Bit-Tech Review: Borderlands 2
Borderlands 2 review
(reposted from http://www.bit-tech.net)
Published on 18th September 2012 by Joe Martin
Borderlands 2 Review
Platform: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Publisher: 2K Games
UK Price (as reviewed): £24.99 Incl. VAT
US Price (as reviewed): $59.99 Excl. Tax
When I previewed Borderlands 2 in July I said that, come mid-September, the game would be an interesting critical challenge for reviewers. I thought it would be hard to express how a game can be both so utterly meaningless and disrespectful to players and yet also so more-ish and fascinating.
I was wrong. To explain that you only need to understand one thing about Borderlands 2 - money. I'll get to explaining why shortly.
First it's important to lay the groundwork for what Borderlands 2 actually is, which is mainly done by remarking how similar it is to the first game on all the broad levels. The action is still set on the planet Pandora, the game still carries a space-cowboy theme and you still start by choosing one of four adventurers who go off in search of, um, adventure.
What's different this time around though is the presence of Hyperion, an evil mega-corporation which fits the western theme right down to its railway-building antics. Led by the abusive Handsome Jack, Hyperion is on Pandora to find and open a vault similar to the one you opened in the first game - but wants the spoils all to itself and so has been killing all the adventurers it can. It's by pure fluke that you manage to survive.
Who 'You' are depends on who you choose to be, of course. The four available characters are functional analogues to the heroes of the first game with a smattering of tweaks. Salvador is the tank-class and roughly equivalent to Brick from the first game, for example, with his new special ability being that he dual-wield any weapon in the game for a limited period. The others can meanwhile use holographic decoys, throw enemies in the air or deploy turrets.
Personally, I'm a fan of the turret.
The RPG system fits firmly into the action-RPG mould, predictably enough. There's no option to talk your way around conflict or stealth through most missions; every upgrade you get boosts your ability to receive or deal damage. Even so, there's plenty of room for leaving a personal footprint on the type of violence you unleash. Axton the Commando may be a great frontliner, but bulk his turret skill up enough and he can step back to just a support role, for example.
One of the major new additions to the game is a new layer on top of the skill system which builds your 'Badass Rank'. This is presented as a series of tokens earned for completing certain arbitrary and meaningless challenges ("Kill 50 Humans", "Kill 100 Humans", etc) which can then be spent on core stats, such as reload speed or maximum health.
One of the other notably returning features is how difficult it is to die too. Fluff up a combat and you'll fall to your knees, with a few seconds to kill an enemy and get a regenerating 'Second Wind' - but fail that and you'll still respawn at a nearby checkpoint. The only way death really impacts you is as a loss of funds...
And, on that point, it's time to talk about money.
Money is everywhere in Borderlands 2. There are boxes of the stuff in every crevice and cranny, while even unlikely wealthy foes will explode in ludicrous coinage. More often than not it makes even less sense than this, such as when you enter a shop to find sheafs of cash littering every surface, free for the taking.
What's most odd about this though is that you're usually only collecting small amounts of money...but it never, ever looks like it. There'll be inch-thick wads of notes stuffed in a toolbox, but empty the lot into your pockets and you'll find you've picked up less than ten dollars.
Now, call me cynical, but I can't shake the feeling that the disparity between appearance and actuality is a deliberate choice; part of how Borderlands 2 manipulates you into thinking the game is more meaningful than it is. You feel like you're making progress because you're earning all this money, but in reality the amounts you're grabbing are small and the reasons to spend are few.
So, all money does is keep you clicking because that's all there is to do. Consider it in any depth and you quickly realise that there's little to the game beyond this; Borderlands 2 is a game in which you fight a never-ending stream of incrementally tougher enemies with a never-ending stream of incrementally better weapons. It's a game in which you open boxes which only ever contain the means to open more boxes.
It's a game in which nobody can die but all you can do is kill things.
Money and the appearance of it within the game then are just part of the stylistic veneer to cover this vapidity - and the appearance of money ties into this more than you might think. It's part of the delightfully crude space-western veneer that sits over the game and compensates for all the philosophical flaws. It's this which is Borderlands 2's biggest strength; the quotability of the script, the insanity of the missions and the edginess of the characters.
The notepad I keep next to my PC when I play is testament to this, scrawled in all sorts of snippets from my adventures. My favourite is a threat from an early mission: "I'm going to play hopscotch in your chest cavity."
It's odd, really. The expectation for Borderlands 2 has always been that the story is disposable and that the game's true merits lie in co-operative play and the frenetic speed of the violence. Instead though, close inspection reveals the violence to have remained staid since the first game, while the co-operative elements are only exactly as good as they should be. There's no new flourish or excellence to how Borderlands 2 plays with friends; it plays better that way, but then every game does.
The story and the wit with which the world has been assembled is the real draw here though. It's pithy, it's self-knowing, it's riddled with more pop-culture references than an entire season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It's what makes the otherwise transparently meaningless gameplay feel worth playing, with friends or alone.
