Part 17: Orkin Man

Orkin Man

Taking care of that little thing Wrex mentioned. There's been activity in the Rachni relay and the scouting party Wrex sent went dark, so he then sent a group of commandos. Turns out the squad is run by everyone's favorite teenager. Things turn to shit quite quickly. Reapers got hold of the Rachni and have turned them into one of the shittiest enemies in the game, difficulty-wise. In and of themselves they're not an issue, but they love to snipe you while you're engaged with other things and fuck your whole day up. The first shot will easily break your shield gate and follow up ones can more or less one-shot you on high difficulties. When you've got other enemies either grenading or meleeing you out of cover it's a nasty affair.

At the center of it all we find our old friend, the Rachni queen. If you didn't save her in 1 then it's another queen that we don't have a personal connection with. If that's the route you went or didn't have an imported save it's best to leave her to die. The reason I chose her over Arralakh company is that you get war assets even when they're dead, plus assets from the queen who is friendly to us and un-indoctrinated Rachni will help with the Crucible which leads to some funny dialogue and emails later on. It seems best to me in this situation that you more or less reintegrate the Rachni into galactic society and they'll lose their boogeyman status. If you save the generic queen she isn't actually safe and then the Rachni go bugfuck (pun intended) and kill a whole bunch of folks - hence leaving that one to die the best option.

We get overrun (by 3 ravagers oh no) and Grunt sacrifices himself to save us. No joke, I cried the first time I played this.

I love this mission. It has a very strong Alien vibe, right down to the gestation pods. The music is fantastic - even knowing what's coming at the end I always get a little misty-eyed during Grunt's big moment. The only thing that drags it down is the tedious pod-smashing. The aftermath is kind of dumb, everyone lecturing us on how "this time" the queen hadn't better burn us except she's done exactly what she promised to do. It's not her fault the Reapers showed up and started fucking with the kids, we've been fighting Reaperized Turians, Batarians and humans and nobody is accusing all of those species for fucking up. With that done we'll need to help with that bomb thing before we cap off this story arc. Also want to run around and catch up with people and turn in a few sidequests.