Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 06 – DLC: Project Firewalker
This episode had a fairly simple plan: clear all five Project Firewalker missions, see how long they took, and perhaps move on to Overlord if there was enough time left. As usual, the simple plan soon expanded into research upgrades, planetary scanning, depleted probes, questionable Hammerhead driving and several conversations that had very little to do with Mass Effect.
By the end of the night, Project Firewalker was complete, the Hammerhead had somehow survived us, a forgotten Omega quest was finally off the list, and Overlord was sensibly left waiting for another session.
🌌 About the Game
Mass Effect Legendary Edition brings together the single-player content from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, along with more than 40 pieces of DLC, promotional weapons, armour and packs, all remastered and optimised for 4K Ultra HD.
We are currently working through Mass Effect 2 as Commander Shepard, travelling aboard the Normandy, improving the squad and the ship, and preparing for what lies ahead with the Collectors. This episode steps away from the main story for a while to deal with one of the DLC mission chains included in the collection.
🛰️ Where We Are in the Journey
This is Episode 06 of our Mass Effect 2 playthrough, and we are still taking the completionist approach. Project Firewalker had been sitting there waiting for attention, so the goal was to clear its five scanning missions before moving on to anything larger.
There was also the possibility of starting Overlord afterwards, but I already suspected that would depend on how much time and energy Firewalker used. Between missions we were still gathering resources, buying research upgrades and making sure we were reasonably prepared for the Collectors later on.
⚠️ What Happens in This Episode
We began aboard the Normandy with some housekeeping before Project Firewalker could properly get underway. The research terminal had been neglected for a while, so there was a round of spending on armour, shields, weapon damage and tech upgrades, with survivability taking priority for fairly obvious reasons. Given how often Unity tends to get called upon when things go wrong, anything that made Shepard and the squad a little harder to kill seemed like a sensible investment.
Of course, spending all those resources meant immediately heading back out to replace them. Planetary exploration became a sizeable part of the evening, with rich deposits hunted down between missions and the scanner dragged across anything that looked remotely promising. Platinum was particularly welcome, probes disappeared at an alarming rate, and at one point we managed to run out completely and had to head back for more. The persistence did pay off with the Galactic Explorer achievement for visiting 100 planets in unexplored clusters. Precious achievement secured.
The first proper stop was Project Firewalker: MSV Rosalie Lost, where the real star of the DLC finally appeared. After a small connection puzzle involving fuses and grounding plates, Shepard gained access to the M-44 Hammerhead—the “weird floaty thing” that was vaguely remembered from previous adventures.
Relearning the controls took about as long as expected. The Hammerhead hovered across broken terrain and lava while we tried to work out exactly how much abuse it could survive, including one crossing that produced a fairly optimistic “may not make it… we made it.” Resource collection involved keeping the vehicle positioned over targets long enough to extract them, and by the end of the mission we had successfully acquired—or, depending on your interpretation, stolen—the Hammerhead without dropping it into molten rock.
From there, Survey Sites Located gave the Hammerhead something more aggressive to do. Resource collection was mixed with geth attacks, rockets started flying and there was an important discovery: apparently we did not need to keep repeatedly pressing fire. Holding the trigger worked just fine.
That revelation made combat noticeably easier, although not before one encounter stripped the Hammerhead’s health down quickly enough to require a “take two.” On the second attempt we made better use of distance and high ground, firing into the geth from relative safety before moving in to collect everything worth taking. The Hammerhead’s extraction system had, by this point, been renamed the “bizarre vacuum cleaner,” which was a reasonably accurate description of how much of the DLC involved hovering over objects until they disappeared into the vehicle.
The driving naturally attracted encouragement from chat. There were calls to “flip it,” followed by the disappointing discovery that spinning the Hammerhead around was considerably easier than actually performing a proper flip. When the vehicle antics became sufficiently questionable, there was also the suggestion that we had “done a mango,” adding another phrase to the collection of things that probably make perfect sense if you were there.
Between Firewalker missions, exploration continued. Any rich planet was an excuse to stop for a scan, while poorer worlds were given a quicker once-over unless something interesting appeared. We were regularly returning to the Normandy to see whether the newly gathered materials had unlocked another research project, spending what we could and heading straight back out again.
Volcano Station pushed the DLC further into exploration. This time there was no helpful trail of sparkly markers showing us exactly where to go, which meant navigating the landscape manually while collecting deposits and searching for the research base. Inevitably, this led to one of those moments where a suspiciously large drop was examined and the conclusion was, “I might be able to survive that.”
That particular bit of optimism did not entirely work out.
After another attempt, the route became clearer and we made it into the base. Power was restored, cramped rooms were searched and the logs inside began pointing towards the main Prothean ruins. Even once the obvious objective had progressed, there was still the usual refusal to leave immediately. If a room, terminal, resource pickup or suspicious corner looked unexplored, it was getting checked before we went anywhere.
This was also the point where Frodolotr33 asked a dangerously important question: when was the last time we saved?
The answer, after some consideration, was essentially “not this evening.”
Fortunately, chat had noticed before that became a much bigger problem. A manual save eventually followed, and later in the DLC we saved again specifically because Frodo had not reminded us. Chat also helped keep count of the missions as Firewalker progressed, confirming when the third was finished and celebrating when there was only one left.
Meanwhile, the actual Mass Effect conversation was competing with an impressive collection of unrelated subjects. Cyberpunk 2077 remained a recurring topic, including streamer-safe settings, questionable posters and a motel encounter that probably should have been considered suspicious much earlier. Frodo asked about free spreadsheet software and ended up downloading LibreOffice, while Farming Simulator brought us the important distinction between “cheating mods” and “quality of life” improvements—along with a request to leave the 500,000-litre trailer alone.
Then there was Erris87’s impending trip to London. What began as travel plans quickly developed into claims that the armed police were already preparing, predictions that London might need to go into lockdown and the crucial discovery that there was a bar on the train. The possibility of having “warm-up rounds” before even arriving became part of the conversation while Shepard was busy uncovering ancient alien technology.
Back in Project Firewalker, the Prothean Site delivered the most obviously suspicious location of the night. A kinetic barrier blocked the Hammerhead and was far too strong to simply blast through, so the only option was to follow the connected lines through the area and disable its generators while enemies continued appearing.
Once the barrier finally collapsed, Shepard entered the ruins and found the mysterious Prothean sphere. The recovered logs suggested that things had gone very badly for the people studying it, which naturally led to an immediate application of video-game logic: we were absolutely expecting the place to explode the moment we touched anything important.
The final interaction involved navigating one of Mass Effect’s hacking puzzles, following the safe symbols while avoiding the red hazards. Against expectations, the ruins did not immediately bury Shepard under several tonnes of ancient architecture, and the mysterious sphere was successfully recovered. Four missions were now complete, which meant there really was only one Firewalker assignment left.
The finale, Geth Activity, changed the pace again. The Hammerhead landed in an environment cold enough to steadily degrade its engine performance, turning the mission into a race between objectives as warnings repeatedly announced that the temperature was falling.
The solution was simple enough: keep moving and keep using the “vacuum.” Extraction points were hit in sequence while we counted down how many remained, trying not to spend too much time wandering away after resources while the vehicle complained about the cold. After all the earlier driving mishaps, hostile geth and ominous Prothean ruins, the final mission ended almost suspiciously smoothly.
“Well, that was quite easy.”
With that, the game confirmed that all five missions discovered by scanning had been completed, giving us the completion pop we had been waiting for. Project Firewalker was officially finished.
There was still enough time for unfinished business, but not enough enthusiasm to launch straight into another sizeable DLC. Overlord was therefore left for another session and the Normandy headed for Omega, where a forgotten side mission had been sitting around waiting for us.
The destination was Afterlife, specifically its lower bar and a batarian bartender with a reputation for serving something rather worse than a bad pint to human customers. Shepard ordered a drink and was promptly poisoned. Unlike the bartender’s previous victims, Shepard survived, learned that humans had deliberately been targeted and headed back for a confrontation.
The discussion did not last very long. The bartender threatened Shepard, Shepard decided not to take any chances, and the forgotten mission was finally cleared. With Erris preparing for his own night out in London, the timing also gave us the opportunity to compare Afterlife’s dancing and drinking with what might be happening the following evening—and to repeat the important advice from chat: perhaps do not tip that bartender.
The rest of the session became a practical shopping trip. Omega’s stores were checked for affordable upgrades before we jumped across to the Citadel, clearing out useful weapon, shield, armour and tech improvements without throwing all our remaining credits at the more expensive equipment. Shepard’s ability to declare almost every shop his “favourite store on the Citadel” naturally made another appearance as we worked our way around the merchants.
Back aboard the Normandy, one final journal check confirmed what we had set out to achieve. Project Firewalker was done, the Hammerhead had somehow survived the entire evening, the forgotten Omega quest was finally off the list and Shepard had picked up another collection of upgrades along the way. Overlord remained waiting for a future Mass Effect night, when there would be enough time—and energy—to tackle it properly.
Not bad for an evening that began with the simple intention of clearing a few DLC missions and somehow also managed to include Prothean archaeology, geth combat, hover-tank gymnastics, planetary strip-mining, spreadsheet recommendations, Farming Simulator trailers, London drinking plans and one extremely well-timed reminder to save the game.
🎬 Watch the Episode
If you missed the Hammerhead driving, the Prothean ruins, the Omega bartender or the moment chat realised I had not saved all evening, you can catch the complete episode here:
Watch Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 06 – DLC: Project Firewalker
You can continue the playthrough through the Mass Effect series playlist and find more videos on Dr Ravenholm on YouTube. If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, let me know your favourite moment in the comments and subscribe so you do not miss the next part.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
The recorded episode gives you the full journey, but the livestream is where chat can remind me to save the game before something goes wrong, question the Hammerhead driving and somehow turn planetary exploration into conversations about spreadsheets and enormous Farming Simulator trailers.
Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube. You never quite know where the conversation will end up, and when we finish, we often carry the community onward with a raid just as we did with vaultdweller32 this time.
🌐 Community & Links
The Normandy may be parked for now, but there are plenty of places to keep up with what I am doing between streams.
Live — Come aboard when the next stream begins:
Twitch | YouTube
Community — Keep the conversation going between episodes:
Discord
Socials — Follow the latest updates across the rest of the network:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X
Music — You can also find my music here:
Spotify | Apple Music
Support — If you would like to help support the channel:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs
More — For my other projects, services and writing:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🛸 The Hammerhead Survived
Project Firewalker is finally cleared, the forgotten Omega quest is dealt with and we managed to leave the Citadel with a few more useful upgrades. More importantly, the Hammerhead survived the evening despite several opportunities for that not to be the case.
Overlord is still waiting, so we can give that the time it deserves in a future Mass Effect session. Until then, perhaps the most important lesson from this episode is that if chat asks when you last saved, there is probably a good reason.
— Dr Ravenholm
Discover more from Transparent-Aluminium.net
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
