Pinnacle Station was the second and last piece of downloadable content released for Mass Effect. The other piece of DLC, Bring Down the Sky, plays out like any other mission that Shepard gets. What I mean is that you travel to a location, figure out what’s really going on and decide how to handle the situation. Pinnacle Station on the other hand has no decisions to be made and is primarily action for the entire mission.

Pinnacle Station itself is a spacecraft that houses a robust training simulator. In it, you play through twelve scenarios, divvied up between four types: timed, where you kill every enemy as quickly possible, hunt, where every kill adds time to the clock, capture, where you capture points on a map as quickly as possible, and survival, where you must survive as long as possible. Each scenario has a leaderboard and you need to place first on each. I played through them all about the same; I ran as much as I could and never stopped using the assault rifle, and only one scenario gave me problems playing this way.

Completing everything associated with Pinnacle Station took me a little under two hours. While Pinnacle Station took me longer to complete than Bring Down the Sky, its focus was more narrow, and grew tiring. I think including your friend’s scores to the leaderboards would’ve added something of value to the package, unlike the in-game rewards you receive. There are three achievements totaling 150 Gamerscore so that’s nice, but if you don’t care about achievements and are more interested in the conversation and storytelling aspect of Mass Effect, save yourself five dollars and skip Pinnacle Station.