Review: Borderlands 2

At times tightly designed and brilliantly executed, while at other times uninspired and juvenile, Borderlands 2 is an idiot savant of a first-person shooter.

On the lawless border world of Pandora, four "vault hunters"—a soldier, an assassin, a brute, and a powerful sorceress—are on a quest to find an legendary alien treasure. Guided by a mysterious artificial intelligence and assisted by a bizarre cast of supporting characters, these four brave adventurers battle feral creatures, psychotic bandits, and the forces of an evil corporation as they search for the mythical Eridian Vault and its promise of immeasurable wealth and power.

This little tale was the premise of the original Borderlands, and having sunk a lot of time into the first game, it is a story with which I am quite familiar. Consequently, I was somewhat disappointed when I realized a few minutes into the introduction of Borderlands 2 that this was also the premise of the sequel.

However, after spending a lot more time with the second game, I realized how wrong I was. Borderlands 2 isn't really about vault hunters, nor is it about "Handsome Jack" (the game's narcissistic, sociopathic, endlessly chatty villain), nor is it a commentary on imperialism and corporate greed, nor is it about murdering lots of dudes to snag color-coded loot. (Well, maybe it's a little bit about that last thing.) Rather, Borderlands 2 is about expectations, and why you should put yours aside when you play this game. It's also about an inbred chubby-chasing mechanic named Scooter.

I'm convinced that understanding this man is the secret to understanding Borderlands.

Like the original, Borderlands 2 is a self-styled "role-playing shooter" (RPS), combining the gameplay of a first-person shooter with the kinds of leveling systems, random weapon drops, and quest structures more traditionally found in role-playing games. Throughout the game's fairly linear mission structure ("go to point A, kill thing B, repeat") you'll encounter a variety of bizarre characters, such as an unbelievably annoying and foul-mouthed tween of a demolitions expert, a cyborg anthropologist who comes across more or less like a black Rudyard Kipling (how's that for irony?), and the four vault hunters from the original Borderlands (formerly a bland collection of nearly mute player characters, now somehow infused with distinct personalities).

However, the character I found most intriguing was Scooter, who reprises his role as the redneck proprietor of the "Catch-A-Ride" vehicle creation system. Scooter is friendly, talkative, funny, secretly romantic, and likely quite inbred, which is unsurprising given the occasional allusions to his incestuous urges. Despite his affable nature, he's got a casual murder or two under his belt, indicating that he's achieved the same level of moral flexibility exhibited by everyone else on this brutal wasteland of a planet. Also, he's a savant when it comes to engineering, and he seems to be one of the only people around capable of dealing with Pandora's incredibly advanced technology. In short, Scooter is Borderlands 2: an uninspired, frequently predictable stereotype full of crass behavior and juvenile dialogue, but one that also exhibits flashes of true technical genius, genuinely funny comedy, and uncharacteristic emotional depth.

Borderlands 2 may be the smartest dumb game I've ever played.

All of this brings me back to my original point about expectations. It would be easy to say that Borderlands 2 is simply "more Borderlands", because on a certain level that's the truth. It would be similarly easy to view it as yet another first-person game with RPG elements (à la Mass Effect, Bioshock, Fallout, or Deus Ex), with a repetitive mission structure and too much hand-holding. Likewise, it would be perfectly reasonable to take in the game's gratuitous violence, meet its over-the-top characters, and listen to their many jokes that fall flat more often than not, and then find yourself turned off by a title that seems like it is simply trying too hard.

A better approach, though, is to put your expectations aside and leave yourself open to the true moments of brilliance that can be found in Borderlands 2. It can be found in the expertly balanced combat, the amazing diversity of weapons (with their impressive array of custom reloading and firing animations), or among the many subtle improvements Gearbox has made to the enemy AI. It can be seen in the franchise's unique "concept art" graphical style, which feels more lovingly hand-drawn yet stylishly hyper-real than ever. It can be found in a ninja assassin who speaks only in haikus and emoticons (which is who I played most of the game as), and in a villain who turns out to be a much more complicated brand of douchebag than he originally seems. And of course, sometimes that brilliance can come from a porn-addicted hillbilly mechanic and amateur poet named Scooter, who helped me save the world of Pandora while making me laugh out loud more than once.

What I've Been Playing

October is going to be a great month for gaming. Not only am I looking forward to the releases of Dishonored, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Assassin's Creed III, I'm also eagerly anticipating the 24-hour video game marathon I'm doing on Saturday, October 20th as part of the Extra Life 2012 charity event, to benefit Boston Children's Hospital. (Here's the link to my donation page! Give, for the children!)

Of course, even though October appears pretty stacked, September certainly was no slouch. Here's a quick rundown of the games I managed to play last month during the calm before the storm.

Spelunky (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

"Roguelikes" seem to be the hot indie trend for 2012. Unfortunately, I tend to view the genre as the video-game equivalent of the band Wilco: I keep giving them a shot, but for some reason I just can't see why people like them so damn much.

In case you're unfamiliar with it, the term "roguelike" refers to the 1980 Unix game Rogue, which was characterized by certain gameplay elements like an aggressive level of difficulty, randomly generated levels, and permanent character death. Today, these gameplay elements seem to have found a wider audience of people who demand crushingly difficult and frustratingly unpredictable game experiences, because they seem to be popping up in every third indie game that comes out.

One such game is Spelunky, a roguelike action platformer released this summer for Xbox LIVE Arcade. Having never played the original version (which was released for PC in 2009), nor having played any similar games (such as La-Mulana), Spelunky was a new experience for me—an experience that involved dying a gruesome death and restarting the game from the beginning about every 2 to 3 minutes.

Spelunky would be like the movie Groundhog Day if instead of learning the piano, Bill Murray just got shot in the face with a poison arrow every morning.

After logging a few good hours of play, I did eventually develop some basic Spelunking skills like running, jumping, climbing ropes, dodging spiders, whipping bats, rescuing damsels, murdering shotgun-toting shopkeepers, and not getting impaled by spikes, to the point where I even finally made it to the second of the five major areas in the game. Unfortunately, by that point I'd decided that Spelunky was probably not the game for me, at least not if I wanted to make it to Thanksgiving without hurling my Xbox controller through my TV screen.

The Binding of Isaac (PC / Mac)

By contrast, a roguelike that does it right is The Binding of Isaac, a Steam title from 2011 that I only recently started playing. A deeply disturbed interpretation of the Bible story of the same name, The Binding of Isaac follows the child Isaac as he flees the murderous zealotry of his mother, descending in to a dungeon of unholy terrors armed only with his tears.

Be warned: this game is pretty disturbing.

Gameplay-wise, Isaac is sort of a dungeon-crawling shooter, like a comfortable mix of The Legend of Zelda and Smash TV. As a roguelike, it's certainly difficult, and death is very much permanent; however, what it really captures about the spirit of roguelikes is the element of randomness. Every time I play, I encounter something I've never seen before (and often, something I hope I never see again). Moreover, the game is balanced such that randomness of the powerups and items firmly guides the gameplay, without undermining player skill to the point where you feel like you're simply a sinner in the hands of an angry random-number-generating God.

Mark of the Ninja (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Having had my fill of indie roguelike self-flagellation, I abandoned for a time playing as either an archeologist with a death wish or a crying child. Instead, I turned to the other extreme: becoming the baddest ninja warrior that has ever existed. Mark of the Ninja is hands-down my favorite XBLA game of the year so far, and may well be my favorite game for 2012 overall. Pretty much everything I wanted to say about the game I put in my recent review, so I think I'll leave it at that. Mark of the Ninja: play it!

Borderlands 2 (Xbox 360)

In my recent Darksiders II review, I claimed that I prefer a game that is too ambitious to one that plays it safe. Well, that claim was put to the test last month by Borderlands 2, which is basically an expanded, more polished version of its predecessor.

Still, sometimes it's the little things, and Borderlands 2 improves a lot of the little things. The difficulty is a little better balanced, the missions are a little less repetitive, the weapons are a little more diverse, and the enemy AI is a little less moronic. All of these little changes—along with some genuinely funny writing—add up to a total Borderlands experience that I've really been enjoying, so much so that perhaps I was full of crap with that whole "respecting games that take risks" nonsense. I'll say more in the review I'll be posting this week, but for now you should know that Borderlands 2 is a pretty solid pick, especially if you either never played or you absolutely loved the original.

So, that was my September. For my October, I'm really only searching for two things: (1) donations to help sick kids, and (2) suggestions for games I could probably win when playing against sick kids. I mean, I'm willing to donate money to help them fight cancer, but I'll be damned if I let those punks beat me at Halo.

My Fall Preorder Lineup

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Preorder

I've gradually grown to love "preordering" upcoming titles before they're released. Originally I viewed the practice as a way for desperate Gamestop employees to harass you at the register, by running through all the additional games they'd like you to buy beyond the one you were actually holding. As I started buying most of my games online, I became more willing to drop a bit of pre-release coin in exchange for various discounts and bonuses.

Today, I'm a straight-up preorder addict. I buy upcoming titles on Amazon as soon as I know I want them, without regard to whatever preorder bonuses may or may not materialize. (More than once, I've ordered games so far in advance that they've been delivered to a previous address several months after I moved.) Every release date is like a little mini-Christmas, and the UPS guy is my own personal Santa in brown short-pants. Here's a quick run-down of the titles I'm expecting to show up on my doorstep between now and the end of 2012.

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Game:	Borderlands 2
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	September 18, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Cautiously Optimistic

Released in 2009, the original Borderlands received a fair amount of acclaim for its distinctive visual style and its skillful integration of RPG elements into solid first-person shooter gameplay. Also, from what I heard, when experienced at its finest, the four-player co-op bordered on transcendental. Unfortunately, this was never my experience, as the difficulty scaling was so aggressive that to play with anyone a few levels above or below you was either prohibitively challenging or pointlessly easy. Furthermore, the bare-bones plot and repetitive mission structure left me pretty unsatisfied with the single-player experience. Still, there was a whole lot about Borderlands that reeked of promise, and if its sequel can fix some of these missteps while building on the potential of the original, it could turn out to be one of the best games of the year.

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Game:	XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	October 9, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Sporting a Raging Nostalgia Hard-On

If you've ever spent any time talking to a PC gamer, chances are they've mentioned XCOM at some point. Originally released in 1994, XCOM was a turn-based tactical strategy game that revolutionized the genre, while simultaneously keeping my friends and I up playing into the wee hours, terrified that at any moment a Cryssalid would burst out of the monitor of my Tandy desktop and impregnate us with its zombifying alien toxins. This upcoming remake of the original has been lovingly developed by the capable hands at Sid Meier's Firaxis Games, the folks behind the Civilization series. All signs point to this game being a slam dunk, and for the developers' sake I sure hope so... should it disappoint, an army of XCOM fanboys stand at the ready to unleash a flood of impotent Internet rage.

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Game:	Dishonored
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	October 9, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Skeptical, But Intrigued

Dishonored is a first-person stealth/action-adventure game developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. I hadn't heard about this game at all until this year's E3, and I'm still a bit skeptical. If there's two things that first-person games tend not to excel at, it's stealth and melee combat. (Fans of the Thief games would probably disagree with me here.) Still, the impressive screenshots and industrial-era setting—along with the fact that it's one of the few new games this year that's not a sequel—piqued my interest enough to go with Dishonored as my impulse buy for the fall.

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Game:	Assassin's Creed III
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC / Wii U
Release Date:	October 30, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Brimming With Revolutionary Bloodlust

Being a New Englander, any game where you run around revolutionary-era Boston murdering Redcoats is going to get four out of five stars from me just for showing up. Sure, the Assassin's Creed series started to get a little stale after Ubisoft released a second follow-up to Assassin's Creed II, but it's still a rock-solid franchise, and everything I've been hearing about this game indicates that the developers have taken nothing for granted. For now, I'm going to allow myself to revel in unchecked enthusiasm for this game, fully confident that it's going to turn out to be phenomenal.

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Game:	Halo 4
Platform:	Xbox 360
Release Date:	November 6, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Glad It's Not Call of Duty

I never thought of myself as a huge Halo fan, usually preferring to scratch any competitive multiplayer itches with the Gears of War games. However, my friends and I have recently gone back to playing Halo 3 during our weekly online play-date, and I was quickly reminded of what an amazing game it is. As someone who is thoroughly bored of the whole Call of Duty thing, I'm picking Halo 4 over Call of Duty: Black Ops II as my preferred multiplayer shooter for the holiday season. (If my friends are reading this... you now know what to tell your wives you want for Christmas.)

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As you can see, I've got my work cut out for me for the rest of 2012. (I'm actually glad Bioshock Infinite got pushed off to February.) Looking at this lineup, it makes me wonder what kind of space is left in the marketplace for the Nintendo's new console (the "Wii U"), which they just announced will be available November 18. Regardless, there will probably be no U for me... my dance card is full.

PAX East 2012: Day One

6:00 AM - Got up way earlier than I ever manage to do for work, at least when there's not a screaming child involved. Not sure how long it will take to drive, subway, hitchhike, and/or walk down to the area of Southie where the Expo is, but I wanted to give myself time.

8:44 AM - Fed, caffeinated, and mildly molested by public transit, I arrive at the venue. It's pretty hectic, but after a bit of wandering I find an enormous queue. I don't know what it's for, but I stand in it anyway.

9:04 AM - Found out what the line is for; it's to stand in a bigger line.

Penned in like lambs to the slaughter... if the lambs were then given swag bags.

10:21 AM - The bigger line eventually led to the exhibit halls. I had wanted to catch Jordan Mechner's keynote, but no way am I leaving to go wait in another line.

View from one of the convention center's skyways.

11:46 AM - The exhibit halls are pure sensory overload, the gamers' equivalent of Las Vegas. Fortunately, everyone is super friendly, either because everyone has a shared interest, or because they're not from Boston. I avoided the long lines for the blockbuster games like Borderlands 2, opting instead to check out the many small indie offerings where I can talk directly to the developers.

Sculptures of the characters from the upcoming Borderlands 2.

12:57 PM - Sat in on the "Gaming for Grown-Ups" panel, which featured (among others) Ken Levine of Irrational Games. Started off as a bunch of old guys talking about their gaming glory days, but ending up being kind of inspirational. Left me hopeful for my future in gaming. If nothing else, my generation seems to be an incredibly important target audience for games, so we're going to keep getting the coolest shit.

2:06 PM - After another sweep through the exhibit halls, decided to wait in line for some merch. Line was long, but fortunately the Plants vs. Zombies dancers were there to entertain us.

2:45 PM - Ran into a co-worker. Neither of us were aware the other was a gamer. On a totally unrelated note, I'm super glad I decided that the full Princess Zelda costume was more of a Saturday outfit.

3:16 PM - Attended the panel, "Stuff Your Criticism, I Want a Review!" Panelists discussed the subtle differences between reviewing video games as consumer products and critiquing them as art and media. They did not discuss the third option (which I prefer), sniping at their petty flaws like a judgmental douchebag.

View from above the main entrance.

4:50 PM - Interesting panel on video games in education. Best part was a demo of "Code Hero", a Portal-style game that introduces programming concepts by having the player solve puzzles through manipulating segments of the game code as they play. The Oregon Trail and Number Munchers were not mentioned.

6:15 PM - Grabbed a burger at the food court with a Canadian sound designer I met on the Giant Bomb site.

7:00 PM - I'm exhausted. With the exhibit halls closed, no interesting panels going on, and more than an hour until the concerts start, I decided to call it an early night and head home to rest up for the long day tomorrow. I enjoyed the panels today, but didn't really see anything on the exhibit floor yet that blew me away. However, there's still a lot left to see over the next two days.