The man was me, and the story had a happy ending. The real story is different for everyone, and for me it was about a man who was constantly waddling into battle slightly under-levelled and who really wanted to get his hands on a corrosive shotgun. It's a surprisingly good narrative, but it's not the real story at all. By night, his troopers enforce draconian laws while the ground shakes with the sound of his treasure-seeking drills. By day, the highways and plains of this scrapheap world are covered with billboards showing his smirking mouth and his mocking eyes. The plot concerns Handsome Jack of the Hyperion Corporation, who's built a base on the moon and is stirring up trouble on Pandora itself as he searches for one last great vault buried deep beneath its surface. Second Wind remains a great idea, and provides a constant baseline to the most deadly of the missions.ĭan was impressed with Gearbox's approach to downloadable content right from the off: "This is a vast, generous offering: a true expansion from a developer that obviously cares deeply about its creation, rather than a corporate cash-grab mandated by the boardroom." Gearbox's latest offers the richness and character of those Halloween Special-styled episodes spread across a campaign that will take you days to complete. Questing, levelling, shooting, even driving: almost everything important has been improved while each little detail has been refined. Dr Ned, General Knoxx, Claptrap's ramshackle uprising - these are the things that Borderlands 2 builds on the most, taking cues from the tighter campaigns, sharper jokes and more poignant, oddball asides. That's the spirit that made the first Borderlands great, too, of course, and that really came to the fore during the original game's add-on instalments. It's the hillbilly at the peak of his powers. With the squeeze of a jerry-rigged throttle it powers him up out of the swamp and high into the sky, where he tears through the Earth's atmosphere and then bellyflops explosively into the heart of the sun.īorderlands 2 is still a hillbilly moonshiner sort of game, then, but it's the hillbilly at his canny, tinkering, big-dreaming best. He's made wings for himself from rusty trash cans, though, and he's rigged up a rocket engine from parts of an old moonshine distillery and the motor of a 1967 Ford Galaxie. In the middle of the swamp is a little shack that sells soda pop and tickets to an alligator zoo, and on the roof of the shack stands a wiry old duffer in denim britches and a dirty cap.
If you want to understand the spirit of Borderlands 2, close your eyes and imagine a swamp. Here we present our original review from 18th September last year with, down the left-hand column, links to reviews of all the DLC and some further reading. Dishonored wasn't the only game to get a Game of the Year Edition last week Borderlands 2 also saw the release of a complete edition featuring all the DLC campaigns and other add-ons, including two character classes, the Mechromancer and the Psycho.