Madd Moxxi's Underdome Riot feels like work instead of fun
Hot on the heels of the first downloadable addition to Borderlands comes Gearbox’ second offering, and is hardly as good as the first. In “Madd Moxxi’s Underdome Riot” you are invited to go to The Underdome and partake in a series of wave deathmatch against enemies and bosses from the main game. It also adds a bank to store items in, and lastly there is a quest which grants a skillpoint as a reward (or two if you do the quest in both playthroughs).
Starting out the player uses the fast travel system to travel to the Underdome. There you take a quest and go to the first of the three arenas where you fight five rounds against five waves of enemies, the last wave always being a boss wave and provided with funky techno music. Throughout the waves Moxxi will add Moxxi Maxims, which are modifiers that affect the game in certain ways. Some are simple like shotguns doing more damage and the other weapons doing less damage, others make the enemies move really fast, which can be especially challenging when fighting fast moving melee opponents. After completing all three arenas, new twenty round challenges are unlocked.
Immediately the DLC showed problems in its design. I quickly found out that there is no reward to be found in The Underdome apart from the skillpoint you get from a quest. The enemies do not drop weapons, nor do they give experience. You only get weapons after each fifth wave, in which you’re presented with a ‘boss’ enemy from the main game along with catchy techno-music. Then there’s the arenas which are small, boring, and consist of rehashed assets that you have already seen in the main game.
Madd Moxxi’s Underdome is long. It can take over an hour to complete five rounds, which is quite lengthy, but later challenges of twenty rounds which take three to five hours are simply unbearable. You cannot save inbetween rounds so if you wish to get the achievements you’re immediately locked in for a great deal of time. And this is a great deal of time in an utterly boring arena, just shooting the same borderlands enemies you’ve shot a thousand times before, but without the rewards or the progression, so why would you do this?
And it gets even worse, because this DLC has plenty of technical issues. I have had to restart a twenty round game with a friend of mine after three hours because an enemy had spawned inside an object and we could not kill him. Also, the few guns that are awarded occasionally tend to fly away into the sky, unreachable forever. But the worst I have encountered is that in singleplayer the DLC makes you lose items like your shield or class mod.
Simply put, this DLC adds nothing worthwhile to the addictive shooter-rpg that is called Borderlands. The arenas are small and are made of reused assets, the wave combat is unspectacular and unrewarding, the bank is something that should have been patched into the main game, and to top it off it is littered with technical issues. Playing this feels like work instead of fun.
