Much like the character, playable Claptrap is perfectly realized as a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. His assorted skills favor technical play – use this type of weapon in these circumstances, enjoy these advantages – and his more powerful buffs typically come with a disadvantage attached. Claptrap, now playable for the first time, is a particular standout. Each feels unique, with skill trees that fall roughly into one existing archetype or another … but often with a twist. These, coupled with a new Grinder that allows you to break down three weapons and re-form them into something new, inject a marginal amount of freshness.įour new playable characters help as well. There’s also more variety in the bajillion-strong arsenal thanks to new laser weapons – of the beam, spread-fire, and “pew, pew” variety – and a new “cold” elemental effect that allows you to freeze and potentially shatter enemies. You need it to breathe, of course, but these air jets also enable new boost-assisted jumps, and area-of-effect damaging “butt slams,” both of which bring a new layer to the fast-paced combat. The airless moon’s surface also creates a need (among the human characters, at least) for oxygen, and that leads to the addition of air jets.
Gearbox had some fun in Borderlands 2 with the notion that there’s no fall damage taken when you drop down from a great height, and the Aussie team takes that further by allowing players to ascend even higher. The low-gravity combat, enabled by a new primary setting on the surface of Pandora’s moon, Elpis, leads to some truly epic encounters. The Pre-Sequel is a carbon-copy of Borderlands 2 that never really finds an identity of its own.In fairness, 2K Australia tried to pull a few things off.
That’s not anything other than bad design.
Many times, the most challenging obstacle to completing a given mission in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is the simple act of locating the tiny, green-glowing object that you need to interact with. Or it might just require finding the lone, nearly invisible doorway that’s right in front of you but two levels down. A mission objective that appears to be directly in front of you might actually require backtracking around in a large loop for 10 minutes. They’re a strategic boon in combat, but a pathfinding nightmare. The Pre-Sequel’s huge environments are filled with elaborate networks of pathways that often fold over onto themselves. And Moonstones, a secondary currency similar to Borderlands 2’s Eridium that funds ammo capacity upgrades, still need to be manually collected one at a time, every time, same as ever.Įven worse is the lousy checkpointing. Ammo and cash auto-collect when you run over them, but only some of the time (sloped surfaces seem to confuse the auto-collect). Sequel enhancements like secondary currency and mega-bosses return, and they’re as welcome as they were before.īut in the midst of all of that remain the same niggling annoyances. It’s just plain fun to run around blasting everything in sight, thanks to eminently responsive controls that suit the fast-paced action perfectly. The core mechanics are as enjoyable as they’ve ever been. Borderlands 2 offered an expert evolution, building out the first game’s basic ideas in fresh directions that helped to bolster the sequel’s ever-lengthening tail. That’s not entirely terrible, to be clear.
This is a paint job and little else it might as well have been framed as some weird mega-DLC for Borderlands 2. Shortcomings that were easily forgiven before are harder to overlook here. A handful of new mechanics and killing tools aside, it is fundamentally the same as its 2012 predecessor. The Pre-Sequel is a carbon copy of Borderlands 2 that isn’t able to establish an identity of its own. No, the chief problem is that 2K Australia never shows its work. And it’s definitely not the loot itself, which still explodes forth out of enemy corpses in a pleasing shower of colorful sparkles. It’s not the new setting either, an airless, low-gravity moonscape that creates a new, wonderfully vertical emphasis on your loot-shooting. It’s not the story, a fan-serving lore dive that charts the descent of Borderlands 2 antagonist Handsome Jack into villainy. Fitbit Versa 3īorderlands: The Pre-Sequel is what happens when the numbers don’t add up. Yet something is amiss in the way it all comes together.