The Cats out of the Bag and the Color is out of this World!
Time to find out whether or not Gearbox studios latest entry in the Borderlands series is a yea or nay.
The rich bounty of colors and assignments
The original Borderlands was quite the co-operative first-person shooter. Though I will say that the color palette was most unappealing. The dull browns of varying shades, ran rampant and unselfconsciously about the wastes of the games setting Pandora. Even before there was any widespread retrospective analysis, one could not argue that Borderlands was the most ambitiously colorful game out there. But, with a couple of years and some fan/critic feedback Gearbox has delivered a visual feast, in Borderlands 2. The graphics--on the PS3--may not be the most technically impressive, but they make up for this with a much wider use of warm and cool colors, creating a fun, refreshing, atmospheric hue that renounces the--not totally unwanted--trend of grit and realism. There is, to go hand in hand with a larger swath of color, a larger selection of environments for players to loot and pillage in. There is a wildlife reserve, comprised of rolling green plains and pasture; there is now frozen tundra, comprising of, well, frozen soil and in some sections alpine areas, or in others frozen plains covered in snow and tree-less, ice capped hills; then there are the caustic caverns, secret industrial sewer hideouts/fortresses, among other places. All-in-all, I would say that the variety of places the player will get to experience is a marked improvement over the games predecessor.
*Yes, there are still desert dunes and dusty plains as well*
Mission structure within Borderlands 2 is present, I guess. The management of the many, many, many missions of which one will acquire over the course of the game is much better than in the first game. The mission management menu can get very cluttered, but it still offers the options to tailor your focus to the task at hand. Though I would say that Gearbox should streamline the mission selection/menus more efficiently in the future. There are a lot of missions; from pizza delivery, to assassination, to mail delivery, to the re- naming of informal creatures. There is a lot to do in the game. The missions are divided between side-missions and main quests. Side missions are completely optional, though if you do intend to play solo then they are mostly recommended, as the game can get challenging without active leveling. The multilayer experience is, in my opinion, one of the very essential pillars of the borderlands experience. Meaning that the amount of co-op play that you will take-part in, will determine the level of enjoyment you will experience. I love single-player experiences--Skyrim, anyone?--; the problem is that the level of interaction within the open stages of Borderlands 2 is wholesomely lacking and basic. This is not to say that one does not enjoy frolicking through the many wastes of the game, and shooting the commendable number of creature species and re-skinned bandits in the face, but it can get very repetitive, and it happens a lot quicker than in a game designed to be a second world, of sorts, to explore.
