Don't replay Borderlands just before starting Borderlands 2...
You see, I've been amped for the release of Borderlands 2 ever since I got hold of the first one for the Xbox 360. I ploughed over 100 hours into the first game, maxing out all 4 characters and farming raid bosses over multiplayer until I had collected every Pearl weapon that the General Knoxx DLC could throw my way.
But that was 2 years ago, and when the launch date for Borderlands 2 came round I thought I would drop in the first one again and have myself a bit of a nostalgia run. Woops. I cracked out another 50 hours on Borderlands, then almost immediately dived straight into the sequel.
Now, looking at Borderlands 2 as a distinct and separate game, its a cracker! The graphics are rendered beautifully, with a massive variety of environments and locations. There remains some texture pop in and scale up, but it doesn't really impact on your enjoyment. The character models are much improved, with more personality and style across the 4 new protagonists, and although a lot of the previous enemy types make an appearance - the new enemies add enough variety to give it a point of difference.
Soundwise, the voice acting for the lead characters is good. Not great, but very far removed from the original Resident Evil quality that sometimes pervaded the first game. The main antagonist, Handsome Jack, is solid throughout the first playthrough, but by the end of the Ice Shelf on the 2nd play, I was sick to death of him. Maya, Roland, Brick and Mordecai have a pretty big part to play this time from a vocal perspective, and their respective actors doe a good job of creating some fun and emotional moments.
Carrying on the theme of sound, the guns are excellent. Plasma weapons, shot guns, pistols, rocket launchers, grenades, rifles, and sniper rifles all sound fantastic. When I got tired of the sometimes awful sound of the enemies one liners, nothing punctuated it better than a 32k damage sniper rifle smashing a head into tomato soup.
The weapons themselves have a lot more variety than the last game as well. There is so much loot here, it becomes a little overwhelming at points trying to decide which to have in your hands. The major flaw here is drop rates. At the end of 100 hours of Borderlands 1, I had everything I could hope to dream of, and yet I could still find something a little more interesting in the next chest, or the next bit of boss farming. With Borderlands 2, the drop rates are atrocious. Having logged 60 hours across the 2.5 playthroughs, I have only managed to farm 10 oranges. 3 of those were the same shotgun, 2 of the same sniper, 2 of the same shield, and then some random ones a couple of levels below mine which had little useful value.
The bosses, however, are fun to play against. The Warrior became extremely easy very quickly, simply running at him with a shotgun and hitting his chest scales, dropping him into the lava, wait for him to rise, rinse and repeat. A little disappointing for the last major boss. But, Terra, Bonehead, The Sheriff, Dukinos mom, the constructors, Saturn, BNK3R, Boom Bewm, Captain Flynt... the list goes on. All had different styles and strategies, and dropped pretty interesting loot.
Multiplayer is fun, although I can't help but feel that the difficulty spike this time was a little off. I picked up the Xbox & PC versions pretty cheaply, and used the Player Number Setter on the PC quite a bit when farming, but the increase in difficulty was minimal (and the loot didn't scale that well either). Still, taking on BNK3R with 4 players, and group killing Terra, were both great experiences.
Coming back to my original point though, playing Borderlands 1 beforehand sucked a lot of the enjoyment out. The game-play is so fundamentally similar that it felt more like the biggest DLC ever made rather than a sequel. While improvements in graphics and sound are good, they are not so different as to invite major praise. The story itself (it actually has one!) is great, but the feeling of grinding out more of the same just to see it robbed it a little bit of its interest.
Borderlands 2, on its own, is an amazing game. It recycles the original formula so well, and continues it so seamlessly, that it is almost like playing the original again with a better story, better graphics, better characters, and more varied loot.
What lets it down is that this similarity does not extend to rewarding you in the same way the first game did. To watch 100s of drops pour out of The Warrior and have this feeling that NOTHING is going to be worth picking up is just horrible.
I wish I hadn't played the first just before starting the second, and I hope they improve the drop rate in future patches and DLCs. In a loot based game, actions need to have proper scaled rewards, and most of the time Borderlands 2 didn't make the outcome feel worth the effort expended.
For that reason, I have dropped my score. But, I think I will review again after getting Torque and Scarlett DLCs, with the hope that I will get a little more of the joy back.