Game Over OnlineBorderlands: The Pre-Sequel
The Good: More Borderlands!
The Bad: More Borderlands.
The Ugly: Long, unskippable tutorial. Graphics are starting to look tired.
I played a lot of Borderlands. I mean a lot. A lot a lot. I probably spent more than 150 hours tooling around Pandora. After I finished the main plotline, I hit the bounty boards. Then, after I exhausted the bounty boards, I and Mordecai and Bloodwing would just roam the countryside, taking in the raw, hyper-stylized beauty of the place and blowing people’s heads off recreationally. I remember one day sitting on a hilltop with a stalk of wheat between my teeth popping Skags. Sure, when I was whatever the hell level I was they were only worth 1xp each or so, but I had a corrosive sniper rifle that would dissolve them writhing in the dust in biochemical agony. Good times. Good times.
But, and this is the part some of you may find surprising, I never played Borderlands 2. I just flat missed it. I was still tooling around in Borderlands 1 when it came out, and then somehow it was in the rearview mirror and out of my sight. And I haven’t read the Wikipedia entry either, so I know essentially nothing about it. That then makes a review of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (which I think is kind of an overly cutesy way of saying Borderlands 1.5) kind of difficult. I don’t know who Jack is, or what role he plays in Borderlands 2 or why he features so prominently in Borderlands 1.5. Furthermore, overall, the characters and plotlines in Borderlands didn’t resonate with me to quite the same depth that the characters in, say, Mass Effect did. Although I lived and breathed in Mordecai’s skin for the better part of two years of gaming, I never developed an abiding desire to find out what became of him after he and I parted ways and I moved on to something else.
So I came into Borderlands 1.5 kind of untethered. The characters I met were not like some grand backstory, but their new-to-me front stories, and the characters from Borderlands 1 who made occasional cameos, I for the most part neither recognized nor remembered. I think 1.5 still surprised me, however, by starting off the game with exactly the same structure of tutorial and crippled activities of the very first game. Do people at 2K really believe that new gamers, fresh eyeballs, are going to come into 1.5 having never played any of the previous games or endless DLC adventures? Apparently so, because it’s not until hour two or three that I finally get vehicles again, and not until an hour or more after that the bounty board opens up. Even more surprising, the first four hours or so are essentially adventuring on the rails, a series of rather tightly scripted and very limited activities that you do to acclimate yourself to the Borderlands game style. This not only leads to several hours of pretty boring gaming for Borderlands veterans, but kind of locks you into the very first character you choose to play because who possibly has the patience to go through those several hours of tutorial again just to try out a new one? Not I, I’ll tell you that much.
I started out with Nisha, because she’s a sniper and I had a warm spot for Mordecai in my heart. Later I wanted to try playing as Claptrap, because that seemed like it would be unique and different. But it takes several levels to really start opening up any character’s skillset, and up until that point Claptrap is just a highly inaccurate shooter, so I ditched him and went back to Nisha. The other available characters I gave no more than a glance at. It would have been nice to let me take a new character and jump right into the thick of things. Alas, not to be.
This time around the action takes place on Pandora’s moon Elpis. The low gravity allows you new jumping physics and makes the vehicles more bouncy. It furthermore requires you to worry about your oxygen level just a little bit. I say just a little bit because you are immediately equipped with an Oz kit (breathing apparatus with a tank of a certain duration) and the moon’s surface has kind of natural geothermal oxygen vents that you can stand on to refill your tanks all over the place. Sure, there are some areas where the vents are thinly populated, but your tank depletes rather slowly and everyone you kill drops a bottle that you can use to replenish your oxygen. Vehicles also come with their own air supply, and every so often you come across a new Oz kit that has higher capacity. It was just never a problem for me. The new low-gravity physics also allows for some fun combat. When you jump in the air you can expel some oxygen from your kit in a jet that gives you kind of a double jump effect. It’s unfortunately never quite clear just how far or high you can jump in this manner and I fell to my death dozens of times due to mistaken jumps making some areas feel similar to a platformer which I found to be a drag. But one of the first major boss battles, against a guy with a jump pack and a lightning gun in an arena of multiple levels and jump pads, is easily the highlight of the first three or so hours of gameplay.
The humor of Borderlands is still off the wall. Not everything about it is probably nearly as funny as the writers hope, but there are plenty of chuckles to be had. For some inexplicable reason, Elpis seems to be some offshoot of the Australian outback and nearly everyone has an Australian accent. I’m pretty much OK with that because I find the Australian accent funny on its own for the most part. Someone reading a grocery list with an Australian accent would probably elicit laugh from me, though I suspect those weren’t the laughs they were going for.
The graphics remain unchanged from the original Borderlands, which came out in 2009. Back then it all looked new and hyper-stylized, like a post-modern graphic novel. Now three games in, I’m kind of tired of the effect, and on my new 30” monitor driven by twin 290X graphics cards, things look ridiculously pixelated and I’m seriously underwhelmed. Weapon effects – ice, lasers, lightning bolts – look better, and surprisingly the backdrops, the sky with the giant space station hovering in the distance look quite good.
The things about Borderlands that I liked, the cartoonish super-violent gunplay, has remained. With it also comes the things that I didn’t so much like – the need to click on nearly every single item to pick it up (especially ammo – why not just auto-pickup ammo until you’re maxed out?), the endless drop of useless weaponry that I have to sift through, and I think I’m going to lump the graphics in that bucket as well – are all back as well. The result is a game that I think will appeal to little more than the Borderlands diehards.
Reviewed By: Phil Soletsky
Publisher: 2K
Rating: 65%
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This review is based on a digital copy of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel for the PC provided by 2K.
