Borderlands 2 Review: Episode II

That, My Friends, Was a Good Game

Lava! Environment effects! Purple!

It is probably about time that we address the elephant left in the room since the first part of my review. There may have been a particularly important feature of Borderlands 2 I completely neglected to mention. The game features cooperative play with up to four players at once. Oops. Now, we will talk about it, and you will learn more about me. The previous game also featured co-op, but getting it to work was often a mess. First, you had to sign up for and log into GameSpy. Then, you couldn't just join a friend's game, no. They had to invite you and vice-versa if you wanted a friend to tag along. Sometimes those invitations didn't work, even as recently as right before Borderlands 2 was released. (I was finishing up the DLC, so I could mentally move on.) It was cumbersome, especially for someone who would rather play games alone.

That's right. As I've discussed before, I like playing a lot of games solo, and I even play some games with fully-featured multiplayer modes solely in single-player mode. Borderlands 2 may be one of the most obvious games to play with your friends, but I'm happy to let all my solo-and-loving-it brethren that there is no loss of enjoyment playing this game by yourself. The entire experience still remains captivating, and while some parts feel a little too tough for a single person to tackle, I rarely pined for another human being to join my game. That said, I did test out the co-op, and it works so much better. I really could gush all day about how much better it is. You literally just have to launch the game, and all your friends are displayed right on the home screen. Not only that, your buddy list displays what levels they are, what story missions they are on, and whether the game thinks that you will make a good fit for each other based on the previous two criteria. To join the game, one must simply click on the person, verify that he or she wishes to join that game, and the home screen is reloaded showing all present players. I also thought it was cute that the person hosting the game gets a little crown on his or her username.

I know what you're thinking. Bandits can't spell.

When playing co-op, everyone is actually free to meander about in any given area, but the group has to travel together to get to new areas. The host controls what mission everyone is trying to complete, too. If everyone is around the same point in the story, completing these missions together means completing them in your own game, which is great because you don't have to backtrack. If your host friend is significantly ahead of you in story, the game will prompt you to skip a mission when you are faced with it later on. Coupled with a brand new but really obvious mini-map, it's also easier to find your friends if you join in the middle of whatever they're up to. Borderlands 2 also recognizes there are more players and appropriately increases the number of enemies in any given encounter. It can sometimes feel insane, but it's a great way to gain more experience if you're particularly good at beating up bad guys. Experience and items other than currency are not shared. When everyone is done fighting for who gets to grab a weapon or shield, if someone is charitable enough to give a weapon to a teammate, the game has a sharing menu to transfer items between each other. I found it a little wonky to use, but it is better than dropping the item on the ground for your friend to pick up. Other than being less cruel, the game also exaggerates item dropping, and a nice gesture could turn into a friend chasing after a flying shotgun.

Aside from my problem with object edges mentioned in the last part, I had a few game-breaking issues, which are worth mentioning. At one point, I was climbing up a long ladder and hit the reload key, and I was no longer able to move on or leave the ladder. I couldn't bring up any in-game menus except the one to escape. A friend was actually playing with me, and I had to leave him in the dust while I backed out. That was annoying because we already cleared out the gauntlets of enemies, and I was trying to finish this one mission before going to bed. I was faced with returning and running through throngs of baddies just so I could sleep soon. At another time, I went to an area as dictated by a story mission, but I picked up four additional side missions while I was there. I like to finish all the side missions in an area before I leave to turn them in, and this became my downfall. The game froze on three separate occasions. Given that there is no manual or quick save feature, I would force the game to quit and return only to find myself with all my side missions incomplete (and unique loot lost). I don't know what was special about the place, but I ended up quitting after finishing each mission just to ensure the game was saved appropriately. Finally, I was tackling a round in Fink's Slaughterhouse when I killed the last enemy shown on the minimap only to have absolutely nothing happen. I had to quit the game to make the entire multi-wave mission reset. I could've melted metal with my anger on that one.

This was my prettiest gun, and the game makes it easy for me to show you my weapon.

Moving on, I did finish the game last night, and it was much better than the first one by far. In general, more happens in one story mission than happened in the entire first game, or at least, that's how it comes off. The game goes to more lengths to show you things happening and have you interact rather than just letting you hear about it in your earpiece. There are some exciting sequences with the characters from the last game joining you on your adventure. Much of it happens during player-controlled gameplay, though, so be sure to actually watch what they're doing, or you'll just hear nonsense in your ear about something happening out of sight. Overall, though, I witnessed a lot of bombastic action on my screen in beautiful color. There is even a brief visit to good ol' Fyrestone from the first game, which reflects how things have changed in the years past. The endgame was really satisfying, but this is mostly because of all the story content from before. I completed every darn side mission I could find on the way to the end (with the exception of the survival rounds in Ore Chasm), and on top of doing so much, I learned a lot about what is and was going on in the world of Pandora. Borderlands 2 also did not set me up for an underwhelming ending like the the first game. I didn't beat the boss this time and think, "That's it?!" I also felt the final boss experience was appropriate. The whole scenario was not an absurdly tough encounter, though I did die as a result of my own stupidity once. After imbibing so much of the craziness, it was nice to have a simple encounter that just looked really big but was over quickly. I just wanted to go home, and the game let me do so without issue.

In total, I spent 77 hours playing Borderlands 2, and now there is DLC out for it. There are also a lot of Badass challenges I didn't complete, such as finding out more about the four new vault hunters. I'll get to all that once I catch up with all my other games that have been vying for my attention. Meanwhile, if you haven't bought this game, go do so. It's pretty. It's funny. It's fun even for people who suck at shooters. There are few reasons not to play it.