Mass Effect Replay: The ugliest aliens you've ever seen in any universe

Batarians are ugly. By human standards, anyway. Batarians have four black eyes. Six gnarly looking nostrils. Weak, shallow chins. Heck, humans even hate that feature in each other. But the thing I dislike most in the Batarians is that, in the Mass Effect universe, they’re the underdogs, and humans are basically going to ensure they stay there, unable to progress, as the underdogs.

The Bring Down the Sky DLC is something I ran into accidentally on my way to finding the blue lady (Liara). In Bring Down the Sky, the Batarians are driving an asteroid right towards a major population center on a planet. It’s an asteroid big enough to wipe out the dinosaurs. I’ve got four hours to stop it. When my six-wheeler is dropped from my ship and I land on the asteroid, I see how close the planet is—and its enormity on the asteroid’s horizon—which makes the ticking of the clock become very loud and clear in my mind.

But it's human greed and/or ignorance that brought the Batarians to this point. I'm not going to unpack the DLC's end boss spoilers here. But it goes to show why indeed the Batarians are repressed and are only perceived as endlessly violent because, perhaps, they're outgunned, outmanned, and don't have any other way of making themselves heard. That's...one side of the argument.

This video captures the end of Bring Down the Sky. I’ve been bumping and bouncing over peaks and valleys that look like GameStop stock prices. But this DLC’s finale takes me and my team (Tali and Wrex) into an arena-like shootout that reminds me of an arena shootout in Max Payne 3 of all places. If Shepard were to suddenly be sporting a bald pate and a cheap Hawaiian shirt, I’d be convinced Rockstar handled this level’s design.

I’m not playing on hard difficulty. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But I get to experience some more tough combat-centric gameplay. My weapons are constantly overheated from, well, me not laying off the trigger, but even more from enemy biotic attacks. I’ve got only a few minutes to clip the correct wires to disarm some demolitions charges scattered around this Max Payne arena. Which would be fine, but I’m barely a few parsecs from Eden Prime where I was doing this exact same thing against main bad guy Saren.

I can’t complain about it being a completely repetitive mission structure, because this time I’ve also got drones flying around shooting at me from advantageous positions while I go about disarming bombs. That’s new! And did I mention those jerkoff biotic enemies overheating my weapons constantly? Oh man, what a new and exciting twist on combat!

My only other complaints stem from the idea that I’m pretty sure Wrex and Tali have no concept—or just don’t care—about friendly fire. They don’t realize—or they’re teaching me a lesson—about the perils of me still being in level one armor when I should be in level four armor. But I only want to wear my level one armor because it’s the iconic Commander Shepard armor, y’know, with the red stripe down the sleeve and the N7 on the chest. I can’t go around in superior armor if it doesn’t have the N7 on the chest. How else is everybody supposed to know that I’m a top secret special forces operative?

Post-Bring Down the Sky, I’m given plenty of downtime back onboard the Normandy. I love this ship. The doors look like portals. The hallways look like I’m time traveling through them. The mechanical components are chunky. The interior, from the bridge to the loading bay, looks like it was meant to hug my uniform, to draw sharp lines against my jawline. Normandy and Shepard are both handsome devils.

I wrap things up with a deep dive into engineering with Tali. She likes my engine and stuff. While we talk, the background spins and pulses with the crackling energy of the Mass Effect drive. She’s never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen anything like it. And I remember back to my playthrough of Mass Effect 2, some 11 years ago, when Tali becomes the woman I romance. You have to remember, Mass Effect is just a dating simulator with a sci-fi backdrop. All the Reapers and E.L.E. asteroids and four-eyed aliens are just window dressing to what really makes up the core of Mass Effect’s gameplay: trying to get one of your crew to sleep with you. It's only creepy if you make it creepy.

Which reminds me—I’m looking for the blue woman. Liara. The asari. Those are the female-presenting species that can go full XX or XY chromosomes as needed to mate with anybody they want in the known universe. If you’ve somehow stumbled across hermaphroditic images of this iconic blue alien woman at some point in the last 14 years of existing on the internet, well, that may be fan art, but it’s fan art with a basis in Mass Effect’s reality.

It’s getting weird. Goodnight! This has just been one more hour-long step in my replay of the Mass Effect trilogy, hoping to have rolled credits by the time the Trilogy’s remake launches this May.