Borderlands 2 Review

We all remember the grind of Borderlands 1, it was a never ending stream of new loot to compare and switch between, skill points and strength to look forward to with each level, and a large sprawling new world complete with hilarious psychotics, cannibals, shotgun midgets, and of course skags. Somewhere along the lines though, we got tired of having no new missions to complete and once we were fully leveled and had found that one gun that could kill any enemy with a single shot if felt as though there was no reason to play Borderlands and it drifted off as we would sell it back to Gamestop in order to get money for our next big adventure. However, it would not be long before we began to miss the colors, the humor, the overly engaging blend of rpg and fps that no other game had ever dare attempted and now its back.
Yes thankfully we can now return to Pandora and its 85 gazillion guns are at our fingertips. Borderlands 2 features 4 all new vault hunters and a brand new story that actually takes off of the train wreck that was the story of the first game. The opening of the first vault spread eridium throughout Pandora and it quickly became a hot commodity. A man named Handsome Jack saw this as a great opportunity for the Hyperion corporation, one of the major gun manufacturers from the original game, to swoop in and bring order to the lawless planet in order to mine the eridium and gain power and wealth. Now Jack has become the new president of Hyperion and he has found a second vault on Pandora and he invites vault hunters to come help him open it so he can just kill them as soon as they get there ensuring that he has no competition. If you cannot tell already, the story is much, much better in the sequel. I was honestly impressed with it this time around. Not only were they able to salvage the gigantic, mind-numbingly bland story of the first game, but they expanded on it bringing back all of the characters from the original game, including all 4 original vault hunters, and crafted a story of revenge, heroism, tragedy, love, loss, and reflection over good and evil. Of course all the gore, crude humor, and murder remain perfectly intact so do not fret.
The 4 classes have been completely revamped with new abilities and vastly different skill trees that cater to a myriad of play styles and skill levels. There is Salvador the gunzerker who can activate his gunzerking skill in order to duel wield any two guns in the game while he regenerates health and ammo and screams bloody murder much like Brick did when activating his berzerker skill. Salvador is very much a tank/dps class, that is how I utilized his skills anyway. His three skill trees focus on tanking, shrugging off damage and regenerating health. Switching weapons, giving bonuses for constantly using different weapons and weapon types, and continuous fire. A gunzerker needs to never stop firing and if at all possible never stop gunzerking you will probably get the most dps out of this skill tree but not you will essentially be a glass cannon. The commando, Axton, is a lot like Roland in that he is entirely dps and his action skill deploys a sabre turret that I am happy to say is much more useful than Roland's was. All of Axton's skill trees are incredibly useful focusing on powering up the turret for support, powering up Axton's overall damage and magazine size, or strengthening Axton's survivability and being able to get out two sabre turrets equipped with shields. Now I have yet to try the other two characters but Maya and Zero both seem to be ranged support. Zero's action skill makes a decoy of himself that aggros enemies and Maya can grab an enemy in a stasis bubble that does continuous damage and often offers buffs to the team.
The classes and story are not the only things that have been revamped. The multiplayer has been given some upgrades as well. You can still do the classic four player co op and work through the story as a team however the enemy level scale will depend on the level of the host character but having more people in your party makes the game more difficult and rare loot drops more often. Story points can be skipped or re done for more advanced players who do not wish to replay them or for those who do. Weapon and skill menus have a sleeker and more interesting layout that does not take up the whole screen during co op and allowing all players to check their menus or compare weapons at the same time. There is now a full system for trading money and equipment instead of just dropping things on the ground and hoping you do not lose them before the person you are trading with has a chance to pick them up. You can even bet a bunch of money or equipment on the outcome of a duel between you and another player however the arenas have been removed to put more focus on co op play. I am still looking for a good team to take down the gigantic and imposing raid boss Terramorphous if anyone would be interested.
Of course being that this is Borderlands, there needs to be tons and tons of different guns and enemy types and Gearbox did not disappoint. If you can believe it there are actually more guns and enemy types in this game than there were in the first and that is really saying something. I think the first game actually had a around 17 million different guns and it won the Guinness world record for most guns in a video game ever. The guns. grenades and enemies are much more interesting this time around. Each manufacturer adds a new and unique effect to their guns such as gaining accuracy with hyperion weapons and throwing the gun like a grenade to reload it with tediore weapons. The differing abilities between weapons and their elemental effects are much more prevalent and no two weapons are even slightly alike. You can even inspect the millions of impressive 3d gun models in full detail now which as an animator, I found was a very nice feature.
All in all, Borderlands 2 has completely brought back the chaos and the comedy in an even bigger way and I loved every second of it. I cannot wait to start my second play through as the gunzerker and I know that this time around I will be playing through as every character because they are all just way too interesting to ignore. If you like shooters, rpgs, pretty and unique graphical styles, or completely hilarious and over the top experiences that are increasingly hard to come by, you cannot afford to miss Borderlands 2.
9/10

About Games-a-blazin

For anyone who would care to know, my name is Geoffrey Epstein, if you have not already figured that out, and I am the sole writer of this blog. I am a gamer, a prospective game designer, a writer, an otaku, a full on "nerdist" some might say and in this blog I am going to give you my take on many of the goings on within the games industry. This will include previews and reviews of many of the games that I play, considering I tend to play just about all of them that is going to mean a lot of previews and reviews.  

I BET YOU WANT A FIREFALL BETA KEY!

I was recently sent an invitation to the closed beta for Firefall which is an open world MMO, RPG, 3^rd/1^st person shooter. It feels and looks a lot like borderlands with the exception that it is in MMO form. The weapons are not as playful nor are the abilities and every ability thus far seems more like last minute support than an effective plan of attack of course I have not gotten very far into my leveling tree. Speaking of which, leveling is very interesting in that all classes are available to you at all times when you play one you rack up XP for that class and can buy another upgrade when you have enough. The upgrades, a lot like the abilities, do not seem very useful thus far but I am still at the bottom of the tree so I am sure they will get better. I really like that every character and every class are given some type of jump jet with the exception of rpg abilities, it is a cool way to throw a twist into what would be yet another bland shooter, however, even though I say that I am starting to get a good sense of how the different classes mesh together in both PVE and PVP. I was digging for resources which attracted the attention of many enemy AIs and as an assault class I had a good DPS with close ranged combat and an effective AOE weapon, my mobility was high but my health and defense was not so I could not hold off many enemies on my own for too long without dying. As I was fighting two engineers landed on the mountain behind me and started laying down turret drones which aggroed many of the enemies allowing me to fly up to that mountain and defend the engineers by firing into the crowd of enemies with my AOE gun. This experience really gave me a nice feel for how the game is supposed to work out and all in all I had a lot of fun with it. 

It has been quite some time since I came back to Firefall so I decided to take another little romp about this tiny and desperately lacking world that Red Five studios would dare to call an MMO. Since there was seemingly nothing left for my character to do other than kill the same couple of bug like enemies that I had already killed one hundred times over I decided to check out the PVP aspect of Firefall as it seemed like a large part of the game and the developers had poured quite a bit of love into it. Obviously, you play with your own character and can switch their class or "battleframe" at any point during the match like many other multiplayer shooters. I decided to start with my acrobatic, mid-ranged health, assault class armed with a low damage smg and a shotgun like weapon that fires off a ball of energy that then causes a wide area of splash damage. The smg was almost completely useless and the shotgun was almost impossible to aim especially as everyone was flying around with their thrusters because the shotgun does not fire straight, it lobs up and dips down. The only real advantage of the assault class was the high damage of the shotgun, when it hit, and its high mobility. I decided to change into a class that more suited my style, the dreadnaught. The dreadnaught is the tank class. Slow moving, medium dps, high health and defense. You see I like to play shooters as though I were rambo, I run straight into the fray of bullets and fire to my heart's content and you need a class with some serious defense to be successful with that strategy. While I had quite a deal more fun using the dreadnaught, the main minigun that he carries took way too long to charge up and his special skills that deploy a very small shield to trap enemies and protect you from ranged attacks or take an immobile stance that improves accuracy and fire rate but limits visibility were not very useful at all with everyone moving around so fast. Still for all of my criticism I can definitely see that they have something of an interesting shooter coming together. Player movement and aiming is very fluid but it has no heft to it. When you fire a shotgun in Gears of War you can almost feel the kick of the gun and the ripping of flesh as the shells tear through it, but in Firefall, I see the bullets flying but I don't feel like I am firing them. I am not expecting this to be as good of a shooter as Gears but I think the definitely need to change some character animatics.