Playing on the Edge: Borderlands 2 Review

Borderlands 2 has been an epically fun adventure to dive into.  Any fan of the first knows the Borderlands title to mean crazy cell-shaded bandits, beasts, and other baddies to stand between you and your optional team of vault hunters.  I thoroughly enjoyed the first game in the series.  It offered a colorful cast of NPC's to interact with and help out along with a very MMO feeling level system that colored your damage and health throughout the game, mostly to prevent you from going too far ahead without properly leveling.  With full co-op multiplayer in tow Borderlands 2 hits the bricks with a ton of smart talking characters and a new cast of vault hunters to tangle with this new storyline.  Those who enjoyed the fresh look and feel Borderlands offers the FPS genre will not be disappointed by it's aggressively awaited sequel.


Phase 1: The Story

Borderlands 1 had an interesting tale to tell, vaults and hunters and douches in the way of each step toward the ultimate goal is standard fair for both games.  However, Borderlands 2 offers up a different dynamic to the story.  We begin our tale immediately following the first game, the vault has been opened by Handsome Jack, the extremely charismatic and intriguing antagonist, and with the control of Hyperion has basically imprisoned the planet (I don't know how imprisoned a planet can feel when they are offered free blowjob machines). 

You begin the tale as one of 4 (5th available via DLC) character parallels to the first games cast. Maya, the sassy Siren with a psychic orb lock ability, Axton "the Adonis" and turret wielding commando, Salvador, the no-holds-barred beef-cake who balls-out-duel-wields with fury, and Zero, the mysteriously mysterious assassin with psuedo-phasewalking (the DLC character is Gaige, a "mechromancer" that apparently can control robots...cool).  These characters are all fun, but outside of a few revealed motivations for joining the world of pandora's hunt for vaults scattered around the world via collectable echoes, they don't really offer any unique perspective.  That being said, the old cast and crew from the first game are all re-united and given personalities and dialog that span far past their previous one liners post head shot.  Lilith, Roland, Brick, and Mordecai all join an all-out resistance front against Handsome Jack as he terrorizes the planet with the threat of a global...uh...threat.  There are quite a lot of twists for the story and, well...I don't want to spoil everything, if you like blowing shit up, looting chests, and following smart mouthed NPC quest requests, then you are in for a real treat.  It's extremely fun and engaging for a storyline in an FPS and it better well be since there isn't any sorta COD style multiplayer to be had. 

Phase 2: Gameplay

Combat:

The gameplay in Borderlands 2 hasn't changed much from it's first installment, and that is a damn good thing in my opinion.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  It's a good philosophy for game developers to live by, and Gearbox knew it was a good idea to stick with it.  Having gun damage and health be determined by levels makes side-quests a must, but don't worry, gameplay in Borderlands never feels stale despite the constant missions you'll be thrown into.  It isn't much to simply say that you must run and gun your way to your objectives; you have to hunt down, dig up, activate, murder, or otherwise obtain all your varied objectives through a trope of areas and enemies that are unique and engaging.  Vehicles return to help traverse the larger areas, and trust me, running them on foot sucks major ballsack.  Thanks to each character's special abilities, combat doesn't ever get too boring.  Keeping enemies afloat in orbs or berserking out with regenerating ammo doesn't ever seem to get too old for me.  And of course, throughout the story there will be plenty of fun and sometimes challenging boss fights.  Everything is made all the more fun with co-op in tow.  Up to 4 players online can take on Pandora and all of it's threats with enemy numbers scaled up to compensate.  There isn't anything quite like 4 friends teaming up and wrecking shit on anything that moves, and Borderlands 2 has taken full advantage of that.  Thanks to the return of the New-U and fight for your life mechanics, there is little in the way of punishment for dying, so feel free to let loose and have fun.  

Non-combat:

There is a lot more to do in Borderlands 2 than there was before for your character.  There is skin and face customization, a larger and more diverse skill tree for your abilities to branch out, tons of badass rank objectives to increase and further customize your characters to fit your play style, hidden echo recordings to collect, and SOOOOO many different guns to find and toy with.  Although mini-games take a backseat to exploration and side-quests, Borderlands has never failed to keep occupied even the most savvy of non-story explorers with loot and quests abound.  All of the minor tweaks to the gameplay and leveling system help Borderlands 2 perfect the systems it was using in the previous games, while still exploring new ground.  So many gun possibilities are going to keep you searching high and low, and just when you think you've found your favorite gun, a new one is around the corner just waiting for you to fall in love all over again.  It's the only game that i have ever played that the treasure hunt was as engaging as the battles themselves.

Phase 3: The Result

Borderlands 2 offers up a co-operative treasure hunt of epic proportions while engaging players in a charming story and grounding them in entertaining combat.  There aren't too many games that succeed in fulfilling my enjoyment to these levels.  This is a game I'll be playing for quite some time, and the DLC around the corner only makes me even more excited to see what is left to explore in this crazy planet called Pandora.  Borderlands 2 gets a 94% from me.  A game like this deserves a great score, but i would have liked to see a bit more creativity with the characters, they feel too similar to the first bunch.  And I also would have liked to see non-story multiplayer modes.  But even without any of that, I had some of the most fun I've had playing an FPS in a very long time.