The first of the Mass Effect DLC was released on March 10th entitled “Bring Down the Sky”. As a fan of Mass Effect I was excited to learn that DLC would be available allowing 90 minutes of gameplay and for us achievement whores 50 gamerscore! I won’t bore you with the details of the mission as Tom has already outlined it in the news section so I will stick to a review.

Bring Down the Sky basically amounts to a longer Mass Effect Side Quest. If you took the time to complete some of the side quests in the original game, you will be familiar with their formula. It goes something like this:

1. Person(s) in distress.
2. You need to visit several bases on a planet.
3. Enemies in the base.
4. Destroy the enemies in each base.

Where Bring Down the Sky differs is they include a boss fight with the quest. A boss fight which you can easily avoid if you choose to.

All things considered, I’m glad I received the easy 50 gamerscore, but honestly, this type of mission already exists within the game - they just have different objectives.

I don’t like the idea of having to pay for a rather boring tedious side quest. If I am going to pay for DLC I want it to contribute to the game in a meaningful way. A lot could have been done with this mission. It could have possibly acted like Mass Effect 1.5, adding a story line that we need to look out for in Mass Effect 2. Actually, depending on what you do with the boss fight, this may be a possibility. I certainly hope that a key part of Mass Effect 2 is not the Batarians.

The reason I am giving the DLC such as low score is because we need to seperate the things that make Mass Effect great from it. We need to rate the content alone. We already know the graphics are good, sound is good etc…so I am reviewing this on the merit of the content alone and not what makes the whole Mass Effect experience excellent.

If you don’t want the 50 gamerscore don’t bother purchasing this DLC.