Borderlands 2

While everyone else is up and excited about the release of Borderlands 3. I finally wen't back and finished Borderlands 2. Borderlands 2 (BL2) was released in 2012, so about 3 years after the first game, and it has been released on several platforms since. I myself played it on PC which is in a way the reason why I didn't complete it until now. The problem being that the game didn't run on my PC for whatever reason. Borderlands games are shooter games filled with violence but refined with a good sense of humour and with some great RPG elements.


Story

In Borderlands games you play as characters called "vault hunters." What is this vault and what does it contain? Well it kind of depends on the borderlands game. In BL2 it contains an ancient warrior that the main villain "Handsome Jack" is trying to bring to life in order bring peace and order to the planet of "Pandora" and destroy all the raiders and everyone else that comes in his way. The flow of the story is quite fluid. First you wake up on Pandora after Handsome Jack tries to kill you. You find out what he is trying to do and then you try and stop him. The only thing that disrupts the flow of the story are the side missions that you pretty much have to do in order to stay on the same level as the story missions. If you are too low level the story missions become almost impossible to complete, as they are sometimes quite hard as they are.


Gameplay

As long as you do quests that are somewhat on the same level as your character, the game is a lot of fun and very fluent. You can either run, jump or shoot your way through the levels but if  you skip too much of the killing you will eventually fall behind in level. Killing all the weird and different kind of enemies that you encounter along the way with even more weird and different guns sometimes fun and sometimes a lot of fun. The role play elements of the game bring a nice level of depth to this otherwise very shooter heavy game. Sometimes I did wish that there were more those elements in the game but somewhere is that fine line when it can disrupt the shooter feeling of the game too much so maybe it was at a pretty good level in general.


Sound design

The sounds of the game were filled with shooting and chaos, at least at the beginning but when you progress more into the game sounds you come across become insane. My personal favourite was a  gun that screams when you shoot it.


Open world

The world of Borderlands, the planet Pandora, is very open but it has been divided into sectors that you have to travel between. Some of the areas are very linear, and some of them are very open, all of them are equally awesome. Even the more linear areas are full of shortcuts that make them feel very open and the more open areas you even need a car to go across, making the different areas feel somewhat similar in size when you think about it. And if the place you need go is on the other side of Pandora and even a car isn't enough, you can always fast-travel to make a life a bit easier.


Comparison to the previous one

Straight of the bat BL2 is a lot more refined version of the previous game. In almost all areas of the game there are some improvements and this is something I like to see in a sequel. The world seems a lot more interesting, the gameplay is more refined and fluent and the guns are lot more crazy than in Borderlands. The story itself doesn't continue straight from where the previous game left of but you can quite quickly notice all the references to Borderlands and see how the story links up.


The review

Even though Borderlands 2 wasn't a mind blowing experience, it was still a very good game. It had pretty much everything that one would want out of a sequel and it provided me with countless hours of fun and enjoyment 8/10