certainly well worth playing for the whole, yknow, point of pure flow state speedrunning -- but I think even this aspect of the game gets old kind of fast. missions are fairly repetitive aesthetically for the first half and some weapons are more fun than others (with the rocket launcher making gift finding a pain). obviously anyone else will tell you about the cringe dialogue and I'm no exception but the story is so whatever anyway it really is OKAY to just ffwd everything. it's a good game that starts good and GETS good but the grind for gifts and ace medals gets frustrating fast and I actively gave up on going for every achievement realising the total bullshit of the ng+ rushes. you're telling me I have to play every level of the game back to back without dying? get fucked, absolutely lowering my score for this alone.

Yeah Kasumi is a great character both in story and gameplay, yeah the psuedo stealth mission is an interesting change of pace, yeah the ending is suprisingly emotional without being overly dramatic, and yeah looking at a bunch of priceless art pieces done by aliens alongside human ones is cool (seriously we barely see any actual culture from other alien races throughout the entire ME series).

But whats most important is that i've been doing an insanity difficulty playthrough as a pure biotic, and this DLC finally got me a new weapon to replace my shitty starting SMG. On God the default SMG is such trash in this game, 3 round burst, no accuracy and isn't even good in close quarters. Half the time it feels like flicking peas at the enemy would do more damage. And by Christ the new SMG in this DLC is incredible, feels more accurate than my heavy pistol designed for long range and it has high damage and fire rate. Literally just this one gun made the rest of the game about 3 times less frustrating (althrough it is completely my fault for playing on insanity as a pure biotic)