wanting to extend the Mass Effect 2 experience you’ve already enjoyed, you will have to wait until the paid Kasumi – Stolen Memories DLC releases on April 6th, which will include a new recruitable crew member and an accompanying loyalty mission. In the meantime, what the free Firewalker DLC dishes up is a different type of experience altogether.
As Bioware announced, the Firewalker DLC focuses on the Hammerhead hovercraft assault vehicle, and the missions are almost entirely completed in the vehicle. The missions are also very linear. Like the on-foot missions from Mass Effect 2′s main game, you are dropped into an area and have a specific mission with little opportunity for exploration. The missions essentially boil down to one mechanic. Whether you are tasked with scanning databases to obtain information or finding artifacts, you follow the light beacons showing you the next goal, fight any enemies you find along the way, and hold a button down to scan the lighted circle at the bottom of the beacon. Only one mission varies from that structure, and only slightly. And there’s really not much of a story holding the missions together. There were some scientists in distress and after you check on them in the first mission, you obtain some data about work they were doing on other planets, leading to the other four missions. And that’s about as exciting as it gets story-wise.
Unlike the Mako, the Hammerhead hovers above the terrain and, therefore, does not get caught on the environment. There’s a boost to make the Hammerhead travel more quickly. Additionally, it can jump. Quite high, in fact. You can even do subsequent boost jumps, as a sort of double or triple jump to get across gaps or lava pools. Indeed, most of the levels require a significant amount of jumping to move through the level and achieve your goal. If this is starting to sound like a platforming experience to you, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
Although you will exit the Hammerhead in a few stages and explore a couple of areas on foot, there is no combat outside of the vehicle in these missions. When in the Hammerhead, there is a guided missile launcher. As in the Mako combat in the first Mass Effect, you aim your reticule on an enemy while holding down the trigger. Unlike both the Mako or the combat in the main game of Mass Effect 2, however, there is no ammo limitation and your gun does not overheat. So, you can hold down the trigger continuously in combat. You dodge enemy missiles and fire by moving left and right or jumping. The combat felt very similar to the Mako combat, where your best strategy is to remain very distant from enemies and to dodge enemy missiles and fire as necessary. Because if you get too close to enemies, their fire damages the Hammerhead very quickly (and then you when it explodes). So, the distant combat in the Hammerhead is about as unexciting as that in the Mako.
Additionally, there seem to be some problems with the aiming system. Although “guided” makes it sound like the missiles hit your targets very easily, I found that I would sometimes be aiming at one of several enemies and my fire would not hit that enemy. That was true even though I had it in the center of my sights and it was highlighted as my target. However, if I aimed at one of the enemies next to it, I would start damaging that other enemy immediately. Once I destroyed one (or sometimes it required destroying all) of the other enemies, I could suddenly hit the previously indestructible target. Additionally, aiming while jumping is extremely inaccurate, even when you maintain your reticule directly on your target.
To me, the Firewalker DLC feels like a Bioware experiment looking towards possibly including vehicle-based missions and combat in Mass Effect 3. But I just am not feeling it at this point. The platforming seems extremely disjointed from the main game. If Bioware wants to incorporate vehicles into the next game in the series, I believe that linear, platformy levels are not the way to go. Instead, I think that the Hammerhead’s hovering and jumping could breathe new life into the open-ended planet exploration of the first Mass Effect. I loved the sense of discovery that occurred when you found an isolated base or stumbled upon a side mission you could complete. However, the Mako was too slow and did not work well in the environments, and many planets just had too little to make exploration seem worth it. I think it would be interesting if Bioware combined the scanning system of Mass Effect 2 with the planet exploration of Mass Effect 1.
For example, you could scan planets and obtain minerals (although please, please, please Bioware make the scanner go faster and automatic so that it does not require pushing a second button to actively scan every few seconds). Just starting to scan a planet would indicate whether there was an “anomaly” indicating that there was something interesting on the planet. Some of these would be missions that drop you directly on the planet on foot, as was the case in Mass Effect 2. Others, though, could be Hammerhead-based planet exploration like in Mass Effect 1. The difference being that Bioware should limit the number of planets to explore and should pack enough interesting or rewarding things on each planet so that it’s actually exciting to do so. Every explorable planet should have a few missions, and possible several missions tied together by something happening on that particular planet. And because the Hammerhead is more maneuverable and jumps over difficult terrain more easily, the annoyance that was driving the Mako would not hinder the experience.
I’m glad, though, that Bioware is experimenting to possibly change up things in the next Mass Effect installment. I’m also happy that they chose to do so through free DLC. Because if I had paid $5 or $7 (or really even $3), I would not have been satisfied with the content of the Firewalker Mission pack. But since it’s free, who am I to complain? Oh wait, I already did.