Borderlands – The Pre-Sequel – Gameguide

Don a black armband and lower the flags to half-mast! A great campaigner has fallen.
From the arctic wastes of Skyrim to the burning deserts of Mexico, from distant planets to the distant future we have roamed together for hundreds of hours slaying countless zombies, demons, angels and men. We have fought alongside the great and the good bringing down evil and been devious and underhanded bringing wrack and ruin to the great and the good. We have travelled thousands of miles in every type of vehicle imaginable. My little white box of joy and torment, an original Xbox 360, (still running the 20gb HDD) has finally died. Rest easy now, your fans have screamed their last!

And what monster brought low this mighty campaigner? None other than Borderlands – the Pre-sequel. Only a couple of hours in the brilliant, vibrant colour that Borderlands is renowned for turned into garish zig-zags of colour across the screen (reminiscent of the loading screen for Monty on the Run on the C64 tape drive). So here is my review based on a few hours of play, unless someone out there gives me a new 360…. (Just saying…) in which case this will become my pre-sequel review of Borderlands the Pre-Sequel.

Essentially this game is just more Borderlands. After a few hours playing through the main campaign I can’t actually point to anything genuinely new. I’m sure there are things I haven’t noticed due to the length of time since I last played Borderlands 2 and the graphics are probably better but I honestly couldn’t tell…

Visually it’s still gorgeous. Fresh, bright and vibrant. Not cartoony per-se but a break from the reproduction of real life that most game companies attempt. The graphics and style of Borderlands are a highlight for me and despite not trying to be realistic it is extremely well done. The characters and weapons are great and although the vistas aren’t as mesmerising as some recent games the environments are interesting to explore with lots going on to capture your attention. I’m a big fan of character customisation so was a little disappointed that the only variable is colour but the wonderful variety of weapons and the fact they all look different is great. The weapon style isn’t quite as significant as in Diablo, where I’m always tempted by something that looks cool rather than the most effective weapon, but it’s close…

The similarities to Diablo 3 don’t stop there. At its heart Borderlands is also a relatively simple loot hunting RPG. The RPG mechanics are straightforward, not bogging down in detail but allow for a wide variety of customization and along with the 4 character classes there should be a combination that suits everyone. I’m not sure how important balancing the classes will be in co-op play but I suspect it won’t make much difference in the single player campaign (perhaps varying degrees of hiding/sniping/running). It took me a while to get used to the run-and-gun style of play and it appears I’ve become conditioned to having a cover mechanism because I kept trying to hide against barriers with very little success. It seems old fashioned to duck and move your character behind a wall rather than just punch a button and have a smooth animation take you automatically into cover but it wasn’t bad, just took some getting used to.

In the best borderlands tradition the sweet loot drops still form a big part of the fun/addiction and along with its sense of humour the essential Borderlands experience remains unchanged. It won’t challenge our understanding of humanity or test our moral compass. It’s not even really about challenging our twitchy reactions and itchy trigger finger it’s simply a way to have fun. I didn’t get a chance to play online but I imagine whilst it’s a good single player game it’ll continue to be great fun online co-op with mates. At least, that was true of Borderlands 2 and after a few hours I couldn’t actually put my finger on any difference between the 2 games…

To be continued! Maybe…

Reviewed on: XBox 360

Rating: R13 Violence, offensive language and content that may disturb.

Reviewed by: Aaron