Review: Mass Effect DLC-Pinnacle Station

The second piece of DLC for Bioware’s Mass Effect is entitled Pinnacle Station and is a nice change of pace from the main game. The basic idea is that Commander Shepard is invited to an elite training facility called “Pinnacle Station” run by Admiral Ahern of the Alliance. The station is simply a large simulator that allows you to play four different combat modes over three different maps for each mode.
The combat modes are straight forward; survival has you and your squad trying to survive as long as possible, it is time based not wave based like Horde mode in Gears 2. Capture has you and your team capturing 3 points around the map and the quicker you do it the better your score. Time Trial has you eliminating all of the enemies on the map as quickly as possible. The last mode is hunt, you gain time for every enemy you kill and you are trying to kill as many as possible before the timer runs out.
The maps are mostly based on locales from the main story of the game; there is the underground section of Liara’s dig site, a section of Virmire, a warehouse similar to the enemy bases in the main game, and the only unique map, a volcanic setting. You are competing against the best scores of the other combatants on the station but their scores are usually pretty easy to beat. There isn’t much in terms of story to the DLC but it offers a nice combat simulator that caters to replay value and you can try to topple your own best scores so it’s fun.
It has been criticized for being very different from the main game because it doesn’t add any new alien species (like Bring Down the Sky did) and it didn’t add any new worlds, just a space station, but I think that it brought a nice combat element to the game that allowed the good combat system to shine. Most RPG’s don’t have traditional shooter elements like Mass Effect does and this allows the game to pull off a piece of DLC like this. Overall it wasn’t a bad piece of DLC and it’s fun for what it is, 800 MS points isn’t a bad price so I would recommend this to Mass Effect fans.