FA+
Shop
PC Game Review - Borderlands 2
7 years ago
Borderlands 2 is a bad game. It has it's good points, and it's far from the worst game ever made, but it also has many flaws. While I'm not alone in this opinion, I'm also in the minority. ...kind of. Lots of people love this game, but the ones I've spoke to tend agree with many of the problems I bring up.
It reminds me of the Dark Carniville campaign in Left 4 Dead 2. Many people claim to like the level, they might even say it's their favourite, but every notable part of it is annoying, boring, or both.
So, in this review, I'm going to talk about why I don't like Borderlands 2.
Now before I start, I'm going to say up front that I'm not going to go into the drama with gearbox after the games release. So nothing about Aliens Colonial Marines, or the Pre-Sequel. There's more than enough to damn this game on it's own merits.
With that out of the way, let's talk about the game itself.
---Writing---
Borderlands 2 is a first person shooter, and a loot game. The premise is that 4 vault hunters are on the planet to of pandora to ...do something. Not that it matters, because they were lured here under false pretenses by the bad guy, Hansome Jack, so he could kill them. The point is, Jack's assassination attempt fails and your character decides to get revenge.
The writing is terrible, and not because it's a revenge plot.
I'm ok with the plot holes that can be hand waved away as this being there for gameplay reasons. For example. New-U basically exists as an in world explaination as to why the player respawns, so I can overlook the plot hole of various dead NPCs not respawning, or why Jack doesn't turn off or destroy the machines. But other stuff like Jack not bombing Sancturary once Lilith is captured are harder to ignore.
The real problem with the writing though is the constant use of memes, references, and shouting as substitutes for jokes. Fan favourite characters like Tiny Tina and Scooter are more annoying than funny. While others like Brick are one-note and repetitive. There are some funny lines here and there, but most of it's grating or unfunny.
And because memes are generally short lived, passing fads means the game feels incredibly outdated despite only being about 6 years old. Hell, I think the memes were outdated even when the game was new.
---Gameplay---
Maybe you don't care about the story, you're in it for the gameplay, and nothing else. Well, I've got some bad news for you. The gameplay isn't great either.
First and foremost, just like Borderlands 1, Borderlands 2 claims to have a bazillion guns. The idea is that they are randomly generated, thus giving technically infinite guns. However, I'm generally not a fan of these kinds of precedural generation mechanics. And Borderlands 2 is a great example of why.
The N64 game James Bond Goldeneye has about 20 odd weapons, depending on how you count. Each gun felt unique and served a purpose. Be it the utterly useless Klobb, the devastating RCP90, or the 1 hit kill golden gun. These are all memorable and different.
In Borderlands 2, the game with almost infinite guns, they all feel so similar as to be practically the same. Theres no real difference between an automatic pistol, an assault rifle, and a SMG. Sure, SMGs on average might have less recoil than assault rifles on average, but it really depends on the randomized stats you get. Most of the guns you get are useless to you anyway, lacking the damage output or accuracy to be of any use. The only guns that really differ are the named weapons. These are technically unique weapons with some unusual property, but they are often unusable gimmicks. Such as a SMG that slows you to a crawl when you have it equiped, or a shotgun that fires a cool looking wave pattern, but if utterly useless in combat.
There's nothing useful or memorable like the Flak Cannon, the Cerebral Bore, or the Laptop Gun.
The guns you get are based on random chance. So it's easy to get stuck if you have a run of bad luck. You know a game has problems when people tell me that, if I'm getting bad drops, I should use a cheat engine, a save editor, a mod, or use some special one time use codes from the internet.
A lot of this has to do with the way level scaling works. To put it simply, the higher the level, the more damage you deal, and the less you take. Enemies get the same benefit. What this means is there's a narrow range where the game is ballanced enough to be any fun. If you are overleveled, the game is a push over and no-one can really hurt you. If you are a couple of levels below your enemies, they will kill you in just a few hits, while you're weapons will do little.
Even when you're at the correct level, enemies will still occationally 1 shot you from off screen.
I think a large part of the problem is a mechanic in the game called second wind. If you run out of health, you are downed, and have a limited amount of time to kill an enemy. If you do, you get back up and keep fighting.
This might sound like an elegant system, a fun way to recover from fatal mistakes. But it can often feel like a game design crutch, as if the presence of the system is an excuse to not balance the game. This is most obvious when a boss has high damage, almost unavoidable attacks, but the arena is full of crappy minions that are basically second wind fodder.
And even if you do die, there is little consequence for death, which makes dying an annoying inconvenience. But it also instantly deflates the game, as there's little reason to be careful or play well.
The final gameplay issue I want to bring up are the skills. Now, there are some fun and interesting skills to try, and respecing is cheap. The problem is that boring skills like increased shields or increased elemental chance are not only most of the skills, but are generally more useful than potentially fun skills like deflecting bullets back at enemies or being able to set enemies on fire by punching them.
---Fanboy Defence Force---
I don't like it when people defend a game by saying "the game gets good 40 hours in!" or "once you reach end content, then the game really starts!". Hell, Borderlands 2 itself says this when you complete the game for the first time.
It's an argument I don't buy for a few reasons, but the main one is a game should be fun from the start. Obviously, some games need a slow build up, and others are incredibly complected. But Borderlands is neither of those. The measure I use is Xcom, which is fairly complecated, but can be completed while teaching you everything in 8-10 hours. So the idea that Borderlands 2 doesn't get good until you beat the story, which can take 15-20 hours on a first play through, is rediculous.
If True Vault Hunter mode is where the game starts getting fun, why doesn't the game start you off in that mode?
Then there's the bullet physics. I've been told that Borderlands is superiour to other FPS games because it has bullet physics.
What are bullet physics? In short. Most FPS games work on "hitscan". When you fire a gun, the bullet instantly hits what it's aiming at. In Borderlands 2, bullets are projectiles that take time to travel to their target.
In real life, bullets are pretty fast. Bullet physics mainly comes into play at long range, where you have to lead your target as he might have moved by the time the bullet gets there. Or you have to time your shot when he's standing still. The Sniper Elite games let you customize how realistic you want the physics to be, and since that game is all about sniping, you can imagine that it's pretty important.
But in Borderlands, all it really does is ruin online co-op, as bullet physics are calculated server side. Meaning, unless you're host, there's a delay between you firing the gun, and the bullets actually appearing. It might only be a third of a second, but it's enough to make hitting moving targets at long range almost impossible, since you not only have to lead the target, but also the hosts internet connection. This also applies at fast moving targets at close range.
Add in some bad drops and it can feel like you're barely even playing the game.
Lots of games have projectile based weapons. Unreal, Tribes, and the afore mentioned Sniper Elite games spring to mind.
---Players/community---
It is debatable wether a game should be blamed for the kind of people it attracts. Personally, I don't think a game is responcible for the actions of the people that play it.
However, I do think that some games encourage certain kinds of behaviour by their mechanics. For example. Left 4 Dead 2 often attracts trolls, due to how easy it is to spam annoying voice lines, and the always on friendly fire of the harder modes. There are even guides on the Steam page explaining how to make the game as annoying and unpleasant as possible.
Borderlands 2 has some problems that are common to loot games in general. I have a house rule that is no one checks loot until we're in town or some other non-gameplay area. Because stopping for 5 minutes every half dozen enemies to check if that white item he dropped is better than you're +6 legendary weapon of whatever gets really boring really fast.
But there are problems unique to Borderlands. In my experience, Borderlands fans seem to want to play the games in the most boring and anti-social way possible. Be it grinding high drop rate areas. Sprinting off ahead to loot everything before anyone else gets there. Grabbing loot they don't use. Twinking characters using the stash. Killing enemies when you're trying to second wind. Leveling up via boosting and exploits. Using speed run strategies to skip content. Running past enemies and encounters. Deliberately softlocking the game for "teh lulz". And even using cheats, mods, and save editors because why not at that point?
I think it speaks volumes that most of this stuff involves not playing the game. To me, playing the game should be the fun part. So unless you're trying to speedrun the game, why would you deliberately ignore enemies and skip content? Hell, I remember Destiny 2 getting stick for being so easy you could run past the enemies, but I don't see Borderlands 2 getting condemned for the same reason. I think a large part of why people do this is that there's only 1 set of loot to go around, and even with the better drops from playing co-op. It rewards players who sprint ahead and collect everything. Even items that are not something they can use on their current character, they can always give it to another character via the stash.
Even if you don't care about loot, you will care when you're stuck with ineffective pea shooters that other players didn't consider worth picking up, like the kid at school that ended up with the white crayon.
---Other Stuff---
Now, I could go on about the game, there's a bunch of stuff I cut for time. But there's a few I want to give a mention for the sake of completeness.
Like sidequests. There's nothing wrong with fetch quests and Kill X quests if they're fun and done well, but these are typical MMO style filler. Bland and boring, yet people insist on doing them anyway.
I heard the Dungeons and Dragons DLC is amazing, but despite some nice graphics and cool ideas, it still has the same problems as the base game. There's an entire side quest that is just Dark Souls references. You light bonfires, collect souls, a hollow guy becomes human, then you help him kill someone invading his game. There's no jokes in this quest, at least that I noticed. It's all just "Guys, remember Dark Souls? We've played Dark Souls. Here's some Dark Souls jargon. Isn't that cool? We played Dark Souls!"
Then there's the golden chest, and the golden keys needed to open them. In short, by entering codes from Gearboxes social media posts, you could get 1 time use keys that opened a special chest that garunteed good loot for your level. I didn't use the golden chest, but just like second wind, it seems to be a crutch to not ballance the game.
Speaking of which, money is mostly worthless in the game since vending machines rarely have anything worth buying in them. I think they should sell items decent enough to have you been effective if you get bad RNG.
---Conclusion---
As I said at the start, Borderlands 2 has it's good points, and it's far from the worst game ever made, but it also has many flaws. It's below average. I'm not a professional reviewer, but if I had to give it a score, I'd give it 4 out of 10.
So, why am I the odd man out? Why is it I'm not a fan of the game when everybody else seems to love it so much despite admiting the the huge problems the game has?
I can only speculate, but if I had to guess, I'd put it down to 2 things. First would be my attitude to loot. I might like getting new gear, but I didn't cry tears of joy because that rare named weapon dropped. Second, I play games to have fun, and I stop playing them when they get boring. Whereas Borderlands fans seem to only care about loot, and the boring grind isn't just work, but part of the appeal.
It reminds me of the Dark Carniville campaign in Left 4 Dead 2. Many people claim to like the level, they might even say it's their favourite, but every notable part of it is annoying, boring, or both.
So, in this review, I'm going to talk about why I don't like Borderlands 2.
Now before I start, I'm going to say up front that I'm not going to go into the drama with gearbox after the games release. So nothing about Aliens Colonial Marines, or the Pre-Sequel. There's more than enough to damn this game on it's own merits.
With that out of the way, let's talk about the game itself.
---Writing---
Borderlands 2 is a first person shooter, and a loot game. The premise is that 4 vault hunters are on the planet to of pandora to ...do something. Not that it matters, because they were lured here under false pretenses by the bad guy, Hansome Jack, so he could kill them. The point is, Jack's assassination attempt fails and your character decides to get revenge.
The writing is terrible, and not because it's a revenge plot.
I'm ok with the plot holes that can be hand waved away as this being there for gameplay reasons. For example. New-U basically exists as an in world explaination as to why the player respawns, so I can overlook the plot hole of various dead NPCs not respawning, or why Jack doesn't turn off or destroy the machines. But other stuff like Jack not bombing Sancturary once Lilith is captured are harder to ignore.
The real problem with the writing though is the constant use of memes, references, and shouting as substitutes for jokes. Fan favourite characters like Tiny Tina and Scooter are more annoying than funny. While others like Brick are one-note and repetitive. There are some funny lines here and there, but most of it's grating or unfunny.
And because memes are generally short lived, passing fads means the game feels incredibly outdated despite only being about 6 years old. Hell, I think the memes were outdated even when the game was new.
---Gameplay---
Maybe you don't care about the story, you're in it for the gameplay, and nothing else. Well, I've got some bad news for you. The gameplay isn't great either.
First and foremost, just like Borderlands 1, Borderlands 2 claims to have a bazillion guns. The idea is that they are randomly generated, thus giving technically infinite guns. However, I'm generally not a fan of these kinds of precedural generation mechanics. And Borderlands 2 is a great example of why.
The N64 game James Bond Goldeneye has about 20 odd weapons, depending on how you count. Each gun felt unique and served a purpose. Be it the utterly useless Klobb, the devastating RCP90, or the 1 hit kill golden gun. These are all memorable and different.
In Borderlands 2, the game with almost infinite guns, they all feel so similar as to be practically the same. Theres no real difference between an automatic pistol, an assault rifle, and a SMG. Sure, SMGs on average might have less recoil than assault rifles on average, but it really depends on the randomized stats you get. Most of the guns you get are useless to you anyway, lacking the damage output or accuracy to be of any use. The only guns that really differ are the named weapons. These are technically unique weapons with some unusual property, but they are often unusable gimmicks. Such as a SMG that slows you to a crawl when you have it equiped, or a shotgun that fires a cool looking wave pattern, but if utterly useless in combat.
There's nothing useful or memorable like the Flak Cannon, the Cerebral Bore, or the Laptop Gun.
The guns you get are based on random chance. So it's easy to get stuck if you have a run of bad luck. You know a game has problems when people tell me that, if I'm getting bad drops, I should use a cheat engine, a save editor, a mod, or use some special one time use codes from the internet.
A lot of this has to do with the way level scaling works. To put it simply, the higher the level, the more damage you deal, and the less you take. Enemies get the same benefit. What this means is there's a narrow range where the game is ballanced enough to be any fun. If you are overleveled, the game is a push over and no-one can really hurt you. If you are a couple of levels below your enemies, they will kill you in just a few hits, while you're weapons will do little.
Even when you're at the correct level, enemies will still occationally 1 shot you from off screen.
I think a large part of the problem is a mechanic in the game called second wind. If you run out of health, you are downed, and have a limited amount of time to kill an enemy. If you do, you get back up and keep fighting.
This might sound like an elegant system, a fun way to recover from fatal mistakes. But it can often feel like a game design crutch, as if the presence of the system is an excuse to not balance the game. This is most obvious when a boss has high damage, almost unavoidable attacks, but the arena is full of crappy minions that are basically second wind fodder.
And even if you do die, there is little consequence for death, which makes dying an annoying inconvenience. But it also instantly deflates the game, as there's little reason to be careful or play well.
The final gameplay issue I want to bring up are the skills. Now, there are some fun and interesting skills to try, and respecing is cheap. The problem is that boring skills like increased shields or increased elemental chance are not only most of the skills, but are generally more useful than potentially fun skills like deflecting bullets back at enemies or being able to set enemies on fire by punching them.
---Fanboy Defence Force---
I don't like it when people defend a game by saying "the game gets good 40 hours in!" or "once you reach end content, then the game really starts!". Hell, Borderlands 2 itself says this when you complete the game for the first time.
It's an argument I don't buy for a few reasons, but the main one is a game should be fun from the start. Obviously, some games need a slow build up, and others are incredibly complected. But Borderlands is neither of those. The measure I use is Xcom, which is fairly complecated, but can be completed while teaching you everything in 8-10 hours. So the idea that Borderlands 2 doesn't get good until you beat the story, which can take 15-20 hours on a first play through, is rediculous.
If True Vault Hunter mode is where the game starts getting fun, why doesn't the game start you off in that mode?
Then there's the bullet physics. I've been told that Borderlands is superiour to other FPS games because it has bullet physics.
What are bullet physics? In short. Most FPS games work on "hitscan". When you fire a gun, the bullet instantly hits what it's aiming at. In Borderlands 2, bullets are projectiles that take time to travel to their target.
In real life, bullets are pretty fast. Bullet physics mainly comes into play at long range, where you have to lead your target as he might have moved by the time the bullet gets there. Or you have to time your shot when he's standing still. The Sniper Elite games let you customize how realistic you want the physics to be, and since that game is all about sniping, you can imagine that it's pretty important.
But in Borderlands, all it really does is ruin online co-op, as bullet physics are calculated server side. Meaning, unless you're host, there's a delay between you firing the gun, and the bullets actually appearing. It might only be a third of a second, but it's enough to make hitting moving targets at long range almost impossible, since you not only have to lead the target, but also the hosts internet connection. This also applies at fast moving targets at close range.
Add in some bad drops and it can feel like you're barely even playing the game.
Lots of games have projectile based weapons. Unreal, Tribes, and the afore mentioned Sniper Elite games spring to mind.
---Players/community---
It is debatable wether a game should be blamed for the kind of people it attracts. Personally, I don't think a game is responcible for the actions of the people that play it.
However, I do think that some games encourage certain kinds of behaviour by their mechanics. For example. Left 4 Dead 2 often attracts trolls, due to how easy it is to spam annoying voice lines, and the always on friendly fire of the harder modes. There are even guides on the Steam page explaining how to make the game as annoying and unpleasant as possible.
Borderlands 2 has some problems that are common to loot games in general. I have a house rule that is no one checks loot until we're in town or some other non-gameplay area. Because stopping for 5 minutes every half dozen enemies to check if that white item he dropped is better than you're +6 legendary weapon of whatever gets really boring really fast.
But there are problems unique to Borderlands. In my experience, Borderlands fans seem to want to play the games in the most boring and anti-social way possible. Be it grinding high drop rate areas. Sprinting off ahead to loot everything before anyone else gets there. Grabbing loot they don't use. Twinking characters using the stash. Killing enemies when you're trying to second wind. Leveling up via boosting and exploits. Using speed run strategies to skip content. Running past enemies and encounters. Deliberately softlocking the game for "teh lulz". And even using cheats, mods, and save editors because why not at that point?
I think it speaks volumes that most of this stuff involves not playing the game. To me, playing the game should be the fun part. So unless you're trying to speedrun the game, why would you deliberately ignore enemies and skip content? Hell, I remember Destiny 2 getting stick for being so easy you could run past the enemies, but I don't see Borderlands 2 getting condemned for the same reason. I think a large part of why people do this is that there's only 1 set of loot to go around, and even with the better drops from playing co-op. It rewards players who sprint ahead and collect everything. Even items that are not something they can use on their current character, they can always give it to another character via the stash.
Even if you don't care about loot, you will care when you're stuck with ineffective pea shooters that other players didn't consider worth picking up, like the kid at school that ended up with the white crayon.
---Other Stuff---
Now, I could go on about the game, there's a bunch of stuff I cut for time. But there's a few I want to give a mention for the sake of completeness.
Like sidequests. There's nothing wrong with fetch quests and Kill X quests if they're fun and done well, but these are typical MMO style filler. Bland and boring, yet people insist on doing them anyway.
I heard the Dungeons and Dragons DLC is amazing, but despite some nice graphics and cool ideas, it still has the same problems as the base game. There's an entire side quest that is just Dark Souls references. You light bonfires, collect souls, a hollow guy becomes human, then you help him kill someone invading his game. There's no jokes in this quest, at least that I noticed. It's all just "Guys, remember Dark Souls? We've played Dark Souls. Here's some Dark Souls jargon. Isn't that cool? We played Dark Souls!"
Then there's the golden chest, and the golden keys needed to open them. In short, by entering codes from Gearboxes social media posts, you could get 1 time use keys that opened a special chest that garunteed good loot for your level. I didn't use the golden chest, but just like second wind, it seems to be a crutch to not ballance the game.
Speaking of which, money is mostly worthless in the game since vending machines rarely have anything worth buying in them. I think they should sell items decent enough to have you been effective if you get bad RNG.
---Conclusion---
As I said at the start, Borderlands 2 has it's good points, and it's far from the worst game ever made, but it also has many flaws. It's below average. I'm not a professional reviewer, but if I had to give it a score, I'd give it 4 out of 10.
So, why am I the odd man out? Why is it I'm not a fan of the game when everybody else seems to love it so much despite admiting the the huge problems the game has?
I can only speculate, but if I had to guess, I'd put it down to 2 things. First would be my attitude to loot. I might like getting new gear, but I didn't cry tears of joy because that rare named weapon dropped. Second, I play games to have fun, and I stop playing them when they get boring. Whereas Borderlands fans seem to only care about loot, and the boring grind isn't just work, but part of the appeal.
I think it was pretty enjoyable when it came out and miles better than Borderlands 1 which was just so dull and bland but I don't think it will have aged well.
I forgot how focused on memes and references it was, I wonder if anyone would even get half of them now, it must be so dated.
I don't think all the writing was that bad, Jack had some funny lines at times but yeah it wasn't exactly stellar.
Some of the guns were really cool but generally you found a couple you liked and then some crap you had to have cos it had an elemental damage attribute you needed.
The only type of gun I can even remember really were the ones that you would throw away to reload and depending on how much ammo was left in the gun when you did that it'd explode for more damage, which as a serial reloader in any first person shooter was awful for me, so many wasted bullets >_<
I remember some of the skills being fun and the trees being different enough that it was fun exploring them. A huge problem I had with Destiny 2 is your special takes so freaking long to come back that you basically never use it until you reach a boss and at least in BL2 you could use them fairly often which was nice.
I also liked the buffs you got from doing the in game challenge things, kill 100 people and get 1% damage, finish 50 quests get 1% more XP, that kind of thing. It eventually added up to a nice bonus and they persisted across characters.
I've completely forgotten what True Vault Hunter mode even does. Was it just more difficult?
Speaking of which yeah the second wind thing was bull. It was cool when you pulled it off and got a free revive until the bosses when like you say they fill the arena with stuff you can kill just by glancing at it and clearly they are only there to act as second wind fodder so they can make the bosses extra annoying.
Even on single player the bullet physics sucked, it was nigh impossible to hit anything that was moving at any kind of range.
The way the game did loot was so stupid cos yeah you did just get people rushing ahead and grabbing everything. I guess they expected people to go "Do you need this, can I have that?" and so on but that's assuming you even know someone got something and good luck with that kind of thing if you're playing with randoms.