Jack of many trades, Overlord of none

Mass Effect 2: Overlord is a strangely ambitious DLC pack, and while it makes admirable attempts at several mold-breaking innovations, I wouldn't really say that they paid off.

It's got a mostly self-contained story, for one thing, a story which ultimately reaches a pretty fascinating conclusion without leaning on Shepard or the Reapers or other established lore. ... however, up until that conclusion, plot development is scant and slow. The premise is genuinely good, but it just isn't well-integrated with Overlord's early and middle missions.

Partly because - and here's another surprise - those missions can be tackled in any order, across a free-roaming planet map. Like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy's Western Ghats level, Overlord feels like an experimental taste of non-linear sandbox world design, using the new Hammerhead hover-tank to physically travel between missions at your own discretion.

This new approach is definitely promising, and probably helped inspire Mass Effect: Andromeda, for whatever that's worth. But here, it's very prototype-y and under-done: secondary objectives and interesting scenery are both sparse, and so the illusion of openness breaks down pretty quickly. Plus, the Hammerhead kinda sucks.

And then there are the missions themselves, which you can tell are really trying to do new things that Mass Effect players haven't seen before; but when those things are a tile-sliding puzzle that's almost solved already, or a draw-the-enemy's-fire encounter that can kill you in one shot, they just ... aren't very whelming. One could even call them underwhelming.

Overlord gets some credit for bold new ideas, but it doesn't take any of those ideas far enough to compete with the main game's excellent content.

Better than: Mass Effect 2: Kasumi - Stolen Memory
Not as good as: Batman: Arkham Origins - Cold, Cold Heart
Spoiler alert, there is a satisfying throwback to Overlord: in Mass Effect 3, but ... I'll have more to say about "throwbacks in ME3" later.