Reviews// Borderlands 2

The first Borderlands admittedly lacked in any real story outside of its basic premise and anticlimactic ending. This is probably the area in which Borderlands 2 has undergone the most improvement. The campaign is a much more story-driven experience now, with actual antagonists and a supporting cast instead of just pitting you alone against the hordes of Pandora.

A whole host of the memorable but largely undeveloped characters return from the first game, only this time round their personalities are much more defined and their appearances more prominent. This benefits quests greatly, as characters now talk you through what’s happening and even interact with each other, whereas the first Borderlands relied mostly on sandwiching every quest between text boxes of exposition.

This means far fewer bland and soulless fetch quests and a lot more of Borderlands’ wacky characters and sense of humour getting to shine. Whether you’re helping midget cultists sacrifice themselves to their fire goddess or facing down a foursome of pizza-loving mutant ninjas in their sewer lair, the side quests of Borderlands 2 definitely lean towards the memorable side.

The greater attention given to each quest does unfortunately mean there seem to be less of them than in the last one. A lot of those colourful quest givers will spend much of the game telling you that there’s no work for you right now. It’s a fair price to pay in exchange for deeper and more memorable side quests, but still feels like a bit of a shame.

Just in case you hit a dry spell of questing, the revamped Challenges and Badass Rank systems will make sure you’ve always got goals to aim for as you trek around Pandora. Killing different kinds of enemies, using different types of weapons, using your vehicles, just about everything is covered by the challenges.

As you accomplish each challenge you’re rewarded with an increase to your Badass Rank. Not just a cool bragging rights number, your Badass Rank will also reward you with tokens as it reaches new heights. These tokens are then traded in for a permanent boost to a choice of stats which affect not only your current character but also any other character you later play as.

These characters can also complete the challenges for themselves, raising your Badass Rank even higher and earning more stat boosts. It’s only less than a 1% increase at a time, but eventually you’ll be able to build up some substantial bonuses that’ll definitely help out your new lower level characters. And if you’re one of those serious hardcore gamer types, Gearbox has got you covered. You can easily switch all Badass bonuses off to keep your characters pure.

With the basic formula of Borderlands still intact, Gearbox clearly had more time to focus on the little things this time round. Little things that help you whiz through the dull stuff and keep doing the fun shooty stuff.

You now automatically suck up the money and ammo dropped by enemies. This means no more carefully searching through fields of corpses after every battle. Which is nice really.

In a similar vein you can also take all of said items from a chest at once by simply holding the button. Which means less time spent browsing through piles of ammunition, especially considering you don’t even need to be able to see what you’re taking. Which is, again, quite nice.

A brand new feature is the ability to visually customise your characters somewhat, with a selection of different heads on offer and more to be unlocked throughout the game. While you can’t manually choose your own colours as in Borderlands, there are instead a wide range of pre-set colour combinations for you to choose from.

Again, you unlock a lot more as you progress through the game, either as quest rewards or random loot. You only start with a handful of head choices and the number doesn’t increase too much later on, but it’s a nice addition even if there is room for it to be expanded on.