Even losing a single squadmate acts a sombre warning.Īfter a crash landing at the base, Shepard rounds up the remaining squadmates and you are given your first set of role options. If you're under-prepared, it can feel a brutal introduction - one which sets the stage for the potential massacre that can follow. This is all before you touch down at the Collector Base itself. One of these will be picked from a character in your squad at the time, the other from the rest of your team. Later checks depend on Normandy having upgraded shielding and cannon, and can see a further two deaths from an explosion in the engine room and from a falling bulkhead. The game will make a straightforward check to see if you've upgraded the ship's armour to determine whether Normandy comes through unscathed - or not, which immediately kills off Jack via an explosion in her below-deck hidey hole. Three squadmates can die if you failed to heed your crew's earlier warnings about going into battle under-prepared - specifically, if you did not unlock and complete upgrades to the Normandy itself. Here, sandwiched in-between sequences where Shepard fights off Collector invaders in the cargo bay, the deaths begin. This is swiftly shown in the mission's introduction sequence, which sees the Normandy jump through the Omega-4 Relay and into battle with the Collector Ship - the same one which took down the original Normandy in Mass Effect 2's opening moments.
Not to be confused with Omega-3, good for healthy joints. It's why this mission fascinates me - long before I saw flowcharts being made to expose its inner workings. But while this opaqueness makes for a nailbiting ride, it also hides some of BioWare's best decision-made gameplay, as choices here and from throughout your path through the rest of the game converge. The best thing about the Suicide Mission is you can go into it blind, hoping you've done everything you can to protect your ship and crew - and still feel a gnawing doubt not everyone will make it out alive. Not that much of this is visible to the player, of course. It's an ominous sight - and a signpost to where you will also be drawn, pulled towards this place just as inevitably for the game's beautifully designed final moments - its Suicide Mission.Ī decade on from Mass Effect 2's release, its finale stands up as some of BioWare's best ever work - and while the game's follow-up certainly competed in its emotional stakes, the Suicide Mission remains unparalleled in terms of its labyrinthine choice complexity. In the distance, burnt debris circles a black hole's accretion disc: a graveyard of spaceship wrecks slowly being drawn toward their final deaths.
Mass Effect 2's final location - the Collector Base sat beyond its Omega-4 Relay - sits on screen from the moment you first fire up the game.
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