Climbing the Tower Towards the Compassionate Assassin

While some of the party members I already recruited were beginning to show signs of attachment towards my Shepard, by reaching out to me, trying to convince me to do their personal quests, I was still more curious about the rest of the character line-up BioWare had prepared for me, so I chose to recruit as many of them as possible before turning them into loyal followers. And the next dossier that caught my eye was the one of the Illium assassin.

As an assassin, there's very little information on this recruitment candidate, but luckily, the information broker of Illium is someone not only very skilled, but also very open to us. To my surprise, the master on intelligence on Illium is Liara T'soni, our asari party member from the first Mass Effect. And while it was great to see her again and learn what she'd been up to in the past two years that I'd been dead, I was more interested in the information she had. I kept things with Liara in ME1 on a strictly business level, so I figured that there was no reason to break character now.

Following a lead Liara gave me, I headed towards Nassana's office building, who was rumored to be my assassin's next target. The main fights here are with Eclipse mercenaries and LOKI mechs, but, this time around, the narrow corridors of the still-under-construction skyscraper are a lot more flexible as far as tactical maneuvering goes.

There's almost always a side passageway that lets you flank your enemies, sometimes even ending up behind them. The enemies come in rather large packs, but letting your team draw their attention while you act all Thief II-like makes the fights very easy. The Eclipse special troops, however, are pretty strong, with both kinetic barriers and armor, so while most of the fights in the level are a walk in the park, these enemies are not to be taken lightly.

There's no big boss fight here, with your last obstacle toward your assassin being nothing but a group of Eclipse elites, which is very different from o full-fledged boss fight. It's a lot easier to focus your fire on one of them and grind them to a manageable encounter, since the three mercenaries have very little coordination, and don't really know how to work together.

The assassin turned out to be Thane, a compassionate and spiritual drell, something you wouldn't have expected from someone in his line of work. Suffering from a terminal illness and tempted by the offer to join a suicide mission, Thane is more than eager to be recruited. So far, only one of my party slots has been reserved, namely by Garrus.

Neither did Grunt or Jack prove to be entertaining enough to become a permanent addition to my task force, so Thane is looking like a pretty good option right now. And as far as Mordin Solus, the salarin scientist, goes, he is a very amusing character, and I enjoyed all my talks with him, but, on the field, he's a bit too frail, and dies almost more often than that warmongering krogan.