Well what do you know, turns out this DLC was actually as good as people were saying. It feels good to remember what loving Mass Effect was like and it's a credit to the whole series that something like this actually works. What's also nice is not feeling like you're getting exploited. A lot of the Mass Effect DLC, the stuff for ME3 in particular, has been a questionable value proposition at best, but when in this one you hope that it will keep going a bit longer it actually does. This is how you do DLC right, but I don't want to think about how much they must've had to fight for the approval to do it.
The only thing I didn't love was when they give you a sliver of health, no medigel and limited ammo. On Insanity that was probably the hardest combat sequence in ME3, which I guess is a bit refreshing since half the time it's hard to tell the difference between Normal and Insanity in the regular game. Playing through Omega right before this reminded me of, well two things. First that the people who made Arrival don't know what they're doing, good job creating easily the worst pieces of content for both ME2 and ME3. Ugh, I don't even want to think about "ME4" with these guys at the helm. DON'T BUY OMEGA.
Secondly it reminded me that I might be a crazy person because I vastly prefer the combat in ME2 over the combat in ME3. Knowing how much the multiplayer took off I doubt anyone will agree with me. Between the arena based encounter design and the practically instant cooldowns it just has a drastically different feel. Half the time it doesn't even play like a cover based game. It's frantic where I thought ME2 was tactical, it's non-stop power spam where in ME2 you had to be deliberate. As an Adept you never run out of ammo because you rarely even fire your gun. I know ME2 could get a little tedious on higher difficulties, but I took a liking to that and the combat pace in ME3 is just so radically different.
I also think that the single player in ME3 suffers from a severe lack of enemy variety. Not that the different merc gangs in ME2 were drastically different from eachother, but they did all have their own flavour. If you add up all the enemies, Eclipe, Blue Suns, Blood Pack, mechs, Collectors, Geth and Reapers there was actually an impressive amount of them. In a game with as much combat as Mass Effect I think that's necessary. In ME3 it just feels like you're fighting the same enemies all game long and I think they're less interesting than any of the ME2 factions. This feels like such a silly thing to complain about, but the Reapers are just ugly monsters with guns and the Cerberus troops are completely dehumanized to the point where they almost feel like monsters as well. They're just bland, they have no personality or flavour, they could be from any game and don't feel like the come from the Mass Effect universe.
They did a slightly better job with the Reaper troops I guess, the Banshee and Brute are both recognizable, but having your biggest bullet spunge(s) be a charging enemy is a weird choice. The only new enemy I like is the Ravager but I thought the Scion was more interesting than any of them. But hell, even when they bring back old enemies they misuse them, Husks for example tend to come at you in relatively open areas where they're easy to avoid, if they weren't easy enough having no armor on any difficulty. I don't think I've ever died to a Husk in ME3.
It's not like they didn't try new things, smoke grenades, riot shields, grenades, enemies deploying turrets, I just don't think it meshed well. And I just can't get over how god damn bland the design of the Cerberus troops is.
