 Bewm. New characters, new vault, same uncivilized Pandora. Handsome Jack is trying to open a vault and take control of its contents. It is up to four (un)fortunate to stop him. You're going to need guns. Lots of guns.
1. Gameplay
Before I actually get into the meat of how much fun I had with this game, go grab a friend. Or three. If at least one of them is willing to play Borderlands 2 (which they should be), you’re good to go. If not, seriously consider the following paragraphs.  You don't have to be more accurate, you just have to fire more bullets! Borderlands 2 is an awesome game because the first Borderlands was an awesome game. It’s full of fast-paced carnage, awesome upgradable abilities, and millions of weapon variants. Borderlands 2 has a better story, more conversations, more quests, more areas, more everything. If you liked the first Borderlands, you’ll like Borderlands 2. Unfortunately, that was also partially my problem. I’ve played the first Borderlands in its entirety both on the Xbox 360 and on the PC. I know what the gameplay is like. There’s only so many hours I can go shooting enemy after enemy before I think to myself “Okay, what’s next?” Borderlands 2 doesn’t really deliver on the “what’s next” part. There aren't any missions that can't be solved with tons of violence.  But then again, it could be a lot worse. But as much as that might seem like a horrible negative that should prevent you from wanting to play this game, it’s not. Borderlands 2 is meant to be the kind of game that four friends meet up to play together and shoot wave after wave of enemies. It’s a hardcore social experience. Players can easily lose hours of time taking on enemies and missions. The simplicity of the gameplay makes the game easy for anyone to pick up and get into quickly.  I want my bandits like I want my pea soup. Gamers can't expect any sort of depth from this game. Borderlands 2 is about keeping things very basic but allowing players to have fun playing cooperatively. But the game really boils down to one element, shooting and shooting and shooting. And shooting.
Like the first Borderlands, Borderlands 2 is a long game. Really, really long. There are lots of areas to explore, a ton of missions to complete, and a seemingly unlimited number of weapons to use. Four player cooperative gaming only adds to the replayability. And all of that is in addition to the “second playthrough” mode which allows a player to take their armed and leveled character into a full replay of the game at a significantly higher difficulty level. The biggest thing that kept me from playing this game more is the fact that it didn’t really feel different. I’ve already played over 60 hours of the first Borderlands across two consoles. So even though Borderlands 2 is a lot of fun and definitely just as awesome as the first, there just wasn’t enough to keep me interested for more than another 40 to 50 hours. I’m not sure exactly how long it took me, but I’d say that an estimate of 60 hours would be conservative.
There were a couple of things that were frustrating about this game, but most of these are lost if the player has any cooperative friends. More people makes the enemies have more health and do more damage, but that’s nothing next to the fact that enemy fire will be distributed between two or more players instead of entirely focused on one target. Having more friends in the game is helpful. The problem is that trying to tackle this game solo is extremely difficult. Bosses have a lot of health, ammunition isn’t particularly plentiful, and enemies are extremely accurate. Having a second player gives both players some time to recover and find ammunition before continuing. While this game wasn’t beyond my abilities alone, playing with friends was a lot easier and more fun.  Will you stop killing me? I'm trying to take your picture. The death / reanimation system was really annoying. Basically, if a player dies, he is reanimated at the nearest checkpoint. This isn’t a problem. What is a problem is that the game takes away around 8% of his money for each death. At the beginning this wasn’t a big deal, since $200 doesn’t net much anyway. But at one point towards the end of the game I lost over $30,000 over the course of 10 minutes because of some absurdly difficult enemies. There wasn’t much to spend money on anyway, but the fact that I was losing hours of income in a matter of seconds seriously pissed me off. 2. Parental Notices
This game is constant gun-based violence. The player will spend the vast majority of their hours and hours in this game shooting tens of thousands of enemies. There’s snipers, shotguns, SMGs, assault rifles, LMGs, rocket launchers, pistols, revolvers, and odd combinations of each type. The player will end up using all of these over the course of the game. Hitting enemies will result in liberal amounts of blood and gore that will cover the playing field but will quickly disappear.  It goes away pretty quickly. The amount of blood and how long it says on the ground will depend on what the player plays the game on. When I played on the Xbox, I hardly even noticed the blood. On the PC version though…  Looks like soup. There are some enemies that are even more bloody at times. Goliaths are huge enemies that wear masks (or are they buckets?) on their heads. If you shoot the mask off, they go into a full on rage. Their skulls pop out of their heads in a shower of blood and chunks. And then they proceed to beat everything around them with their bare fists.  That blood came from his head area. If a player manages to hit an enemy with a strong enough attack, that enemy can explode into chunks and blood.  But even then, the fast, constant action will mask a lot of the blood and gore. It’s a bit difficult to focus on how that enemy’s head just exploded into gore when you’re shooting a dozen other enemies who are still running around.  It's hard to care about the blood when that guy is grenading me every two seconds. And if the action doesn’t mask the blood and gore enough, the elemental attacks will. The player will quickly find weapons that do extra damage on top of the normal damage. This damage will take the form of fire, corrosion (acid), explosives, and a few other types. The visual animation for these types of damage will literally coat enemies, making it nearly impossible to see them.  Where's the enemy? But the reality is that there is a ton of blood and gore all the time. This game is constant, inescapable combat. Anyone who plays this will end up seeing gallons and gallons of blood within the first hour of play, but a lot of the real violence is masked by the bright colors, cartoonish graphics, and elemental effects. These combine to significantly dampen what would otherwise be an extremely violent game.
Sexuality is fairly rare. Considering how much time the player will spend doing things that don’t even involve conversations, the one or two times when sexuality is included is pretty easily lost. That said, it’s not completely absent. Some of the conversations include sexual references (especially involving Moxxi’s love life). In fact, almost all of the sexuality involves Moxxi in some way. The only other time I can think of sexuality in a conversation is when Scooter implies that he is attracted to his sister.  And clearly you can see why. But then there’s Moxxi, a busty bartender who drips sexuality. Seriously, it’s really obvious. And it goes beyond just her visible cleavage or her tip jar with “insert your tip” written over a pair of lips.  She's actually at least 40 years old. In one mission Marcus asks the player to find the contents of his safe. These “contents” happen to be a number of softcore pornographic images of Moxxi. Pornographic magazines also come into play for a number of missions given by Scooter, who uses them as a “back-up” option in case his dates don’t go well.
Excluding the different types of exploding barrels (since they are not technically a usable substance), substances are fairly rare overall. Health vials, commonly dropped by enemies when the player is low on health, are simply injection devices filled with some sort of red fluid. “Using” them simply consists of them floating to the player like every other item in the game, resulting in the player almost instantly gaining health.  You'll use these early on, but eventually they become less useful. There are a very small number of bars found around the game. Drinking can be seen in these locations, but the player cannot actively choose to drink.  Sorry, I prefer to kill responsibly. There is one optional mission that the player can find that requires the player to get “drunk” first. For this, the player has to grab bottles of alcohol until the screen becomes slightly fuzzy and little yellow bubbles float up into the air. It’s designed to be unrealistically comical.
In certain locations the player can find slot machines. The player puts in money (the amount seems to depend on the player’s level) and the wheels turn just like a slot machine. Instead of winning money (though that is one possible reward), the player has the opportunity to win weapons or iridium. It’s an interesting system, but the iridium is the only thing worth winning.  Jackpot. 3. Other Factors
There are no modding tools available for this game.
The only time when religion becomes obvious is when the player goes on a mission involving “The Cult of the Phoenix”. Basically some insane fanatics, led by an enemy named Brother Clayton, decide that the Phoenix (Lilith) is their goddess and that they need to worship her. The player is instructed to light a number of effigies to The Phoenix as part of a mission.  This is one of the effigies before I lit it on fire.
There are a few times when the player is going to be fighting the local authority figures. There are small missions that involve fighting a sheriff or killing gang members that have taken over certain areas, but even the “lawful” areas of Pandora are completely chaotic. The only real time when anyone will fight somewhat legitimate law enforcement is when the player fights against Handsome Jack. Jack is the current leader of Pandora (kind of). He’s made statues to himself and rules over some of the nicer areas in the world. So when the player goes into these areas and uses robots to destroy the statues, I’d consider it anti-law. But, like I said, it’s pretty vague here. Pandora lacks any real leadership, and the widespread landscape with a host of dangerous creatures make it difficult to enforce even the most basic laws.
Most of the time I expect players to find friends and play cooperatively. These adventures would be very friendly, social environments exactly the same way that friends would interact with each other at school. If the player wants to play cooperatively and doesn’t have friends online, though, he can choose to look for other gamers online.  At least there's no friendly fire. The cooperative matchmaking system is extremely smart. It will try to pair similarly leveled players together so that they are all on similar missions and all fighting against similarly leveled enemies. New online gamers will have some difficulty adapting to the cooperative experience at first, but they will quickly realize how necessary it is to work together to fight enemies.  We ended up working together pretty well. My experience playing online was awesome. All of the gamers online were very helpful and friendly. If someone asked to do a particular mission to try and level up, everyone was on board with the plan. It was the kind of thing that restores my faith in online gaming.
On foot, there isn’t much that would count towards an “extreme sports” rating. The only exception would be the fact that the player can drop any distance without any damage. The player can literally jump from a 100-foot cliff and, as long as the ground underneath is “walkable” (meaning isn’t out of the intended game boundaries), he’ll land without a scratch.  Falling and shooting? No problem! Otherwise, there are some vehicles that the player can drive in order to cross large distances quickly. The game encourages the player to take a few ramps in order to jump to otherwise inaccessible areas. I didn’t jump off the ramps very often though.  It may be difficult to tell, but I actually got a decent amount of air here.
The amount of magic the player will be exposed to in this game will depend on what character class the player chooses. If they choose the gunzerker, the soldier, or the assassin, magical content will be low and easily missed in the onslaught of bright colors and constant gunplay. But the siren characters in the game, specifically Lilith and Angel, will use magical powers, especially in combat.  An angel of death. But these two characters are hardly ever in the picture. They’ll be around for specific events, but even Lilith, who is almost always in the main city Sanctuary, only uses her magical abilities in a few select story-based events.  I should probably stand back. That changes if the player decides to play as the siren. The siren’s primary ability is to lift an enemy up and lock them in a magical bubble. This bubble can have extra elements added to it such as healing the player and allies while doing damage to the trapped enemy, or doing damage to nearby enemies. If you play as the siren, you’re going to be using this power constantly. But if you decide not to use the siren, magic will be fairly rare.
Torture One of the characters, Tiny Tina, is somewhat insane. She also has the desire to capture and torture a certain bandit. In one mission, the player has to entice a bandit to her “tea party”, where she ties up the bandit and electrocutes him.  Tina, let that poor bandit go. There is an enemy called the “nomad torturer”. This large enemy has a giant metal riot shield. Tied to the front of his riot shield is one of the insane midget bandits. There is a challenge to shoot the rope and cut the midget free, but it's not easy to do without killing the midgets too. The process of “torture” isn’t seen at all.  Maybe they're extra shielding or something? Incest
As mentioned previously, there are a number of conversations that allude to the idea that Scooter is attracted to his sister. However, this idea doesn’t go beyond simple allusions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Like what we do? Want to see more? Donate to the site using the button below!
Not sure what a term means? Read the definitions!
Not sure what a review section is about? Find out more information!
|
RSS Feed