In this review, we take on Handsome Jack in the PC/Steam game Borderlands 2. We find out how well this FPS game plays.
This game was released in 2012. It is a direct sequel to the game, Borderlands which we also reviewed. That game got a great score, so we thought we’d try this game to see if it continues with this trend. This sequel takes place after the events of the first game.
The story starts off with whichever of the three or four characters (depending on your version of the game) you selected from the beginning. It turns out, you are among a small group of new Vault Hunters who are chasing down someone named Handsome Jack. You are aboard a train and are fighting the various enemies Jack is throwing at you. Upon reaching the end of the tain, you discover that Jack isn’t actually there, but rather, an object that looks like him. After that, he detonates the train, leaving you to die on an ice shelf on Pandora.
Luckily for you, Claptrap is also on that ice shelf. When he discovers you, he is thrilled that a vault hunter actually survives. He then gets you to follow him to a hideout. This is supposed to be a safe area from the local bullymongs. Unfortunately, one finds his way into the safe zone and rips out ClapTraps robotic eye. This initiates your fist mission which is to recover ClapTraps eye. Angel, a reoccurring character, suggests that you help ClapTrap out because the robot may be the only way to get you off the ice shelf. As you are venturing forth, Handsome Jack notices you and tells you to make his life easier by offing yourself. You obviously don’t fulfill the request and you carry forth on your adventure.
This game operates a lot like the first game. You have four slots where you can carry weapons that you can quickly swap back and forth from. You start off with 10 health, but you can heal some of that inside the safe house. One thing to note right away is that the ability to carry health has been scrapped. Instead, item pickups heal you instantly and restores a percentage of your health.
Meanwhile, ammo pickups are largely unchanged. You have 6 different ammunition types: pistol, SMG, assault rifle, rockets, sniper rifle, and shotgun ammunition. In addition to this, you have the trusty grenades as a 7th ammunition type that you pretty much always have and can use at any time.
Additionally, a returning feature is your special ability. What that ability is depends on what character you selected. For us, we selected the soldier, so we got the turret. This turret basically gets placed on the field and fires at enemies like another fixed player fighting with you. Of course, the game requires you to level up a few times before you gain access to this, but once you obtain your special ability, it pretty much becomes a necessity and you’ll wonder how you survived without it.
Another returning feature is special damage. Most of these are carried over from the previous game. You have electrical (good for taking out shields), corrode (good for armour), fire (useful for burning anything with flesh), and explosives (just a good all around bonus in damage. What is new in this game is slag. Slag is a bit of a funky kind of damage. You simply hit a target with it. Once you have successfully slagged an enemy, you need to hit it with a non-slag weapon. This will give you huge damage bonuses because slag weakens an enemies defences. This will get you to practice up on switching between weapons as well as you get better at this.
In addition to this, there is the returning feature is critical hits. Critical hits award you with bonus damage for your shots. So, pinpointing critical weaknesses for your enemies can not only take down enemies more quickly, but also save you bullets when you fight in things like arenas. The thing to keep in mind is that critical hit locations are located in different parts of the enemy. So, just because a head shot for human enemies yields critical hits, it doesn’t mean every enemy in the game is like that.
A lot of the enemies you’ve encountered in the previous game is also carried over to this game. This includes skags, bandits, and rakk enemies. This game does, however, feature a whole bunch of new enemies. This includes the aforementioned bullymong, Hyperion robots, engineers, stalkers, and a number of others. So, there is plenty to be on the lookout for.
One of the changes that caught me off guard is the removal of fall damage. This is something to consider in the previous game, but as I found out well after my first impression video, there is absolutely no fall damage.
Another change is the inclusion of eridium. This is a special purple mineral that you can use to buy your upgrades. Before, things like ammo capacity and backpack SDU’s could be upgraded by saving ClapTraps or just buying them with regular money. In this game, however, you buy your upgrades through this new mineral. You buy these upgrades from Crazy Earl who is located in Sanctuary. Initially, these upgrades come cheap. However, each time you purchase a particular upgrade, the price of the next upgrade goes up. Eventually, that upgrade that only cost you 4 eridium eventually costs 250 or more. Something to keep in mind when figuring out what you want to buy and what is priority for you. For me, the priority was upgrading the backpack SDU.
The vault system makes a return, only this time, you can locate your storage vault in Sanctuary. You only have a few slots to store things, but this can be upgraded with eridium. I personally never really used this myself because of my focus of increasing the backpack SDU, but others might find this useful.
A new feature is the secret swap station. This is also located in Sanctuary. With this swap station, if you are playing a co-op with your friends, you can stash your weapons in this shared location. If you are playing solo, however, this can wind up being borderline useless. It all depends on how you play.
Another returning feature is the fast travel network. If you access a station, you can travel quickly from one part of the map to another. This generally saves a lot of travelling that would otherwise be boring. In addition, you have the standard Catch-A-ride system which allows you to pick one of the two available vehicles in the game, and the vending machines.
There are three vending machines: One to buy guns, another to buy ammo (probably the one you’ll use the most), and one for healing. Since you can’t simply lug health kits around like the last game, these stations wind up being useful only if you don’t have any kind of regeneration. You can also buy shields and a few other items if you are really dedicated to squeezing every last bit of quality out of the items you have on hand.
As you defeat enemies, you’ll gain experience points. Like the last game (and many RPG games out there), if you get enough experience points, you’ll be able to level up. After you get your special skill, you can unlock three skill trees. What those trees are depends entirely on the character you selected. Generally speaking, you’ll only have access to the first tier of each tree. Each branch requires you to spend at least 5 points before you can start spending them on the next tier. Note that some skills only allows you to spend one skill point.
A new feature in this game is the quick change station. The quick change station allows you to change your overall look. This is nothing new to the series because, in the previous game, you could use the New-U Stations to customize your appearance. In this game, however, the separate change station also allows you to redistribute your skill points. So, if you are not happy with how you spent your skill points, this is a great feature to use to try out a different configuration.
The think to keep in mind is the fact that there are numerous skins you can use. Most of these skins are only unlocked by collecting them out in the field. All you need to do is pick up the skin upgrade and drop it into your backpack. After that, you just activate it in your backpack to unlock the skin. The item will disappear from your inventory and you can now access that new skin in the station. A number of these skins are also meant for the Catch-A-Ride stations. This just changes the overall look and style of the vehicle. It’s simply for looks and doesn’t actually impact your actual gameplay.
Another feature that is modified from the previous game is challenges. Previously, challenges are just small things you can do in the game to gain more experience points. In this game, however, you get badass tokens for your efforts. Each token can allow you to upgrade certain aspects of your character. This includes increasing weapon damage, overall health, shield recharge rate, elemental damage, improve your weapon recoil, and many other aspects of your character. One thing to keep in mind is that the game will only offer four different things to upgrade when you redeem a token. If you upgrade your health and shield capacity a bunch, you’ll be less likely to see those as upgrades in future upgrades unless you upgrade a bunch of other things first. This encourages you to spread this out over most of your skills.
Like the last game, this game focuses on you completing various missions. If you complete missions, you’ll get a bonus in money and, often, new gear.
Some of the gear you can get (and you can also loot or buy these items of course) are class upgrades. These add a small bonus to certain statistics. They are also class restricted, so if you have a Gunzerker, you can’t use a soldiers class upgrade.
Another item you can get (again, can be looted or bought) are relics. These increase certain aspects of your character, but are not class restricted. These relics can do things like increase the chances of rare loot, give you experience point bonuses, decrease your special ability cooldown, or even increase the chances of getting a second win.
One thing to keep in mind is that certain parts of the game will unlock new missions. These missions will generally be more in line with what level you happen to be in at the time. If you take on missions that are normal, you’ll generally get the most experience points because enemies will be tougher and yield more experience points. However, if you level up a bunch, missions can become trivial. You’ll get fewer experience points in the long run, however, the mission will generally be much easier. It’s up to you how you want to play the game of course.
If you lose all of your health, you won’t necessary die right away. Instead, you’ll become crippled. At that point, you have a limited amount of time to get a kill. You can’t use grenades in this state. If you kill another enemy in this stage, you’ll get a small boost in health and catch what is known as a “second win”. Initially, you get a lot of time to get this. However, if you get crippled multiple times, then you’ll have less time next time around to get that second win. Of course, if you get crippled without enemies around, you’ll just die because there is no way to get a second win in solo play.
One final feature to note is that this game also has arenas. Arenas pit you against a certain number of enemies. There are a certain number of waves of enemies you have to take on. If you defeat all of your enemies in an arena, you’ll advance to the next round. There are 5 rounds for each arena. In all, there are 3 arena’s in the vanilla game to take on: the one with bandits, the one with animals, and the one with Hyperion Robots. While you tend to die a lot with these, you can also get loads of experience points taking these challenges on. So, even when you die part way through, you can pad your experience points collection a bit with these.
For me, one of the great things about the previous game is the fact that you tend to get a whole pile of missions throughout the game. Just pop on over to the bounty board and see what missions are available. After that, just accept them all and let the whole game just open up for you. In this game, these nice long lists of missions pop up only a couple of times. This is not something you’d expect given that you can get missions from more sources (bounty boards, various characters in the game, etc.) Because of this, you have more sources for missions and fewer missions to get from each. So, you’ll wind up with loads of locations with no new missions available.
So, for certain parts of the game, you get maybe two or three missions and wind up being bottlenecked in a single path for periods of time. When you get to that first part of the game where the game dishes out tonnes of missions, it does start to feel more like the older Borderlands game. However, after a while, you get bottlenecked again and the game becomes rather linear again. This is certainly far removed from the previous game which basically lets your play the game in your own style and order for the most part. So, it winds up being a bit more restrictive on that front.
Another aspect of this game is the DRM (Digital Rights Management). At this point, I’ve played a number of games with DRM in them. I have my own feelings on the subject and they aren’t exactly a big secret, however, I’ve kept this aspect off these reviews under the rule that they have to directly negatively impact gameplay. Up to now, I’ve been pretty lucky with these games in that the DRM winds up being negligible in the overall game or it has been pretty unknown. So, because of the minimal impact on the game, I haven’t mentioned DRM at all.
I can’t do that for this game.
While I was playing, the game suddenly lost connection with the Steam servers. I saw the error message pop up and my thought is that I’m in a single player game, therefore, who cares if I can’t access the servers? Well, after a while, the game kicked me out and put me in a seemingly infinite loop of attempting to access the servers. For a multiplayer game, I can understand because the players machines need to communicate with each other. For a single player game, there is no excuse in my books. My connection was fine, but the DRM dictated that I, as a legal owner of the license of the game, said that this is unacceptable. There is no reason for this and I will dock points for this as I suddenly lost access to the game for the day.
Another irritating factor is the fact that this game seems to be a bit tough. I’ve lost count of how many times shots mysteriously wouldn’t hit their target while attempting to get a second wind, or how often having thousands of shield and health points gets rendered meaningless thanks to enemy fire basically taking me out in a couple of shots. You’d be surprised how easily enemies can shoot around your cover. Even when enemies are several levels below you, they still seem to be able to take you out if you aren’t careful. It’s certainly possible to beat the game, but you generally find yourself picking the “trivial” missions because they are more doable.
Having said that, there are certain aspects this game retains from the previous game that still makes this game a worthwhile game to play. There is the inclusion of RPG-like elements in an FPS game. There is the fact that this game has loads of missions and it will keep your busy for hours. I personally clocked 69 hours to get as far as I did. There is a nice variety of different missions throughout the game. Also, there is a nice amount of depth throughout the game that allows you to explore different angles.
Generally speaking, this one is a very solid one. It’s got great overall gameplay and loads of stuff to do. There is a nice variety of weapons, enemies, and items throughout. It retains a lot of what made the previous game great and changes a few things up to make this one fresh. The difficulty leaves a bit to be desired, the DRM for single player play is a fail, and the openness of the missions are a bit more bottlenecked in this one. So, a solid game, but there are certainly things keeping this one back.
Graphically, this game is great. The cell-shading style shines through on this one. In addition, the modelling is quite solid and the various effects work quite well. Also, I really liked the variety of the landscapes this game has to offer. There is the grassland like areas of the Exploitation Preserve, the winter wonderland of Frostburn Canyon, the desolation of Iribium Blight, and a couple of others. Overall, this game is great with the graphics.
Audio is pretty solid. The music has some variety and works pretty well. There’s nothing that really stands out that didn’t have a reference to the first game, so it sets the mood nicely. The voicework is great throughout. I thought this added a nice amount of personality throughout the game. Sound effects are pretty good. So, an overall solid effort there.
Overall, this is a pretty solid game. It’s got a nice variety in missions and is, overall, a very huge game that you can drop well over 50 hours into just to beat it. The missions have a bit of a bottlenecking problem in certain parts of the game and the difficulty can be annoying to contend with. The DRM, however, is the biggest obstacle with losing access to the server meaning you can’t play the single player game. Graphics are great and the sound is solid. So, a solid game that offers a nice, yet somewhat flawed experience.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Beat the game with only the “You. Will Die. (Seriously)” and the 5th round of the Hyperion Slaughter left in the missions to complete. Made it to level 36 after beating the last mission.
General gameplay: 20/25
Replay value: 8/10
Graphics: 8/10
Audio: 3/5
Overall rating: 78%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
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