BORDERLANDS 2

Holy crap, I love this fucking game.

That could ALMOST be the whole review right there.  Almost.  



I make no apologies in saying that the first Borderlands is one of my favorite games.  I've played through it several times, usually as Mordecai (because I'm a sniper at heart), occasionally as Lilith.  I totally get the criticisms it received, and I don't care.  It's fun, and it finds that perfect little niche of "repetitive" and "never gets old".  It's light on story, but solid, and has a repertoire of comedy and memorable characters that keep me replaying it.  So needless to say, the sequel had big shoes to fill, in my eyes.

I can honestly say this game is everything a sequel should be.   It takes EVERYTHING that I liked about the first game, improves it, and expands on it tenfold.

For starters, the game is huge.  The areas are enormous, and there's a ridiculous amount of content (should you choose to be a sidequesting completionist whore like myself).  When I finally beat my first playthrough, I was clocked in at 83 hours.  I had finished all but one of the side quests, completed a ridiculous amount of challenges, and leveled Zero to Lv33, and generally had a grand old time.   And that's only Playthrough #1, in a game designed for 2.5 Playthroughs!  

Another thing that they ramped up in this game is the level of comedy.  I seriously cannot think back to another game that has made me laugh as frequently and as hard as Borderlands 2.   The dialogue, the constant pop culture references, the weird and wacky characters (I am a huge Tiny Tina fan).  Hell, due to a friendly Hyperion agent's reassuring voice, I laughed almost every single time I died.  Shockingly, the comedy melds well into the game, rather than feeling shoehorned in, and it never seems to take away from the game and make it entirely a comedy.  Make no mistake, the humor in this game is incredibly dark.  Serious gallows humor going on in a lot of the jokes.

And then there's the plot.  Or more specifically, there's Jack.   Handsome Jack has pretty much supplanted GLaDOS as my favorite video game villain of all time.  He is a dick.   There's really no better way to put it!  He's a goddamn hilarious dick, but Handsome Jack is a dick.  But his dickishness evolves over the course of the main plot, and the writers do a fantastic job of changing your feelings toward him.  For the first half of the game, you're laughing and going "Haha!  I can't wait to kick this asshole's teeth in!  This is gonna be fun!".  But a few story missions later, you begin to genuinely hate Jack.  There are some surprisingly emotional moments throughout the course of the storyline, and you find yourself wanting to kill him not because it's how to beat the game, but because you hate him.  You want him dead.  You want revenge for the things he does.  And Jack isn't one of these villains that just shows up once in a while to fuck with you; he is taunting you and mocking you the entire way, like a constant companion.

The artwork and graphics have seriously been stepped up, as well.  It still retains that comic book look, but now it's a glossy special limited edition graphic novel with a big name artist, instead of just "Issue #XX".  The areas are varied and colorful, instead of just different shades of apocalyptic trash heaps.  There are a host of new and wild monsters (sweet jeebus do I fucking hate Threshers) with all kinds of variants and new game mechanics.   There are hundreds of swappable skins and heads for your characters and vehicles.   The theme they seemed to go with on everything was "more!  More!  MORE!"  

I have some minor quibbles:  The menu system is mildly infuriating, going for flash over function; I've heard it was designed for consoles, not PC, and it shows.  The vehicles STILL handle like complete shit.   A lot of the sidequests are "Go fetch these distantly scattered items".  The sequel continues the first game's inability to make a decent boss fight, instead making all of the bosses infuriating bullet sponges.   A couple of the character voices and personalities are different from the first, despite the same voice actors.   However, for me, these were all just minor complaints that I was able to overlook in favor of the rest of the game.

The only major complaint I have at all is the ending...for 83 hours of one of the best games I've played all year, the ending was incredibly brief and weaksauce.  It took me a day or two to fully digest it, and I don't want to spoil it, but ultimately it just felt like the game was building up to more.  It just wraps up the plot in a depressingly easy fight and a very short cutscene, and then may as well have plastered "TO BE CONTINUED" on the screen.  The upside to this, however, is that there's pretty much gonna be a Borderlands 3, so...yay!

Still, complaints aside, I can say without even a shred of hesitation that this is the single best game I've played this year.   It exceeded all of my expectations and then some, and provided me with (so far) 90 hours of ridiculously fun entertainment, playing both solo and with friends.  It had thrilling battles, a great story, my new favorite villain, tons and tons of laughs, and of course...

A healthy dose of Claptrap porn...