He makes the game special, but he’s not the only one who does so.Īlmost every quest giver and NPC has their golden line of comedic dialogue, if not more. He’s just cruel and twisted enough for you to hate him yet still manages to walk that thin line of being lovable in a GLaDOS kind-of-way.

He has the Joker’s indifferent, chaotic attitude and Tony Stark’s cool, sarcastic personality, and he’s a hellbent jerk who often brings to mind Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element. Burch brings us Handsome Jack, who will go down as one of the greatest videogame villains of all time. Just as it’s hard to separate writer Eric Wolpaw from Portal, it is hard to look past Anthony Burch’s ( Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’?) writing voice and influence all throughout this game. Though the heroes are now relegated to being side characters, they feel more fleshed out - strangely more than the new playable heroes that fill in during their absence. Rather than brushing off the first game, this sequel owns it and carries on the most beloved elements from it: the world of Pandora, the four heroes, and their foul-mouthed, incompetent robot friend Claptrap. Borderlands 2‘s story is so good that it fools you into thinking the first wasn’t so bad. But if the visuals and combat of Borderlands 2 are a sensible step forward, the improvements in narrative and writing is a stuntman jumping over the world’s longest chasm. I know where it begins and ends, and I also know I didn’t follow the rest out of disinterest. I completed the first Borderlands but can’t tell you much about the story. Pandora is a wild world where you never know what you’ll find next, so it’s a good thing you have some familiar faces by your side. Others will pop out of treasure boxes and whoop your ass so bad you’ll wish you left them closed. Some enemies will evolve into more difficult forms if you don’t kill them fast enough. Others can be thrown when you empty a clip, and they’ll fly through the air, chasing enemies like a phantom shotgun. Some guns will become more accurate the longer you hold down the trigger. Nearly every weapon and enemy makes you approach the game in a different way.

However, the game frequently demands you relearn the genre and discover new strategies for success. Yes, Borderlands controls and feels nearly identical to Call of Duty. It’s that such a system is used to turn the modern shooter on its head. The appeal of such a pairing goes far beyond acquiring loot in the form of randomly generative shields, grenades, buffs, and possibly more weapons than every other first-person shooter combined (we still have our mathematical hamsters crunching the numbers).īut what I love about Borderlands isn’t the loot addiction. The first Borderlands was built upon the very simple concept of making a Diablo-esque RPG within a skill-based first-person shooter. Rig: Intel i5-2500k GHz, 8GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 580 GPU

Watching each crate mechanically unfold and seductively present its contents still drives the game forward, but Gearbox now surrounds the loot-a-thon with a more colorful world, ingenious combat, and what is easily the funniest, cleverest script to grace a game since Portal 2.īorderlands 2 (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 ) And the original Borderlands was most definitely a good idea.īorderlands may have been about loot, but its sequel is about more. Borderlands 2 is built upon the age-old axiom that if you throw enough money at a good idea it will become an even better one.