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But the fact of the matter is that Borderlands 2 just takes its time. They might play a few hours and feel they have serious reservations. Given that my brain is now a sort of petri dish experiment for long-term submersion in videogames, I suspect that my feeling of vague disappointment could be one that appears in other people's experiences, too. Or, like me, have a character for soloing, and others for co-op. To miss that is to miss the point entirely.īut yeah, there's still an army of people who will get through it on their own. (Of almost any game.) We knew exactly how it would be true in Borderlands 2: the ramped up intensity of more and tougher baddies, the richer rewards of extra and better loot. It was immediately better when I turned to play co-op, of course. There was no “WOW” event to create a blip that you could write next to on the graph of my excitement. Worse, nothing really raised hairs or widened eyes.
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Nothing sang to me in the way that original did. It's just that, well, for many hours, nothing really stood out. Not that any of this is fatal, of course, because most of those Borderlands veterans will be here because they enjoyed the original.
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The truth is that the first few hours of Borderlands 2 are going to be thoroughly familiar to Borderlands players, albeit with a lot more expositional jabber being directed at you (all of it sits somewhere on the sassy/wacky axis), and familiar deserts replaced with an Arctic landscape that does little to stir the imagination. I began to sit back in my chair a little, wondering if actually I was doing something wrong. And a couple of the jokes made me smirk, but that was a given, too. And it's true that the first few hours of Borderlands 2 are slow, and a little underwhelming. I suppose that to begin with I was a little disappointed with Gearbox's level-based, quest-driven FPS sequel. He has killed many things, with many, many guns.ĭeep breath. Jim spent the past ten days in hyper-hyped mega-sequel Borderlands 2.
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