Borderlands 2

Ike of the Rehash Critics: Borderlands was a breakthrough in gaming with fast acting shooter action and unique graphics. As a first person shooter Borderlands offered more depth than any other platform with intricate skill trees, endless weapon combinations, and simple yet admirable character customization. Gearbox still delivers a superior product with Borderlands 2.

Gameplay: If you are an anti-social anaconda you are missing out on one of the most important aspects of the Borderlands 2 package. Co-op is a necessity for maximum enjoyment. In single player mode there won't be as much action, survival, killer guns, competition, smack talk, and fun. So pull up your big girl pants and join someone.

Action: Endless, challenging, and engrossing. There may be a long silence amongst your friends during intense battles, so refrain from resorting to your single player cussing at the video game.

Graphics: Gearbox continues with cel-shading and ups the anti on big bad guy design and difficulty. Don't worry, skags (which also describes X'es) are still around but outclassed by the newly introduced bullymongs. The beasties of Pandora, although not vast, add a higher level of difficulty.

New and/or Improved: You will experience more guns, larger territories (vertically and horizontally), enhanced villains, new characters, new talent trees, crazy creatures, the capability of hiding old missions you don't want, and character transferable skill points (i.e. add 1% to shield recharge rate, max health, etc…).

Most disappointing: Here it is in a nutshell: Maps are tricky with multiple levels and poor direction, some talent trees don't have a whole lot of variety, and the story is not as engrossing as the first.

In summation Borderlands 2 met and exceeded 98% of my expectations. I am still playing the second play through and have not maxed out my love for this one. BUY BUY BUY, didn't play the first Borderlands BUY BUY BUY. This game is as flawless as it gets.

Looking back after having played this through it was pure luck that we ever got anything remotely or nearly as entertaining when you see the story, characters, and arc of Borderlands 3. To me the story ends here.

The first borderlands was a fun and unique game when it came out, but I will never go back to it after I played this game. The game play is pretty much the same, but this time it feels much more fluent. The characters each have their own personality, but I really got annoyed with Scooter and Claptrap this time around. Not to mention you never get a break from Handsome Jack, his character is meant to be annoying, but I don't know if they meant it for some of the other characters. I like that they changed the designs of the guns, much more variety than the first game. It was cool to see the first group of vault hunters again. The music is also really good, I especially love the song "Ice", every time I hear it I start getting pumped up. The graphics are better, they look much more clear, but it also has some load in times and the frame rate tends to drop at some points in the game. There is some glitches as well, some of them even screwed up a mission, I had to restart the game. The levelling up system is extremely fun and feels really rewarding. So far this is the only game I got this year and I'm glad I did get it. I did find the second play through mode made things much, much harder, it actually got me angry but the game is too good for me to be put off.

August 20, 2013. Update It's been a long time coming that I wanted to update this review. I've been playing the hell out of this game the last week. Leveling up the Mechromancer I just purchased. The true vault hunter mode just frustrated me with the one shot and I'm done garbage. The Assassin obviously wasn't the best character to try and get to level 50, well I made it to level 42. Any way, the Mechromancer just makes the game much more enjoyable, the deathtrap destroys everything, she is a much better class. That and I've found much better loot this time around. I realized the only difficulty this game offers is enemies that one shot you, it's just plain annoying. 2012 was a pretty crappy year for video games, so this easily takes game of the year for me. There's six characters to play as, so that's 6 play-throughs worth of replay value. I haven't even touched the DLC yet. So this game is on terms with Fallout, for bang for your buck.

Highly recommend to anyone that likes shooters or RPG's, very fun.

Game of the Year Edition: Back at it! What a improvement this was over the first game. Not only does the story seem more engaging, thanks to its villains Handsome Jack, but the gameplay/visuals are popping with color, flair, and bloodshed. I also really enjoyed the substantial amount of hilarious dialogue this game had; "That sentence had too many syllables. APOLOGIZE." (Scooter isn't the only funny character this time around). There was also some brutal kills to 3 main characters, which was quite surprising! I might reveal a spoiler so you might wanna stop reading, but I was honestly not expecting to kill Jack at the end of this game. I expected him to carry over in the other games, but nope, I definitely sniped his brains out of his ear holes. It was also a bittersweet goodbye to Angel, but what was the most surprising was seeing Roland die since he was a main character, not only in this game, but in the last one. I'm glad Tiny Tina kept his legacy alive in the Bunker and Badasses dlc. Speaking of the dlc/seasonal missions, I loved pretty much all of it. I was surprised how much better it was compared the Borderlands 1 dlc. Each dlc had lore, and it felt like I was actually doing main missions throughout instead of just doing side missions. Everything in this game feels worth it (minus some of these raid bosses). Not a fan of these repeatable missions, and I'm also not a fan of the enemies not leveling to your character so your forced to do game+ so you can get better loot, which I find a big waste of time. I'm not gonna complete the main campaign twice just so the enemies in the dlcs will feel matched to my level. Hoping they fix this in the other games.

Borderlands 2 builds up on the original game, streamlining some features and improving the overall experience, while keeping the concept behind the original game intact.

I'm not a fan of Borderlands. When it came out, I felt it wasn't such a great single player game, but it had huge potential to be either a classic LAN-party game or an internet competitive one. If you had a bunch of friends you could LAN with, it was fantastic: funny, challenging and you had many hours of gameplay. The other option was pubstomping some kids in PvP. Whether it was the Pokemon variant - farming the content solo and jumping online to pewpew some randoms - or the Diablo variant - farming the content online with other players - the idea was focused on running the same bosses and levels over and over trying to acquire some very rare and special gear, to then reign supreme in duels. However, not everyone of us had the chance to play the game like that and, if multi-player wasn't an option, you were left with what was a pretty bland FPS-RPG hybrid.

Borderlands 2 made noticeable improvements in terms of gameplay and presentation. Firstly, the game became a ton more humorous. The original Borderlands still tried to retain a gloomy, somber feel that it never quite achieved. This time around, every character you talk to is absolutely hilarious. Big props to the writers. In terms of the actual game, the addition of a mini-map to replace the first game's clunky waypoint-compass system is a simple yet incredible improvement. Missions and side-missions are now very easy to pick up and turn in through MMO-style markers on the map, as opposite to Claptrap just telling you someone has a quest for you and you having to spend 30 minutes looking for the quest-giver. Also in the quest department, even the most banal side-mission now has voice-acting and somewhat of a plot, trivial as it might be. The general user-interface and inventory system, while keeping the same feel as the original, have also been reworked to a much better design that makes item management and stat weighing very instinctive.

Visually, the game also seems to have been slightly improved as well. Pandora definitely looks much more clear and crisp than before, but the cartoony cel-shading graphics are still there, so it's pretty hard to tell how much better the visuals actually got. The important thing is that the balance between looks and performance is still very good, so people with low-tier computers can probably still enjoy this one.

Now, Borderlands 2 still has a few flaws.

The thing that I hated the most about the game was all the senseless running around. RPGs, inherently, come packed with a lot of traveling. Granted. However, in titles like Fallout 3 or Skyrim, where the distances are far greater, walking for 10 minutes to reach some destination didn't feel like such a chore. Maybe it was the fast travel system guaranteeing that you only had to walk there once before you could revisit with just a click. Maybe it had something to do with the atmosphere or landscapes of the game world you're spending so much time running in. Whatever the case, there are many instances in Borderlands 2 that you have to run all the way to the end of a map, complete a quest and then run all the way back to the entrance of the zone. Multiply this a few times per side-mission and I can assure you: it gets old really fast. The simple way to fix this was to add an instant recall item, like the hearthstone in World of Warcraft or the town portal in Diablo 2. Alas, no such device in Pandora.

My second problem is that a lot of the side-missions just seem to not belong there. The mechanic is pretty much constant throughout the game: you complete a few story missions and you unlock a batch of side-missions. Nothing wrong with that. Some of them are even fun, like a whodunit-type scenario or a couple that reference movies and games in pretty hilarious ways. However, towards the end of the game, the narrative is pretty climatic, you know a plot-twist is about to hit you in the face and suddenly a bunch of side-missions markers pop up on your map. I'm all for content and playtime, but cramping a bunch of random secondary missions just because? It doesn't feel right and it seems like a very cheap way of extending the playtime clock. Naturally, don't be surprised if towards the end of the game you start disregarding them. The rewards aren't significant, they add nothing to the story and they get repetitive and boring after a few hours. I would've liked to see, maybe, a lengthier story and less random side-quests.

The third one is a pretty common problem nowadays: DLC. Gearbox announced before the release of the game that there was going to be a fifth playable class as a DLC. Going off the previous game, we can guess there's gonna be a ton of DLC content as well. As is, Borderlands 2 feels a tiny bit empty. It could've been more and I can't help but wonder: how much better would've this game been if all that content they're ripping out on release to get an extra buck later would've been there from the start? At the very least, the DLC-only playable character rose some eyebrows among loyal Borderlands fans.

To sum it up, Borderlands 2 is what the first Borderlands should have been: a polished, extremely funny RPFPS. Nevertheless, the focus of the game is still on the grind/itemization/online play combo. If you have 3 bros you can constantly play with, it's gonna be ten times better. Exclusively as a single-player game, it's not the best game ever but it's definitely entertaining and more robust than its predecessor.