Borderlands 1 was better.

User Rating: 7 | Borderlands 2 (Deluxe Vault Hunter's Collector's Edition) PC
My brief time with Borderlands 2 has not been met with much enthusiasm. I am a straight up FPS player. Im much older now than when I first started playing years ago, on sega's and Nintendo's, and I, more or less, am more nuanced in what I like to play. I used to be a wide open player who would get just about every game there to play. Now I am older and more selective of what I purchase, typically a game that is used or well received or a must have I typically get because I know its an investment worth made. I bought Borderlands game of the year on Steam during the steam sale thing last year. I thoroughly enjoyed because of the variety of elements in it and the fun narrative. Borderlands 2 changed much of the original game, visuals, game play and such. I have a lot of complaints regarding this just from my first early play through.
My primary complaint is the back tracking and unforgiving nature of the game. Money and health were easy to access in the first game. Not so in this time. Money is scarce and rarely dropped by bad guys and health it seems is only bought through a vendor not dropped by a bad guy when your health is low and you just finished a hard boss fight. What that means is that you have to walk all the way back to a health vendor, they are quite expensive too, and buy health to heal which they wont fully fill your health too. You don't find a shield unit early that heals you automatically so you need to rely on luck in a lot of fights. Another issue here is player level, if you are not close to the level of the guy you are fighting then you will lose miserably and it costs money to revive. The first game always dropped health when you are injured bad and had just beaten one of the baddies. Now its like im hurt, time to stop my fight and run back a mile to the outpost that is the only location for miles that has a stocked vending unit with health and heal then run all the way back to my gun fight and finish it, then run back and get more health or stock up and reduce my carrying pack size for any good and useful weapons that I can either use or sell or take a lot run back sell them and come back again and get more.
Its these nuances that totally turned my enjoyment off on the game. I like a challenge, but having players suffer to make it more challenging ruins the fun. I liked the graphics change from the first game, it kept the artistic style but gave it an anime styled appeal that makes it look like an anime movie that's playable, however, the game does lose its open world openness, on some locations you are limited in how you can play the map and try new things and others its like they are on a floating island like spot that also limits what you can do. Character voices and NPC personalities are greatly played and the humor present is as good and better than the original. They were able to bring you back to the same world as the original game while simultaneously making it brand new and interesting. Im hoping that as I play more of the game, that the problems I faced early on will be rectified with better equipment and more money!