In a similar fashion to the first game, you're immediately introduced to an energetic and annoying robot named Claptrap. You are also contacted by a mysterious woman who tells you to follow Claptrap, and then guide you to stop the antagonist Handsome Jack. You meet the four Vault Hunters from the first game; Mordecai (The Hunter), Lilith (The Siren), Roland (The Soldier) and Brick (The Berserker).
As you play the game, there are loads of side-quests to distract you if you wish. It’s the usual "go here/fetch this/kill this'' affair. The game has a very comedic tone, so the characters are often extreme. At one point you meet the Alice In Wonderland-obsessed Tiny Tina who is a crazed teen. She later got some spin-off games.
Sometimes dialogue can be playing and a new batch of enemies attacks you which means you miss out on it. You can also pick up audio-logs which can trigger over existing dialogue too.
The game is a mix of FPS and RPG type games. When targeting an enemy, their shield and health bar is displayed. In traditional RPG-style, numbers appear to show the damage you are dealing to them. You can deliver a critical hit to almost every enemy by shooting their weak spot such as a bandit's head, the inside of a Skag's mouth or the mechanical joint on robots.
As you kill enemies, you level up and gain extra health. You can assign a skill point in the 3 talent trees. I chose the Gunzerker who can temporarily dual wield whilst restoring his health. Even though he was supposed to be a “tank” character, I thought his health drained rapidly once the shields were depleted.
There is an achievement type system which awards you with “Badass Tokens” which rewards you with minor boosts - not that you notice it. I tried to choose perks to boost my shield but I never felt I had a shield that had enough protection or regeneration speed.
The shield system and the way the vehicles handle is very reminiscent of Halo. The shields do have stats like all the other items, so some recharge faster and some have stronger protection, or possibly extra bonuses like health regeneration or extra resistance to elemental damage. Regardless, I thought the shields take a rather long time to start recharging.
When you run out of health, you go into a downed state and start to bleed out with the screen slowly fading. If you manage to kill an enemy in this state, you get 'second wind' where you instantly heal 50% health and full shields. Second Wind has a blurry, slow mo effect, and you can't aim down sights, dual wield or throw grenades. If you bleed out, you respawn at the last New-U station with a small financial penalty.
Your character can sprint as long as you want without becoming fatigued. This is a huge plus when travelling long distances when you don't have a vehicle. Shortly into the game, you get to spawn vehicles at certain access points. You get a limited choice with the secondary fire. The primary fire is an extremely inaccurate machine gun which means vehicle combat takes even longer than on foot. You can always try to run over enemies.
There is no fall damage which can be useful when backtracking in some areas.
There is a fast travel system but it's fairly limited too as you have to find a post to initiate the fast travel option and can only travel to other posts that you have discovered.
Borderlands has a high emphasis on looting, but in my opinion it's far too much loot. Quite often there will be 3 or 4 lockers next to each other with an item or cash in each one, as opposed to having one locker with lots of loot inside. Often the enemies will drop several small wads of cash rather than one stockpile. Maybe it makes sense for multiplayer where you will be battling it out for ownership of the treasure, but for single-player; it just makes it more tedious.
It is quite limited with what you can carry at first. You do gain more weapon slots as the story progresses up to 4 guns in the end. Any additional guns/shields etc are in the Backpack section of your inventory. This can be upgraded with the rare currency.
The UI for managing your items seems a bit clunky and wasn’t always responsive or intuitive with the mouse.
In battle, scrolling through weapons brings up the statistics and manufacturer but not the name of the weapon which is weird. Sometimes I would assign a new weapon, then forgot which slot I placed it in. Even when I remembered the name, I had to go back to the inventory to check.
There are three types of vending machines: weapon, ammo, and medical. While each one sells items in their specialty, any item can be sold to the machine. I rarely felt the need to actually buy items from these given the amount of drops. The rocket launcher ammo and grenades were more limited though so I used them in some sections.
Much fuss is made of the randomly generated weapon system. The guns are separated into different categories: combat rifles, revolvers, sniper rifles, SMGs, shotguns and rocket launchers. Each gun has a manufacturer which has certain characteristics such as higher damage or faster reload times. As you progress in the game, weapons can have elemental damage like shock/corrosive/incendiary, slag (slag is a new status which increases damage taken from other sources) damage, or extra properties such as firing multiple bullets. Items are colour coded to show the rarity, white being common through to orange for rare.
Since you will be picking up new guns with every kill, you would think you'd be swapping out weapons every couple of mins. However, often the loot is very underpowered so I simply glance at it, then usually just keep it to sell at the vending machines. It might have been a better option to allow you to modify your existing gun, rather than having hundreds of useless weapons that you don't care about. It was quite hard to compare the guns without actually testing them out though - the SMG’s had low damage but since they have high fire rate, then they can be much more effective. Weapons can have bonus zoom, more recoil etc so can be more unwieldy than first thought. You might want a particular weapon type but it’s good to have a mix since you are constantly changing the range you are fighting in, so might need to switch that shotgun for a sniper, or incendiary to corrosive damage.
The grenades can have the same elements as the guns like corrosive/incendiary, but also have some other effects like singularity which sucks enemies in, and if they don't die, they are clustered for you to finish them off. Some grenades can be bouncy which often isn’t a favourable trait.
Early on in the game, time and time again you see the same old enemies so it ends up feeling stale. As you progress far into the game, the enemy variations increase and you will see completely different styles of enemies. Bandits are the most frequent enemies and there are different behaviours within the various types; Brutes have high health and powerful guns, Psychos charge at you with knives, Midgets are tiny and are more of a rare occurrence.
Most enemies are too agile; they love to dodge and stagger around. Combined with the low accuracy of many weapons, you spend most of your time reloading and strafing. Later on you get enemies that phase in and out, then can be shielded. Other enemies have hit and run tactics, especially the flying ones. There’s a few small creatures (such as rakk), there’s a robot repair drone that can often drain your shields in one hit, then there’s the helicopter-like Buzzards.
The robots have way too much health and it seems mandatory to use the corrosive weapons on them. When I first encountered them in the story, the game never gave me any corrosive weapons. Even when I came back with one, it was extremely tough.
The big problem is the “Constructors”. They may be static, but fire a constant barrage of normal, or homing missiles. Then they love to spawn in more robots. I never knew the correct technique for taking these down. I felt like I could only hit them from range and hide behind large objects, but then they would sometimes hit me even though their previous several attacks missed. You cannot get close because of their stomp attack, but attacking from mid range is tough when they are spamming you with lasers or missiles. Sometimes I couldn’t even see what I was shooting at due to the explosions. Near the end of the game they are even tougher which is just ridiculous.
There’s quite a few barrels which you can shoot. These have the various traits like incendiary, shock and corrosive.
I am a fan of cel-shaded graphics and the game uses them well. I guess it does make the somewhat boring locales of desolate wastelands look better than it should. There’s a decent variety of locales though like ice, swamps, wastelands. There is a day/night cycle but it can be quite dark. I often failed to spot enemies when they blend into the background objects. Some areas can be too bright too. Not sure if it was the graphical choices or the length of time I was playing but it kinda gave me eye strain.
There's some slight texture pop-up when entering an area but no other problems. If you look carefully, Borderlands can be quite a brutal game; bodies explode, limbs fly off, flesh melts from acid and it's all so gruesomely entertaining.
I found the difficulty quite imbalanced. It generally seems challenging, but then spikes to near impossible. Despite playing a “Tank”, I spent most of my time reloading and fleeing for cover to regenerate my shield.
There's plenty of content within Borderlands but I'd say it's a bit too much. It ends up feeling like a total grind and a chore to play. One major reason why the game really drags, is that there are far too many enemies, and all enemies seem to have too much health, and some missions last too long. In many areas, you often clear out a batch, then more spawn in. After picking up the loot, you move forward for several seconds, then it triggers the next waves.
I played single-player, and I did wonder if the game plays differently in co-op. The difficulty could be more balanced, but no doubt it scales up with more players.