Ellie, one of the CRAZY RANDOM characters you meet.
Genre: Shooter, FPS, Dungeon Crawler, Role-playing
Release Date: September 18th
Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: 2K Games
Rating: M
Retail: $59.99 (All platforms, PC included)
Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
When I’m not gritting my teeth at–hands down–some of the worst writing I’ve seen in a game in recent memory I find myself having a pretty decent time with Borderlands 2. If you didn’t know by the “2″ this is the sequel to the 2009 Borderlands. I can sum of the entirety of this article with four words: More of the same.
The only things that have stood out as new to me are so trivial this hardly seems to qualify as a full fledged sequel and just one more Borderlands DLC package, albeit a big one.
So what is new? After ~30 hours in-game I’m still looking for a place that isn’t a glacier or a dust bowl. I thought that the art team had “found more colors than brown” as I recall being said at E3 or something. I guess they lost brown and found blue? And then found brown… again?
Given that it took me around 30 hours to beat it on the normal difficulty and I did (maybe?) half of the side missions I think the $60 is a fair asking price for a game I’ll likely get 60+ hours from.
Zany characters abound
The game is fun. It’s a lot of blue and brown, the environments aren’t anything to gawk at, but given how the game ends maybe they’re trying to save more varied landscapes for future installments. Let’s hope they find some writers that aren’t 12 to work on Borderlands 3.
(I was going to call this a review, but I can’t really do that when I spent all of ten minutes writing this.)
Bought it (and the future DLC pass thing) while drunk.
DON’T DRINK AND STEAM.
Oh truer words have rarely been spoken.
What about the writing was God-awful? I personally don’t think it was the worst. Maybe kinda bad but definitely not the worst.
The ‘LMAO XD SO RANDUMB’ humor really rubbed me the wrong way. And Claptrap… Oh man.
So? I still think it’s a pretty long stretch to call it the worst considering the Mass Effect series is pretty much the measuring stick for shitty writing.
inb4 Biodrones
I don’t have to be a BioDrone to disagree with you. :)
If anything, Star Wars: The Old Republic had godawful writing that matched with the Star Wars prequels.
…Nope, can’t argue with that. Well played.
I’m sorry, but to call this a DLC pack for Borderlands 1 is downright unfair. I loved the first game but it’s downright primitive in comparison to this.
I also hate how every game that tries to be funny is instantly dismissed as “random”. Sure, some of it can be annoying, Claptrap and Tiny Tina being the most obvious examples. But that’s like 2% of the total content.
It’s like a really, really big DLC.
There’s nothing extordinarily different and that’s ok. The first had a solid formula. I was just hoping for more … landscape variety. Swamps, forest, jungle, cities maybe? It’s just glacier, or dust bowl. That’s about it.
Well, so is Half life 2 episode 1 and 2 are DLC packs, so is mass effect 2 and 3, so is every other sequel to any game that still uses the same engine as its predecessor. This game is bigger than the original Borderlands, it started out as DLC but turned into a whole new game with much more content and stuff to do. Some systems were updated so it wouldn’t work as a DLC for Borderlands.
I thought the writing was very witty at some places, excluding the meme references, Claptrap and Tiny Tina. Borderlands 2 is my GOTY 2012 for now, partly because I actually enjoy it and also because there’s been a shortage of absolutely amazing games this year.
I don’t think there is much more to say about the game, I would call this a review, just a short one.
Like I said above, I had a blast with the game. I even said I think it’s worth the $60 I paid given how much time I’ve spent with it and how much more I expect to. I just don’t think it lived up to what I was expecting and how much it had been built up. But I guess that’s almost all games ever now.
The writing in the game, mostly with regards to characters, made me groan more than laugh. The reason is Burch forget that what makes zany dialogue effective is when you intersperse it with normal. Otherwise, you don’t believe these characters are real.
This is why the original four vault hunters, Dr. Zed, and Sir Hammerlock are the best characters to me. They still have their quirks, but they come off as more stable than the rest of the people in Borderlands 2, who seem to have been written with the mindset that everything coming out of their mouths needs to be zany or in left field. That’s trying too hard, and I usually ignore dialogue with the offenders because of that. Handsome Jack being the worst, for reasons intentional or not.
And then, I think the difficulty of this game got cranked up a bit from Borderlands 1. Maybe this is me speaking as someone who doesn’t quite remember Borderlands with no DLC to provide extra ways to level, but the increase in difficulty, and some of the changes to how character stats change, stood out to me on this.
I totally agree with your choices for characters that weren’t too bad. Sir Hammerlock is great, but Jack… sheesh. Although I did laugh at the Butt Stallion bit despite myself.
I’m never gonna get the complaint about the writing. I didn’t think it was particularly good, but it was far from bad. Even Tina, who everyone seemed to absolutely hate, wasn’t all that bad. She was silly, but that’s it, there was nothing that made me want to gouge her eyes out or stop playing. If anything, the dialog was just kinda there. It’s not like Mass Effect where the dialog is supposed to be a highlight and it comes across as vague/poorly thought out/generally stupid. Then again, I stopped reading reviews awhile ago, so maybe everyone is giving it glowing praise, in which case they’re just a wee bit dumb.
One thing that I liked was that the gun manufacturers now have very distinct traits, like the Tediore explosive reloads, Dahl burst fire, Maliwan whatever and Jakobs still being the best thing ever with shoot as fast as you can. Using Eridian to buy SDUs is retarded, your money is now only used to play the Slot Machines because Marcus decided to not sell anything good for fucking ever. Also there’s also a mission where Jack says “Kill yourself”, so I ran off a cliff, respawned, lost maybe $1000, he called me a bitch and gave me more money than I spent respawning. Not a single fuck was given that day. Another thing, Hyperion rules the whole respawning business, why can’t they shut off the thing and poof vault hunter gone, Handsome Jack is king of Pandora forever?
Oh well, this is just me talking. I just don’t like how most reviewers don’t mention these little things.
its like borderlands 1, and that was a boring game. What else can be said?
It’s like a dlc, it’s pretty much the same with a bit shinier graphics… which get muddled in the cell shaded style. I love diablo-esque games, I love good fpses, borderlands 1/2 (interchangeable) isn’t a good fps.