14 DAY TRIAL // Nor in the first Mass Effect, and neither in the second did I feel like Tali should have been a part of the team that I recruited in order to save the galaxy. If anything, she had a far bigger role in the original ME than she did in this game, but, even so, I always thought is would have been better if I just took the Saren intel from her and parted ways there, at the human embassy. Tali's not much of a fighter, and while her skills as an engineer are impressive, her practical applications, especially in ME2, are limited, if anything. No matter how you look at it, she is even less of a field operative than Liara was. So, while motivation is something I didn't have for the Tali recruitment mission, I did get a lot of fun out of it. I had just recently researched the M-90 Cain heavy weapon, which is basically a tactical-nuke launcher, so I was really eager to test it out.
The mission in itself is probably one of the most combat-oriented ones, as you come across waves and waves of geth, and you even get to face a few Primes along the way. These fights proved to be a bit of a hassle, since knowing that the main enemies in the game, the Collectors, were organics, maximizing the Incendiary ammo was a priority, and the disruptor ammo, the one effective against shields and synthetics, wasn't really ready for a geth assault.
This, along with the fact that direct sunlight burnt your shields in this mission, made fighting very intense. Garrus stood far enough from the geth to stay alive most of the times, but that Grunt had a habit of jumping straight into enemy fire, so he spent most of the mission fast asleep somewhere on the floor, because, after his third death, I decided he was just a waste of medigel. With plenty of cover, from the shield-scorching sun of Haestrom, as well as from the geth fire, the mission also holds quite a few weapon upgrades, so BioWare repaid my inquisitive nature yet again.
The final fight was a bit of a nightmare, but luck was so much on my side that it made things unfair. What should have been a glorious fight turned out to be a bit of a wash-out. Just outside Tali's lock door there was an army of geth, made up of a lot of geth troopers and one huge geth Colossus, with a very special self-repair protocol. One last member of the quarian task force that was sent to escort Tali remained alive, Kal'Reegar, and I chose the Renegade solution, and put him to work. The "good" way to deal with this is to let him sit this fight out, since he's already injured, but I figured that, if he managed to stay alive for this long, he could make it for a few more minutes and help me out.
Ignoring the geth "ants" that were running around everywhere and focusing on the elephant, I let Reegar fire off a few rockets at the Colossus, just to see what his shields could withstand. Now, if you remember, at the beginning I said I just got my hands on the Cain, so I figured this would be the best time to give this bad boy a test run. With the Colossus at half shields, thanks to Reegar putting in some overtime with the rocket launcher, I fired the Cain, and, to my surprise, after a blinding flash and a small mushroom cloud, the Colossus, as well as most of his escort were gone. A few more rounds fired by Garrus, and I heard Tali over the radio saying that, "It's all clear."
I had a bit of a Diablo II LoD flashback, where my "big" boss-fight at the end with Baal panned out pretty much in the same way. I had an overpowered "Tal Tal Perfect Emerald" axe that did so much damage, that poor Baal never managed to split into three and just died all of a sudden. I heard people talking about it at school about how he made three clones of himself and the fight got really wild from there, and I just didn't get it. The same here with the Colossus. It was over before it got started. Maybe in a second playthrough, I'll get more out of the fight, with hindsight. Maybe I'll use just my sidearm and see how far that gets me.
