There are three basic elements to the Borderlands 2 shooting, looting and serious mental dysfunction. And no, aside from some awkward attempts by Claptrap, there is no dubstep in the game. The music-at least in part-retains the twangy, Old West vibe of the original, but mixes it in with modern, synth compositions and other melodies for the action sequences, striking a balance between an arid Western and a typical, drug fuelled night at the club. None of these characters have any idea how witless and/or damaged they really are, but Gearbox, specifically writer Anthony Burch, knows and is letting you in on the joke. It’s a deliberately sophomoric tone that permeates the mood of Borderlands 2. There’s chatter everywhere, and Handsome Jack-clearly inspired by Borderlands DLC villain General Knox-is a constant radio presence, taunting you with hilariously juvenile harassment. It’s really the dialog and the music that have the most significant enhancements. There aren’t any big changes on the audio effects side, the guns still sound largely the way you remember them, and surround sound users will get obvious benefits from their set-up since this is an FPS. The audio portion of the presentation is similar to the visual more of the same but given a slight injection of speedball to give it more punch. This is a problem that has plagued many games running off the Unreal engine this generation. It’s more noticeable in local split-screen obviously, but even a full-screen single player experience is going to occasionally betray the Unreal roots, with blurry textures as the engine struggles to load the characters and environment in at proper resolution. You might be wondering, since this is a game that uses Epic’s Unreal graphics engine, whether the Usual Suspects are still at play in the visuals. There are also many more NPCs, not all of them rooted in place this time, though don’t expect the day/night cycles of a Bethesda RPG with various NPCs going to bed, enjoying meals, and shopping at the market. Gone is the monotony of an arid desert, replaced with glacial platforms, rolling green hills, vibrant cities and… the occasional arid desert. They’ve retained that same sense of style but-as to be expected from a sequel-things have been amped up a bit.
Gearbox took a surprising, stylized approach to the Unreal engine in the original Borderlands, and the result was one of the most unique and distinct looking games of 2009. Moving onto the graphics, things are about what you’d expect. A new cast of Vault Hunters gets help from the old-and a few familiar, maladjusted faces-in the quest for justice, mass murder and bigger and better guns. Of course, Jack’s idea of a villain is anyone that’s not part of the Hyperion family so… you know where this is going. That problem’s name is Handsome Jack, head of the Hyperion Corporation and self-appointed hero of Pandora, killing everything on the planet that is villainous. With the vault opening, robot killing, general skewering antics of Borderlands behind them, the original Vault Hunters are now part of the NPC cast that has a very big problem. Three years later, the sequel comes with high expectations and hopes for more foliage and less desert. Despite everything it had going against it, word of mouth and some addictive game design kept Borderlands afloat, and it became the sleeper hit of 2009. It wasn’t contemporary, or military, it didn’t have a competitive multiplayer mode, it tried to incorporate action-RPG/ Diablo mechanics into a shooter and, most dangerous of all, it was “sent off to die” as Michael Pachter put it, by going up against Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It was a game that, on many levels, should have failed.
Borderlands was one of the most pleasant surprises of 2009.