Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!

Probably the first time I leaped over a phalanx of foes, freezing them solid with my cryo beam before slamming back to the ground and shattering them all, I knew I was loving Borderlands: TPS! Gunfights with lasers in zero G is a ridiculous amount of fun, so much that I wonder why other sci-fi shooters haven’t tried it. But the more I play this game, the stronger my nostalgia for the previous game grows. Despite the new bells and whistles of TPS!, Borderlands 2 is clearly the superior game both in terms of design and story.

GAMEPLAY

The core of Borderlands, shooting and looting, is intact and still functional, but the flaws are beginning to show. The core shooting mechanic is still great, the perfect blend between FPS action and RPG thinking. You rarely find one uber-gun that can kill everything (except possibly Thorny Ol’ Rosie), so strategic swapping on the fly is key. The guns all handle differently and feel great to fire, but the downside of RNG is that you find lots of useless garbage. This problem seems more pronounced in this installment, where I seemed to hang on to guns much longer before finding something better, and I often had to pay through the nose for it at a vending machine or Luneshine chest.

Where the series continues to excel is character design. Each plays very differently, and this is the first time I’ve been interested in playing every class in a game. Borderlands 2 was the first game to successfully break me of my tanking habit, and while Wilhelm is a tanker’s dream, I’ve been having just as much fun playing as Nisha, who’s more of a glass cannon. Even within each class there’s a lot of room for specialization, so you can get a lot more mileage out of the game by changing up your playstyle. I was disappointed to find that you still can’t really customize the look of your character outside of swapping color palettes. That seems like it would be an easy add, and would just enhance the player’s ownership of their character.

The three new things most often touted by the marketing are low gravity, cryo weapons and lasers. The good news is all of these things are awesome. Boost-jumping through the air to rain down fire on your enemies and smashing the ground to send them flying makes the firefights all the crazier and much faster paced. Taking cover won’t spare you for long when everybody can fly. The game also does interesting things with atmosphere. If you knock off an enemy’s helmet in space they will take continuous suffocation damage while they scramble for the nearest source of air. Enemies can catch fire in atmosphere, and will freeze faster in vacuum. Cryo weapons are a welcome replacement for the slag element from Borderlands 2. Whereas tougher enemies were almost impossible to tackle without a great slag weapon in the previous installment, freezing foes in TPS! is optional fun. They take more damage when frozen, but you’ll never encounter a fight you can’t win without cryo. Finally, lasers are so awesome it’s a shame it took them three games to add them. Cooking bandits with deadly beams of light is the one feature I will miss the most when I eventually go back to Borderlands 2. Sadly, they make assault rifles pretty much obsolete.

In true Borderlands tradition, the boss fights remain hit or miss, as if Gearbox hasn’t heard the feedback from the previous two games. Some are immense fun to fight again and again, like Felicity Rampant or the final boss, but then they do another flying boss fight with an overpowered enemy that remains frustratingly unhittable for half the battle. Colonel Zarpedon, probably the best encounter of the bunch, can only be engaged once per playthrough, which seems anathema in a game all about grinding for the best loot.

The biggest shortcoming of TPS! is the uninspired and repetitive quest design. In this respect, the game shows its roots as an expanded piece of DLC. Elpis abounds with tedious fetch quests, and while the previous game was guilty of this as well, it’s all the more infuriating in TPS! because they make up the majority of stuff to do in the game. If you need to grind up a level before tackling the next story mission, you’re going to be hunting down recordings, or finding a lost ball on two different occasions. The fast travel system doesn’t have enough stops on it, so you will often trek and re-trek across entire maps and traverse several load screens just to complete a mission. The side missions that simply send you to a waypoint to waste a bunch of dudes are the best, since shooting is what Borderlands is best at, but these are sadly few. Sadly few could describe the entirety of this game, as after the second playthrough I feel like I’ve already seen all of the content. I maxed out two characters on the previous game and still haven’t seen every side-quest.

STORY

The writing is where TPS! falls shortest of the bar set by its predecessor. While plot has never been a strong point of the series, it’s especially thin in this installment, and the seams often show through. Almost every story mission has its length artificially extended by doors that can only be unlocked by flipping various switches located elsewhere. Once or twice would have been forgivable, but its repeated ad infinitum. Jack can’t even unlock his own office without getting a robot to hack a terminal while you defend it from waves of soldiers. Borderlands 2 didn’t break any molds in quest design, but at least your most persistent antagonist was not a door. It was also frustrating to have the entire plot rendered pointless in the third act.

The characters, typically the main attraction in a Borderlands story, are quite derivative and unremarkable. While the playable characters have much more personality than previous installments, the NPCs you encounter on Elpis are all just repackaged versions of everyone’s favorite people from Pandora. Janey Springs, the lovelorn junk dealer, is just a female version of Scooter. Davis Pickle is basically Tiny Tina with an Australian accent. The Bosun is a straight-up carbon copy of Professor Nakayama, even though the latter character still appears in this game. When the last game introduced us to the original versions of these characters they were new and fun, but going to a whole new planet and meeting all the same people with different accents is just disappointing.

Jack, the ostensible star of The Pre-Sequel!, is served by the narrative least of all. This game is supposedly the origin story of the iconic villain, but TPS! tells a tale completely devoid of character development. We’re led to believe that this story might paint him as sympathetic, they even tell you so at the beginning of the game, but other than trying to keep the planet he is currently on from blowing up, Jack is hardly heroic. When you meet him at the beginning of the game, Jack is an arrogant douchebag who just needs to kill a few people to realize that murder is his true passion. He’s already built a giant death ray in the sky, and never struggles in the slightest with his less-than-ethical decisions. It’s understandable that the developers wouldn’t want to stray too far from the character everyone loved to hate in Borderlands 2, but the result is an unsurprising story about an egomaniacal sociopath’s slight stumble from grace. By the time Handsome Jack puts on his mask at the end of TPS!, you don’t know any more about him than you did by the end of the last game. In fact, if you come to The Pre-Sequel! without having played Borderlands 2, it actually makes him look like an even more unredeemable monster. Ironically, it is the antagonist of this latest game, Colonel Zarpedon, who comes across as the sympathetic misunderstood hero. A game about her origin story might actually be narratively interesting.

THE VERDICT

Obviously, I enjoyed the game. I’ve made two characters and I’m halfway through my fourth playthrough. However, the fact that I have finished the entire game so many times so quickly is indicative of the real problem with TPS! It’s a fun game, but there just isn’t enough of it. It added a few interesting new toys and mechanics, but the game is much smaller than its predecessor, both in terms of area and content, which leaves one to wonder why it’s still being sold at full price. While that’s disappointing, it did not diminish my enjoyment of what is still a solid core game. If you’ve enjoyed Borderlands before and just want more of it, TPS! is a good fix. But if you’re new to vault hunting and are looking for a good entry point to the series, grab Borderlands 2. And now that even GOTY editions are discounted, you definitely get more game for your buck. I’ll continue my adventures on Elpis, and am keeping my fingers crossed for a new DLC campaign, but when I get tired of hearing all of the lackluster dialogue repeated for millionth time, I’ll definitely head back to Pandora to start a new character.