This weekend I completed the main campaign of Borderlands 2. There’s not a lot I can say about a game that is this old and that was this popular; everyone who is interested in looter-shooters is probably familiar with the Borderlands series already.

But I still wanted to share what was the good, the bad and the ugly in it for me.

The Good

Well generally it was pretty good. I like playing shooters but not ones that are too realistic. Borderlands fits perfectly in my groove as far as that goes. It’s sharp looking but I never feel like I’m shooting real people. I spent about 35 hours on the character I finished with, and probably a dozen or so more on trying other classes, and I didn’t feel ‘relieved’ to be done with it, like I am with many games. In other words it didn’t feel drawn out to me, and even deep into the game I found little things that surprised and delighted me. I was level 31 when I went into the final boss level and at level 29 or so I got a gun that talked. At first I had no idea where the voice was coming from! I mean, not a big deal but there were lots of similar things that cropped up.

I also LOVED the “Badass” system. This is a series of many, many tasks that you’ll complete just by playing. Each one levels up your ‘badass rating’ and every so often you get a point to spend that will give you some small increase to stat: things like gun damage, or more health, or shield recharge rates. The clever thing here is that these perks apply to ALL your characters meaning if you play through again with a 2nd character it’ll already have a lot of perks waiting. I thought this was a nice feature for someone who wants to get deeply into the game.

And I have really come to like these characters. Briefly, in Borderlands 1 you could play as 1 of 4 characters, and they show up in Borderlands 2 as NPCs (three of them are in the image at the top of this post: Mordecai, Lillith and Brick). They are all bigger than life in various ways. When I did a quest for Moxxi and she pulled a long gun out of her cleavage, my inner 14 year old couldn’t help but giggle, though once upon a time I was kind of offended by a lot of these characters; once I got to ‘know’ them that dissipated.

The Bad

This is going to sound strange to a lot of people, but I was playing for the story and the design of the game is pretty bad for that. You frequently have voice-overs from one of the characters and that’s a lot of how the story is told, but you can rarely actually hear them since enemies constantly scream, your own character is “barking” frequently, and of course guns and explosions. If you miss what is said, you’re out of luck. There’s no log or anything, at least that I found. That was one of my biggest issues. I WANTED to hear what the characters had to say!!

The Ugly

One of my issues with Borderlands has always been the tone. Just the crass humor. I mitigated this somewhat by playing Gaige the Mechromancer.  She is a young girl so her voice isn’t grating and her barks are generally not too bad, though for a while she did yell “God! It smells like piss and tacos!” way too often. But mostly she talks about what a good robot pal she has. The only time I got REALLY annoyed was when I was fighting a faction called Tunnel Rats or something like that, and they just SCREAM constantly. They scream when they attack, they scream when they die, they scream all the time in between. The game ALMOST lost me in that section.

The other part that was ‘ugly’ to me were all the containers. I get that this is a looter shooter but why do they feel the need to put 4 crates next to each other instead of one crate with a lot of stuff in it. And why do I have to hold down a button to collect the ammo in these crates if I’m playing solo. I am never not going to take ammo if I have room for it. Guns and gear I can see, but ammo should just jump into my inventory.

And really, that’s about all I have to say. I can’t believe it has taken me this long to get into Borderlands. Atomfall is up next but I do plan to come back to the Borderlands series. I’m debating on if I should play the Pre-Sequel or just move on to Borderlands 3. The vague goal is to be finished with 3 by the time Borderlands 4 comes out in the fall.