Mass Effect 2 : The Kasumi Mission Review

The Kasumi content, weighing in at 800 MB and costing 560 MSP, is the first of the paid for DLC if you don’t count the “alternate” uniform stuff, so Mass Effect 2 fans might rightly be expecting something great for this release.

The DLC introduces the new system of Botlzmann to explore with a total of five planets, only one of which is really worth taking the time to enter. The others offer little in the way of scanning potential and so are only needed to be visited to keep that 100% exploration total.

After some fumbling around it became apparent for the need to go to the Citadel and find a terminal in order to enter a password to kick-off the mission. Once you’ve spent the time talking to an advertisement board in the Citadel, the mission can start proper – but it’s not a recruitment exercise and you’re not going to end up with a new team mate at the end of this. No, this is a trip to Bekenstien to fulfil a promise made by Cerbeus to a master thief to join the cause. You do however get to have Kasumi on your team to fulfil Cerbeus’s promise for a while, and so, depending on your current level, will get to kit out her skills based on the points of already acquired levels.

This is a fairly chunky download for DLC, and as such you’d be expecting a lot of interaction with the characters – you’re likely to be disappointed. The mission involves a bit of searching environments and some gun play once past the initial part of the mission, but there really isn’t a lot here to keep you occupied for long, it doesn’t feel engaging, and is simply a matter of going through the motions.

Shepard takes over the persona of Gunn in order to deliver a gift to the target on Bekenstien – playing as a female character, she certainly gets to wear some uplifting outfits (and one you get to keep). It is, of course, perfectly in keeping with the dinner party atmosphere encountered in the mission. The environments are what you might call middle class England – a typical social event complete with entrées. The ultimate goal though is entry to the vault, and for this it involves a bit of interaction with the environment.

After some investigative and stealthy work, the mission turns to some gun play and ultimately a boss battle with the person being stalked. However, it’s difficult to see the worth the of the 540 MSP asked, you’ll complete it in under an hour, it provides no additional weapons, items or armour and the story to it really isn’t very involving or interesting at all – nor is there any real possibility of replayability to it.

For the first paid for DLC this is a poor effort, particularly given some of the great content BioWare has released in the past of this format. Unless you really need the fifteen GamerScore for completing the mission, I’d suggest even as a big Mass Effect fan, that you save your money for something else, or wait for this to become a “Deal of the Week”.

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Marty Greenwell

Marty has been gaming since the heady years of the ZX-81 and still owns most of the gaming systems purchased since those days, including the Atari 2600, ZX Spectrum, SNES, Jaguar, Dreamcast and GameCube. Being a collection junkie (or more accurately, hoarder), he buys more games than he can possibly play, far too many of which are still sealed in their packaging. Marty favours RPGs and Driving games when it comes to genres, and is possibly a little bit too addicted to Disgaea. When not gaming he’s out frightening OAPs on his motorcycle, clad in black leather.

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