Giant Bomb Review
26 CommentsBorderlands Review
4- X360
- PS3
- PC
by Jeff Gerstmann on
General Knoxx is Borderlands' best addition to date, offering more terrain, new enemies, and most importantly, more ways to build your character.
Knoxx is set after the events of Borderlands' main story. So the vault has been opened, and its contents have been dealt with. The new threat is the return of the Atlas Corporation. So most of the enemies you'll see in this add-on are new types of Crimson Lance troops, including medics, shock troopers, jet pack dudes, and so on. Though there are plenty of side missions, the core story missions point you in the direction of the disaffected General Knoxx, who's sitting on top of an armory full of weapons. At the end, you'll face the general and get to take a quick sprint through his weapon-filled vault, which will hopefully contain some goods worth holding onto. At the very least, you could always just grab stuff and sell it later, but considering you'll have finished the game and will probably be close to or above the level cap at this point, money probably hasn't been a concern for you in a very long time. Still, the characters are interesting, the game is still quite funny, and the additional enemies make combat fun again. The new Lance enemies--though incredibly susceptible to corrosive weapons--can be tricky. In fact, I probably died more playing through General Knoxx than I did on my entire second playthrough of the main game.
Between the core missions and the side stuff, you could easily spend another 10 hours or more going through General Knoxx. That's a bit longer than it probably should be, though, since there aren't any fast travel points to be had. Once you warp into T-Bone Junction, the central town area where most of the magic happens, you'll have to drive everywhere else. All of that traveling gets pretty tedious over time, and it eventually led to me simply quitting the game and restarting it to "fast travel" back to town to cash in quests.
Of course, this stuff is fairly easy to overlook if you're already so into Borderlands that you'd do just about anything to get more meaningful content. After the lackluster Mad Moxxi add-on, just about anything would be more meaningful. But at $10, General Knoxx goes beyond most other DLC packages. It feels larger and gives you more to do than most other paid add-ons out there, and in spite of its handful of shortcomings, it feels like a great deal for fans of the main game.
