Borderlands 2 Review

The original had a gun generator and no reason to care. This one has Handsome Jack, a corporate psychopath who phones your ECHO device between missions to mock you, name your friends, and occasionally say something so cruel it changes what the next mission means. He gives Pandora stakes, and the writing around him is sharp enough that the four hour stretches of side quests stay funny rather than grating. Mechanically it is a large step up: the guns actually feel different from each other, the skill trees support builds rather than stat bumps, and the four player cooperative scaling makes chaos legible.

Tiny Tina's episodes and the Assassin's introduction are among the best set pieces in the genre. Its problems are structural. The endgame raid bosses have health pools tuned for coordinated groups and turn into ten minute chip fights, the difficulty scaling in the second playthrough rewards a narrow set of weapons, and by the fiftieth randomised submachine gun the loot stops registering as a reward.