Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!

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IamLEAM1983
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Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!

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Borderlands started out as a crazy gamble that felt reminiscent of failures like Hellgate London. The first game was a tech demo wrapped in flimsy tatters of plot and narrative structure, while the second game improved on the previous title's core aspects and still managed to spin a coherent story. Going from a Vault Hunter that had practically no purpose or agency to someone who actually had stakes involved in Pandora's well-being was a bit jarring, but it felt like a welcomed and much-needed addition. “High-concept Sci Fi meets Western Yarns and Redneck-worthy Badlands” felt like the weirdest mash-up ever, but we'd eventually get a good sense of these oft-mentioned Borderlands.

As it turns out, the game series' depicted future is one of galaxy-spanning corporate rule that leaves plenty of margins for lesser and somewhat neglected worlds to become the human empire's trash heaps. Pandora is one of those fetid outback countries in space, a planet plagued by too-short tidal cycles and food that, while edible for the average human, would never fail to trigger extreme forms of cognitive decay. With the megacorps being discouraged from exploiting Pandora's meagre resources and being too profit-focused to care about their workers' well-being, they abandoned them all. Most were forced to turn to banditry and cannibalism to survive, while being cut off from imported food sources forced them to consider imbibing the local produce.

The end result is a planet that's teeming with psychopaths and sociopaths, when you aren't running into Space Rednecks who speak of inbreeding like it's nobody's business.

Welcome home.

In Borderlands 2 as well as one of the first game's DLC packs, we ran into various characters. Most were allied figures or antagonists, one having been hired to take down a corrupt general from the Dahl Corporation's armed forces and others having gone from average mercenaries to paid employees of the Hyperion Corporation. The first game's aimless treasure hunt became the second's fight for freedom, the oppressor being personified by the delightfully passive-aggressive Handsome Jack, self-proclaimed CEO of Hyperion.

The new offering from Gearbox Software, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! is squarely located in-between the previous two games, largely in order to spin a tale of origins and beginnings. The antagonists of yesteryear are now today's potential player characters, and the narrative tables are turned. The game tells us of Hyperion's rise against the local Dahl forces, and of how a lowly programmer named Jack managed to go from a budding hero to a narcissistic villain of the worst order. Athena the Dahl mercenary is joined by Wilhelm – Jack's future cybernetic enforcer – Nisha, a woman who claims to be the fastest gun on Pandora – and who later becomes Jack's girlfriend – and... Claptrap the Fragtrap. Reprogrammed by Jack from a simple greeting steward to a budding and annoyingly hopeful combatant, Claptrap is the much-vaunted wild card the game has to offer. Selecting him as your character has the game warn you that he's extremely annoying to play, and not for the short of temper...

Interestingly, however, the game was produced in co-development with 2K Australia, with the devs from the outback being more than liberally authorized to inject Aussie humor everywhere. We find ourselves in what's essentially Pandora's Australia; largely populated with accent-sporting Lunatics – because we're on the moon, har har – who trade places with the previous two games' largely American psychos and various other midgets. Expect references to bogans, jumbucks, tuckerbags, walkabouts and plenty of places with names that'd feel right at home somewhere between the mainland and New Zealand; like the crater-covered valley of Burraburra.

As for the gameplay? Well, it's a Borderlands game, so you kind of know what you're getting into. That's a veritable shower of randomly generated firearms, a fairly challenging level of difficulty and a rather severe amount of potential replayability. Succeeding where others have failed, the franchise is essentially an Action RPG wrapped in the mechanics of a standard Triple-A shooter. As my previous synopsis should have made clear, however, the series has always stayed clear of the FPS genre's love affair with grit and seriousness. High-explosive drama à la Michael Bay isn't part of this particular package, as very little in the game's story or mechanics takes itself seriously.

Notably, TPS! puts us on Pandora's moon, Elpis. The homeworld's already reduced gravity is even less present on the lunar surface, and is compounded by the obvious absence of oxygen. Slotted where Eridian Relics used to go, your randomly generated and frequently-swapped “Oz kit” - your compact O2 reserves – are there to keep you from re-enacting Senator Cohagen's eyeball-popping death from the original Total Recall. Your air reserves are finite, but Elpis is rife with air cracks and artificial oxygen bubbles you can deploy with the push of a button. What could have been a hindrance remains an additional gameplay feature thanks to this lenient approach.

In fact, what makes it a feature is the fact that the moon's extremely low gravity enables you to jump higher than before and to reach higher positions, while out in the field. The level design is far more vertical than in Borderlands 2's case, considering, and invites you to use your Oz kit for their true intended purpose – which happens to be landing butt slams from above. Simply jump from a high vantage point and hit the Crouch key while in mid-air. You'll shoot back down to the ground instantly, the amount of damage dealt by your slam being proportional to how long your drop's been. To help you get into position, your Oz kit also enables double jumps; turning suicidal plummets into graceful glides across large chasms. Pair that with Elpis' bountiful oxygen sources and the generally lenient consequences of prolonged hypoxia, and you're up for a fairly pleasing set of gameplay mechanics.

Realistically, running out of air should sap you of all energy and leave you choking where you stand, to the point where the pressure differential between your body and the outer void would kill you. Instead, you merely suffer a slow bleeding effect, your Health meter slowly depleting until you find a source of air – which never takes too long. As soon as you find space enough to breathe, all previously deducted Health points are restored. That's it. Considering how largely consequence-free the addition of oxygen management happens to be, you're free to focus on the new possibilities offered by low-gravity gunplay. There's nothing quite like jumping down a cliff while gazing down your sniper rifle's scope, timing your oxygen-assisted drift and an enemy's motions until the very exact moment where that other flyer lands in your crosshairs – and boom. Headshot. It's almost as if Gearbox borrowed the insane ballistics of more fanciful shooters like Quake III Arena; and the result is exhilarating.

Even past mechanics are affected. Fire-casting guns need oxygen to be able to set baddies aflame, and corrosion-causing firearms deal reduced damage without O2. These might seem like setbacks, but as oxygen sources are never really far away, it's fairly easy to goad baddies into spots where they'll be successfully barbecued or chewed to nothing by nighmarishly powerful acids. New gunplay options include lasers and ice weapons, and these are a very particular treat to use. Manage to freeze an opponent solid, and you'll get to shatter it into dozens of little individual chunks that follow the moon's low gravity and gracefully spin and tumble towards the floor.

Visually speaking, the game is on par with the other two entries in the series, but packs the same tradition of offering stunning skyboxes to gawp at. Planet-rises are particularly striking, with Pandora's immensity suddenly peeking past a mountain range; its meager oceans and expansive continents clearly outlined. As expected, the game sticks to the series' cel-shaded visuals, giving everything a somewhat manic and cartoonish bend. Considering the ridiculously graphic nature of certain kills, it only makes sense.

Once the honeymoon phase wears off, however, a few items tend to stick out rather sorely. The enemy variety is significantly reduced from the previous game, with most of the game's enemies being limited to bandits, Lost Legion members and the ever-present Kraggons and Shugguraths. One is the strangest animal yet conceived in Pandora's already weird fauna, as Kraggons seem to reproduce by way of dying and splitting off into two younger Kraggons. Shugguraths, in the meantime, are Lovecraftian whatsits sitting atop spindly stalks that use their multiple eyes to fire lasers at you. Most of everyone else is human and, as expected, amusingly stereotypical in their Australian origins. You'll run into cameos from the first game's original Vault Hunters, while Claptrap's special skills tackle the task of paying homage to the protagonists of the second game.

Similarly, that limitation extends to the overall playing time and mission design. Expect a lot of retreads and backtracking, plus several instances where a new NPC essentially asks you to return to an area you just cleared to pick up a knicknack you just missed. There's a certain lack of flow in the design and while the game remains entertaining, there's certain instances that left me groaning. One particular mission has you deposit fifty Normal-variety firearms into a dropbox that's located a solid five minutes' worth of driving away from the hub town. As your inventory space isn't likely to ever grow enough to carry fifty items in one go, expect a ton of tedious back-and-forth once you do manage to pick up enough base-level gear. That isn't fun, it's just time-consuming. Another mission stretches on for half an hour at an optimal playing speed, and doesn't quite carry the kind of payoff you'd expect for such an investment. Playing with others alleviates those concerns to a degree, but then you're really just sharing your impatience with other players.

I figure the jig is up when one of your co-op partners spends most of a given mission essentially typing out some variation on “THIS MISSION NEEDS TO FRICKING END, ALREADY!” I was patient enough to keep playing, but it was clear to me that others might not be. The second game had managed to establish a breakneck pace where you couldn't go through one mission without picking up at least five more, but this one takes its sweet old time a bit too much, to be honest.

Couple that with slight collision detection bugs and the fact that the first two games' already iffy driving mechanics translate atrociously in a low-gravity environment, and you end up with a product that finds as many ways to charm you as it does to make you cringe. Map navigation is an absolute mess, with Pandora's flat and open plains replaced by craggy and fittingly lunar landscapes where going from Point A to Point B is a meandering and non-obvious process. Picture Skyrim's mountain ranges with a less legible map and spots where you'd hypothetically be forced to try and jump over a chasm with your horse.

Now, picture having to cross that chasm in a wobbly moon buggy that has to be boosted to cross said gap, but that simultaneously becomes impossible to control, once boosted. That's incredibly fun. As in, not at all. Too often have I understood after several minutes that I needed to cross a river of lava by launching myself off a cliff at a very specific spot that the level design didn't make obvious at all.

Throw in a race mission at that specific spot, and you've crafted something that's sure to send some gamers into fits of piteous rage. Irregular crashes also mar the experience on PC, as well as unexplainable hitches in mouse-and-keyboard controls. I checked and mouse acceleration wasn't enabled by default. I honestly don't know what causes my mouse to occasionally miss a beat while on Elpis.

Sadly, I've come to think that the most obvious victim of the shift to a lesser developer has to be the series' sense of humor. It's still there and there's still some zingers involved here and there – Mister Torgue's ALLCAPS rant on emotional rejection and on the Elpis natives' lack of appreciation for explosive weaponry was particularly chuckle-worthy – but it's easy to tell that Anthony Burch hasn't had as deep a hand in this instance's narrative delivery. It's less madcap and more referential than before, mired in a thick cultural sludge of Aussie stuff I'm sure the Marin studio guys thought was hilarious. It's unfortunately lost on my Canadian sensibilities, however, as I didn't get much outside of the occasional Crocodile Dundee callbacks plus the jokes thrown in at the expense of the outback's slang.

Is that weird? I'm a French Canadian and I already knew what a tuckerbag was. That is, a fancy term used to refer to a knapsack or a tote bag. “You call that a knoife?! Now that's a knoife, mate.”

Because, y'know, they don't say knife like we do. Har har.

All of that does have the handy side-effect of making the Burch lines outshine the rest. I spent most of the game with a polite smirk on my face, only to start grinning when a Tiny Tina cameo came up or when my Claptrap said something that spoke of the character's desperate need for friendship and validation. “I got a challenge?! I got a challenge!

You just wanna hug the spaz, seriously. Then, you'll want to run away and dispel the notion that you've just befriended Claptrap – because he'll never shut up about it.

And that really is The Pre-Sequel! in a nutshell. Flashes of brilliance and innovative design lost in a samey sludge that speaks of just how afraid 2K Australia was of diverging from the series' roots. There's a definite sense of self-limitation that pokes out of the proverbial ground, an impression that's similar to the feelings BioShock 2 sparked in me. I have the utmost conviction that the Marin studio has a sense of identity hidden somewhere in these ungrateful budget-sized sequels they've had to produce, but they're stuck trying to stick to their Main Canon of the Moment and its directives. First, Marin tried to regurgitate a faithful application of the principles behind, quote-unquote, “A Good BioShock Game that's Not BioShock”, and now they've given their shot at “A Borderlands Game that Walks, Talks and Quacks Like Other Borderlands Games”.

That's all well and good, but they really should try and work on a franchise that would be wholly and entirely theirs. The Arkham Origins school of design is a castrating approach that feels toothless to the player and that hobbles the designers. I welcome The Pre-Sequel for what it is, but I'm also aware it'll be blown clean out of the water by any hypothetical Gearbox-helmed Borderlands 3.

Also, NIPPLE SALADS!
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