This isn’t my favourite DLC that the Mass Effect universe has put out, but I didn’t find it terribly bad. A few things I did enjoy were the outside environment as you drive; seeing the asteroid hurtling towards a planet and when you look long enough, it kinda made me dizzy. I did enjoy the story elements as they came, but I did think the inside environments to be bland and boring, making the gunfights themselves boring. I found that ME 1 had this problem in general, as many of the environments were lacklustre when exploring the galaxy, with the exception of a few planets and, of course, the beautiful Citadel.
An average experience.

Mass Effect series Review + Retrospective #1.1: Bring Down the Sky

Bring Down the Sky is the first and only story DLC for the original ME. Taking place on an asteroid that is functionally identical to the typical uncharted worlds seen in the main game, Shepard has to stop a group of Batarian terrorists from colliding the asteroid into a densely populated human world.

How does Shepard do this? By fighting a group of enemies in three identical prefab buildings copied over from the main game, then a minor “boss encounter” in a fourth building. It’s fine, it’s more ME1. If you’re a fan of the uncharted worlds exploration than you will probably get a kick out of this.

The introduction of the Batarians is fairly well done, you get what they’re about in only a few scenes. Speaking of, isn’t it weird that there are basically no sympathetic portrayals of the Batarians in the entire trilogy? They’re literally always terrorists or slavers. Hell, Shepard has to sacrifice their entire system to the Reapers canonically. You don’t even get Renegade points for shooting Balak’s 2nd-in-command when he surrenders, man.

Anyway, it’s a decent hour-ish long little side mission. It’s definitely the most in-depth side mission/assignment you’ll get in the original Mass Effect. I’d say it’s worth completing if you want just a little more squeezed out of ME1 and it’s got a kind of interesting payoff in ME3.

Playtime: 1 Hour
Score: 7/10

Bit of a new experience for me as while I have played through Mass Effect 1 before, I never played this DLC. But since I have the Legendary edition and I'm replaying the games, I wanted to give this a play.

Its got a cool story setup of terroists hjacking an astroid and setting it on course to collide with a inhabited planet. While it is basically a glorified side quest, it does have more production value then your typical side quest in this game and I liked it. You also get a cool choice of reward at the end of it, so its worth playing for that. Overall though, this DLC is pretty short and doesn't really go anywhere storywise. But if have you have the legendary edition then its worth playing as part of your Mass Effect 1 playthrough.

"A Unique Terrorist Plot"

"Mass Effect" has a lot of interesting lore buried within its many text entries and one-off conversations, and one of the ones that always stuck out to me was the discussion of what a "war crime" was considered in this futuristic universe. The use of "asteroid drops" by various races during wartime is one of these infamous tactics, and it always intrigued me as to what this would really look like. Thankfully, BioWare also felt a need to explore this, thus the DLC "Bring Down the Sky" was created.

This DLC explores a situation where an asteroid is hurtling towards the human colony on an earth-like planet, all being directed by a Batarian terrorist squad who took control of its thruster system. This asteroid was a prospect for use as a space station, and the engineers working on it have been taken hostage. It's up to Commander Shepard and company to stop the asteroid's impact, save the hostages, and prevent the Batarians from getting away with their crimes.

Gameplay is pretty much identical to other planet missions, with exploration with the Mako and a few combat sections in buildings being the mainstay. The Mako is still hot garbage so unfortunately the above ground exploration is poor. However, indoor combat was not too shabby and had a decent mix of close-range and long-range firefights. There is a side quest where you find some murdered scientists, but it wasn't too interesting and seemed like it was just thrown in haphazardly.

The plot is decent, but it doesn't really go anywhere. The new characters aren't really "characters", so you don't really feel attached to them whether they live or die. Same can be said for the enemies. There isn't really a lot of time for this exploration anyhow, since the DLC barely lasted an hour. The best aspect of this plot was actually the fact that the setting was interesting, and the visuals of the asteroid hurtling towards a populated planet was both striking and inflicted some tension to the situation.

There's some decent loot to get as a reward for completion, but besides that not much else. It was an alright experience and was thankfully short enough without overstaying its welcome. It kind of toes the line of playability at times, but if I was replaying this game, I would likely run through this DLC again despite its simplicity.

Final Verdict: 6/10 (Above Average)

replayed this through legendary edition. what a remarkably frustrating DLC this is for series lore. by this point, batarians had only been hinted at in lore dumps about the skyllian blitz, and this would be the first chance players would get to see them and what they're about. and turns out. . . bioware wants you to know that they are all irredeemable slavers who seek nothing but the abject suffering of all of humanity. why? because the council favored humanity over them in a critical instance.

the shocking part here is how squandered this premise is. set aside the species essentialism of "you will literally never meet a batarian that is anything approximating moral" mixed with the completely absent info on batarian culture to justify this consistent characterization. . . ignore that. we have objective evidence in this DLC that the council DOES in fact favor humanity in some capacity and IS pulling for them out of either nepotism, quid pro quo, or some potential third reason. the various prejudiced volus and turians are RIGHT, the council did rightfully take away settled worlds from the batarians for the humans. and we're not given nearly enough information on that decision to determine whether or not that's a just call on their part, hell we don't even find out ANY reason for why the council yoinks away land from the batarians and cedes it to the humans. but what you've done is made complexity out of humanity's position in the galaxy and given a species (the batarians) very good reason to resent their presence. organic conflict like this is great and gives the writers so much to build on. what if the council was completely biased against batarians? what if the council made that call based on good evidence that was classified? what if the council only made that decision from the post-contact war fallout in tandem with political pressure from human diplomats like udina? there's literally so many places you can go with this decision.

this unfortunately begins and ends at "the batarians want human colonists to suffer and when they're not torturing human colonists they're doing unambiguously immoral things like slaving". i mean, for fuck's sake, the one batarian you can talk down literally starts his convo with "whoa! don't attack me. i didn't sign up for this (genocide). i thought i was just gonna be slaving.", as if him implying that he would be slaving on a good day is supposed to paint him as the good guy. it's all so dreadfully dull when you get down to the facts of it. the batarians never get humanized in the way any other species like the asari or the turians or the salarians do (or even the less significant ones like the volus and hanar). this sets a bad trend that we see spring up with species like the vorcha, and while you can blame the bad writing in mass effect 2 on mass effect 2, it's worth stating that this was the first step down the slippery slope.

gameplay-wise this DLC is functional. it's certainly better than an average random planet and has more interiors than most. at the same time, it feels like something where you can just autopilot through most of it and not miss much. the only really noteworthy part of the whole thing is the final gameplay section of dealing with all of balak's men prior to talking to him. it feels overwhelming and stressful in a fun way, and evokes the feeling of playing a third person shooter with the enemy AI at its most aggressive. ME1 definitely could've benefited from more "big area with lots of cover to use in a large-scale dogfight" type of arenas if this is anything to go by. after that, you're given the moral choice which the game seems to think is like 90x deeper and grayer than it actually is. no matter what you choose, the game treats you like you like you made the wrong choice, which is a sort of interesting way to go about it but. . . i dunno. this DLC certainly was created with simon's tagline of "choosing between the lives of hostages or letting a terrorist go. . . that's an impossible choice" and it seems to do everything short of suck its own cock on screen over it. this would be a better dilemma if balak existed in any other part of the series and you got any sense that him escaping led to more suffering and death. but no matter what you choose, he disappears from the series and if you let him go, you'll get an email from kate in 2 telling you how nice of a person you are to have not incinerated her via bomb blast. ok.

i just get disappointed with this DLC because mass effect is this english muffin of galactic politics and to squander something as interesting as the batarian/human conflict centered by the citadel is just. . . why even bother? why even make this DLC if you have such a negative interest in fleshing out batarians as a species. it feels like a waste of time. i just don't see the point in crafting this grand world full of scientific fascination and political nuance only to shit the bed in your DLC and go "here are the evil orcs who do bad things and cannot help themselves from being evil". it's just so tired; don't you get tired of orcs after a while?

Prefabricated warehouses. This is always how I thought about the identical building asset reuse Mass Effect has for a lot of it's planet based structures. I mean it makes sense, space travel and setting up structures is expensive so the practical solution would be for industries to have cheap prefabricated adjustable structures for such a purpose which is why 3 out of 4 of the building you go into in Bring down the Sky are identical and often used equally in the base game. Not a knock on the DLC, just something that always amused me how there is an in game explanation that makes sense if you think about it.

Anyway, this DLC is how the race of the Batarians were introduced to the series. They had previously been mentioned in conversations and the codex but this is where they first appeared. A group of them have taken over an asteroid that was being redirected into a planet's orbit to be mined then used as a base once hollowed out. The Batarian terrorists instead have it set on a crash course with the planet colony Terra Nova intending to kill millions.

Gameplay wise it plays just like any of the uncharted planet exploring missions. The mako is dropped on the asteroid and there are a few areas to explore, some items to collect and a few firefights as Shepard shuts down the thrusters on the asteroid. Essentially if you like Mass Effect, it's more Mass Effect and it blends in well with the main game well enough that at this point you wouldn't even know it was DLC replaying it on the legendary edition remaster as I am.

The big flaw is just that it's so short. I like the story premise and extra lore it introduces there just isn't a lot of meat to it. I finished all content, exploration and side quests in about an hour. It's free content in most collections though so certainly worth playing through.

+ Seeing the Batarians for the first time.
+ More Mass Effect.
+ Blends in well with other content.
+ Free on trilogy and Legendary editions.

- Too short, only about an hour of content.