NOTE: There's not much point in me doing a non-spoiler review at this point, the game's been out for a month now, and there are plenty of reviews already out there. So, if you care about the story at all and don't want to know what happens until you play the game, this may not be the place for you. I don't go into that much detail, but there's enough.
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| I haven't even started the game and I already like it. |
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| Of course pirate ships can be Vault Hunters! |
As you may have gathered from the picture, I chose to play as Claptrap, the hilarious/annoying mascot of the Borderlands series, finally a playable character. I really didn't have a choice in the matter, I liked his character in Borderlands 2, and you know, the fact that not the same thing happens whenever I hit the action skill button was entertaining. Of course, Pirate Ship mode is by far the best of all the potential option, and yes, it is annoying to get melee mode while fighting a flying boss. But hey, I knew what I was signing up for. I think it's amusing that Claptrap has skills basically built around him losing all his health. He's great at getting Second Winds (if you lose all your health but kill an enemy in the next few seconds, you get back up), and I like how good he is with explosives. Unfortunately, I feel like Claptrap is really set up for multiplayer, whenever I have played with friends, he seems to get even better than in single player, and he's pretty good in single player.
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| This big giant space station. |
Compared to Borderlands 2, this game starts off really fast. Basically, you're thrown right into the action as evil Dahl soldiers take over Helios, the big giant Hyperion space station hovering over Elpis, Pandora's moon. Your ship gets hit with a rocket and you crash into the station, presumably giving your character a nasty concussion, since you immediately forget your action skill, which you had just used on the ship. That's just how the game works, I know, but still. Anyway, over the course of the first mission, you save Jack, your employee and future Borderlands 2 antagonist, fight a whole bunch of soldiers, confront the leader of the Lost Legion (the soldiers you're fighting) and her alien friend, fight a boss, all culminating with you getting shot out of a cannon at the moon below. In Borderlands 2, your first mission was: walk 100 feet, watch Claptrap (he got downgraded) get his eyeball ripped out, pick up gun.
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| Elpis, Pandora, and the sun. |
It's funny, while the game gets going with gusto, the first half of the game is really fairly slow. There's a lot of moon exploration, and while the moon does look fantastic, it is a barren and basically lifeless hunk of rock. There's nothing organic about it, and environments look broadly similar. It's either ice, or lava. So yes, exploring similar looking areas is a bit monotonous, but it's not realistic in any way for Elpis to have forests, or oceans, or things like that. The methane rivers in the later part of the games are pushing believability, and they're clearly not natural. I think it's also important to note at this point that despite the game's claim to the contrary, Elpis must have some sort of atmosphere. Not a big deal, but every time I hear "VACUUM DETECTED", I can't help but think, "No it isn't." Ah well.
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| The big laser. From Helios, the moon is below. |
So, you're running around the moon doing Vault Hunter things, and that's when the space station above does its best Death Star impression and fires a very large laser at the moon. It even has lasers coming together into a point and combining into an even larger beam, which totally doesn't work, but whatever. This adds some urgency to your quest to retake Helios, except it really doesn't. It never does. Big giant laser bombarding the moon? Time running out? Better do some side-quests.
So, over the course of the game, the player watches Jack fall from a character with heroic, if slightly misguided, intentions to the character we met in Borderlands 2, who is not at all heroic and wants to see everyone on Pandora die quite painfully. It's an interesting story, and I think probably the most reliable. The thing with Borderlands games is that they're frame stories. We're playing a game, but the game is a story being told by someone in the future. In Borderlands 2, the story is told by someone who was on the winning side, and may or may not be entirely reliable. In that case, the Vault Hunters you play in that game, and the Vault Hunters from the original Borderlands (which I have not played), are made out to be heroes. In this game, this isn't the case. This is a very grey universe, and there are no real heroes. Heroes wouldn't last long on a world where communication happens through the end of a gun, and where a supposed "hero" has a kill count in the thousands. That did bother me a bit about Borderlands 2, and I'm glad that this game addressed it somewhat.
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| The game's final boss, guardian of the Vault. |
Long story short, you retake Helios, but you are betrayed by people who we, as the player, have trusted through both previous Borderlands games. Undaunted by all this, you set off for the Vault on Elpis, because after all, that is what you were after all along. You are a Vault Hunter, you hunt Vaults. Vaults are areas created by an alien race known as Eridians, they contain large monsters which defend them, and killing said monster grants you vast treasures (guns, Borderlands advertises itself on having lots and lots of guns). So after fighting through even more soldiers, and a whole host of Eridians, you make it to the Vault and face the Sentinel. I can't compare it to the Destroyer, final boss of the first Borderlands, but I can compare it to the Warrior, final boss of Borderlands 2. I'll keep it simple, this one was better. I was always at a higher level than the Warrior was, he went down quick, there was lava all around the arena that you could easily get knocked into, which was an instant game over, and he was kind of boring.
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| Above: Phase 2 |
This guy felt like an actual threat. You fight him, take down his ridiculously powerful shield, and kill him. But something isn't right. He didn't drop nearly enough loot, and it doesn't feel like it's over. And it isn't. Now it's time for phase 2. He's big, he's mean, and he was really fun to fight. I especially liked the arena, it was just a flat circle. No tricks of elevation, no instant death pits, it's just you and him. And all the little guys he summons to give you Second Winds. Hey, he's a generous monster. You beat this guy, he dies for good, you get your lootsplosion (it's a term), and Jack, your employer, comes in to examine his reward. He touches it, though I'm not entirely sure what it is, perhaps the actual "Vault", anyway, and his future is revealed to him. He sees himself waking the Warrior and ruling Pandora and its vast treasures. That's when he gets punched in the face (long story), the Vault symbol is burned onto his skin, and he goes, to put it simply, absolutely insane. And that's game over. In a few years, Borderlands 2 goes down, Jack does wake the Warrior, but the Vault Hunters in that game kill him and it. Hooray.
And now, what did I think of the game? I enjoyed it a lot. In the last game, there were several locations which I dreaded going through. I hated entire areas of the game. I didn't get that in the Pre-Sequel. I didn't feel like an area was annoying, or too hard, or anything. So, I'd say I actually like it a little more than Borderlands 2. I'll give it a 9 out of 10. That's honestly higher than most other reviews I've seen. Boy, this has been going on for a while, and I didn't even get to low gravity, or laser and ice weapons. Those were all good. The portion of the game where you have to hop through an unfinished section of the space station with nothing but space below you was really cool. I think that's everything I wanted to talk about. It was a good game, and I would recommend it.
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| I hope you realize getting these pictures meant standing still in front of a very powerful enemy. Totally worth it though. |
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The first space flight of the new Orion crew capsule is scheduled for this week. It's about time we got this thing going, we've been without manned space capability for too long. And while the space shuttle was cool and all, we haven't had any sort of capability beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo, and that was 40 years ago. Space flight is no cheaper, we have just as many space stations orbiting the planet, and we are about as close to traveling to other planets now as we were then. Hopefully this doesn't get cancelled, like every other time NASA has tried to move the manned space program along with any kind of ambition. We can only hope. This flight will be unmanned, but if all goes well, astronauts should soon be on their way beyond Earth and out into the solar system.
