PoisonPen
Member
So I acquired Borderlands 2 and all the DLCs recently, and sat down to play it. I played the original Borderlands several times through and rather enjoyed it. It wasn't a perfect game by any means, had plenty of frustration, and felt annoyingly grindy, but the quirky characterizations and the feeling of gradually growing power was a good way to pass the time between Fallout 3 and waiting for Skyrim. I'd rate Borderlands a C+, so I figured Borderlands 2 would be assured of at least a passing grade. Boy was I wrong.
It's like Gearbox set out to recreate Borderlands, but to remove all the fun parts while increasing all the worst elements. In the original Borderlands, things respawned so quickly that you'd often have to kill the same generic spawn three or four times during the process of completing another generic Fedex delivery quest. In Borderlands 2, not only didn't they fix this, they amazingly decided to make it worse. Deliberately. In a deliberate design decision I can only guess must have been made while high on meth, they not only force you to endure repeated spawns of the same generic opponents, but make the opponents so hard that there is a significant chance of death every single time you fight them, resulting in another trip through that exact same generic spawn.
Which brings us to the second inexplicably terrible design decision. This game is Nintendo hard -- and not in a good way. I like a challenge as much as anyone else. I've been gaming on computers for 35 years (my first console was a Telstar Pong) so I'm not exactly a novice, and if I have to sink a little time into a learning curve, well, that's part of the fun. But when enemies can consistently absorb three or four critical headshots from your best sniper rifle, appear in swarms, and can instakill you with two shots no matter how strong your shields or how high your health, that screams "fake difficulty." In order to make Borderlands 2 tougher than Borderlands, all they did was turn every enemy into a bullet sponge while making them hit like a runaway cement truck. That is the hallmark of poor game design, and the strongest signal that Gearbox is creatively bankrupt.
Oh, there are ways to get around the endless swarms of bullet sponges; deploy your turret and hide behind cover until everything is dead, or phaselock everything in sight, or fling a constant barrage of singularity grenades at every pack of opponents. Unfortunately, nearly all of these strategies involve finding ways of not actually being involved in the game. If the only way to avoid constant game death is to stare at a low-poly brown rock while your turret does amazing things somewhere offscreen, what's the point in even playing?
Meanwhile, at the same time they turned every enemy into an unstoppable tank, they removed ammo regeneration entirely. To make it even more irritating, they tied storage and ammo capacity into a randomly-placed unobtainium coin system, meaning that you're always so low on ammunition that the only way to avoid running out is to carry one of every single weapon type, making specialization impossible. It creates a generic, dull, uninspiring, one-size-fits-all playstyle which makes the class you choose largely irrelevent.
I spent some time on Google reading other people's opinions of Borderlands 2, and people seem to be divided into two very different camps. One camp consists of sneering 14 year old Call of Duty semi-literates whose response to complaints like mine consist of "lrn2game loosr"; the other camp consists of people with a boiling point IQ. I can only guess that Gearbox made a conscious decision that stupid, callow teenyboppers are their target market, and that creativity is too much work for too little profit. Which is a shame, because Borderlands showed rare aptitude at satisfying multiple markets by encouraging a variety of play-styles ranging from beer-and-pretzels casual gaming to fast-twitch Korean-level twinking.
All in all, I am forced to give Borderlands 2 a failing F grade. A great disappointment. It will be uninstalled from my system uncompleted and unlamented.
It's like Gearbox set out to recreate Borderlands, but to remove all the fun parts while increasing all the worst elements. In the original Borderlands, things respawned so quickly that you'd often have to kill the same generic spawn three or four times during the process of completing another generic Fedex delivery quest. In Borderlands 2, not only didn't they fix this, they amazingly decided to make it worse. Deliberately. In a deliberate design decision I can only guess must have been made while high on meth, they not only force you to endure repeated spawns of the same generic opponents, but make the opponents so hard that there is a significant chance of death every single time you fight them, resulting in another trip through that exact same generic spawn.
Which brings us to the second inexplicably terrible design decision. This game is Nintendo hard -- and not in a good way. I like a challenge as much as anyone else. I've been gaming on computers for 35 years (my first console was a Telstar Pong) so I'm not exactly a novice, and if I have to sink a little time into a learning curve, well, that's part of the fun. But when enemies can consistently absorb three or four critical headshots from your best sniper rifle, appear in swarms, and can instakill you with two shots no matter how strong your shields or how high your health, that screams "fake difficulty." In order to make Borderlands 2 tougher than Borderlands, all they did was turn every enemy into a bullet sponge while making them hit like a runaway cement truck. That is the hallmark of poor game design, and the strongest signal that Gearbox is creatively bankrupt.
Oh, there are ways to get around the endless swarms of bullet sponges; deploy your turret and hide behind cover until everything is dead, or phaselock everything in sight, or fling a constant barrage of singularity grenades at every pack of opponents. Unfortunately, nearly all of these strategies involve finding ways of not actually being involved in the game. If the only way to avoid constant game death is to stare at a low-poly brown rock while your turret does amazing things somewhere offscreen, what's the point in even playing?
Meanwhile, at the same time they turned every enemy into an unstoppable tank, they removed ammo regeneration entirely. To make it even more irritating, they tied storage and ammo capacity into a randomly-placed unobtainium coin system, meaning that you're always so low on ammunition that the only way to avoid running out is to carry one of every single weapon type, making specialization impossible. It creates a generic, dull, uninspiring, one-size-fits-all playstyle which makes the class you choose largely irrelevent.
I spent some time on Google reading other people's opinions of Borderlands 2, and people seem to be divided into two very different camps. One camp consists of sneering 14 year old Call of Duty semi-literates whose response to complaints like mine consist of "lrn2game loosr"; the other camp consists of people with a boiling point IQ. I can only guess that Gearbox made a conscious decision that stupid, callow teenyboppers are their target market, and that creativity is too much work for too little profit. Which is a shame, because Borderlands showed rare aptitude at satisfying multiple markets by encouraging a variety of play-styles ranging from beer-and-pretzels casual gaming to fast-twitch Korean-level twinking.
All in all, I am forced to give Borderlands 2 a failing F grade. A great disappointment. It will be uninstalled from my system uncompleted and unlamented.
