I’ve been less than impressed with Mass Effect 2 narrative DLC so far. The Zaeed, Hammerhead and Kasumi packs aren’t a complete waste of time, but they feel underbaked and inessential. Two of them add team members you’ll never use or talk to, and the other introduces the neo-Mako, which I’m perfectly happy leaving in the garage.

I fully expected the new Overlord pack, released this past Wednesday and buried in E3 happenings, to follow that same path: a mostly silent Sheppard (too expensive to get the voice talent back in the studio), a plot of no consequence, and a 10-point achievement or two. Well, I was right on that last one.

Overlord is really well done. The plot summary — a virtual intelligence at a Cerberus facility goes nuts and kills people — doesn’t sound like much, but the spoilery details I’m avoiding here add a dimension absent in previous DLC. There are audio and visual effects, like the V.I.‘s digital howl and a Sheppard hallucination sequence, that are unlike anything done in the game so far. The Hammerhead makes an appearance, but is used judiciously as a transportation mechanism, as opposed to the basis of a mission.

The story ends with your standard opportunity to be a moral white knight or heartless clod, but ME2 is kind of forced to work that way. And in a DLC first, I got the feeling that my handling of the end of this arc would have some repercussions in Mass Effect 3. Guess Bioware wasn’t kidding about bridging the gap between the two games with DLC.

I’m not sorry I bought and played those other DLC packs, but Overlord makes them look silly. Definitely worth 560 MS points.