Borderlands 2

Gearbox Entertainment and 2K Games take you back to Pandora with Borderlands 2, the sequel to the hit apocalyptic RPG-shooter that isn't Fallout. It's five years later, Pandora has changed, and there are more Vaults to hunt. We've already gone through the colorful characters and looked at the first few hours of the game, and now we look at the game as a whole, and whether it's worth your money.This $59.99 game for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or PC is bigger and better than the first game, and it fixes a handful of small issues the original had. It's a fun adventure that will last dozens of hours of collecting treasure, and it's our new Editors' Choice.?

I could tell Borderlands 2 was both treading down the well-worn path of the first game and carving out its own new road from the opening movie. Like the first Borderlands, the game opens with a narration from bus-driving arms merchant Marcus, followed by a short movie set to a song that frames the game. Marcus explains that it's been five years since the original Vault Hunters from the first game discovered the mysterious alien Vault. Since then, the Hyperion Corporation has assumed most of the control of the game world, taking whatever vault technology it could and making its leader, Handsome Jack, the most powerful man on Pandora. It's also made him the most violent and sociopathic denizen, and on a world where almost everyone is killing and looting each other, that says something. Handsome Jack is the bad guy.

If you played the original Borderlands, you understand this game. You play a Vault Hunter, a treasure hunter looking for an alien vault on the barely colonized planet of Pandora. While doing so, you cut a swath of death through thousands of Mad Max-style raiders, mutant animals, and robots. All through your adventure, you level up in a role-playing game-like system and collect hundreds of different guns, each with its own unique stats and attributes (and sell most of them, because you only have so much space in your inventory).

That said, you don't need to have played Borderlands to play this game. You'll appreciate a few callbacks and characters from the first game, including the fates of the original Vault Hunters, but the tutorial is simple and Marcus' story tells you everything you need to know to understand what has happened to that point.

The song in the opening movie is The Heavy's "Short Change Hero," and like Cage the Elephant's "Ain't No Rest For the Wicked," it perfectly sums up the feel of the game: stylish and tense in a world that's just as violent and more corrupt than ever. The contrast of the former's lyric of "Ain't no place for no hero" is a fantastic callback to the refrain of "Ain't No Rest For the Wicked," too. To say the least, the opening video will get you excited for the game, and you might find yourself watching it more than once.

The game itself doesn't disappoint, despite starting slow (again, like the original Borderlands). It takes some time to get from waking up face-down in the snow to kicking up your heels for a few minutes at Sanctuary, the first city in the game, but even the tutorial level and the first few missions are stylish, with a few impressive set pieces. The first major?Borderlands 2?story mission had me fighting a midget in a jetpack while his brother fired a battleship cannon at me. And that was a mini-boss. The boss of that mission was a Viking pirate raider with a flame thrower who I fought on the deck of an oil tanker perched on a plateau while flames periodically blasted out of the vents.

Characters Got Skills
You can choose from four different characters just like the first Borderlands, but this time they're all new characters loosely based on the originals. Axton is Roland's replacement, and the most like his predecessor; both are Commandoes who use deployable turrets. Maya is Lilith's replacement, and while she's also a Siren her power is locking enemies in an energy bubble instead of localized teleportation. Salvadore is a Gunzerker and the follow-up to Brick, the Tank. He can go into a rage and wield two guns at once while regenerating health and ammo. Zero is an Assassin and the closest character to Mordecai, the Hunter. He doesn't have a bird like Mordecai, but he can deploy a hologram decoy of himself and become invisible for a few seconds.

Each Vault Hunter has three different skill trees to improve their strengths and class skills. I played Salvadore, and focused on skills that enhanced his ammunition counts, putting points in each level into skills like Inconceivable, which gave me a chance to not consume bullets when I shoot; Filled to the Brim, which increased my ammo capacity and magazine size, and 5 Shots or 6, which gave me a chance to add bullets to my magazines when I killed an enemy instead of subtract them. These were all in the Rampage skill tree for the Gunzerker, which focused on enhancing the Gunzerking skill. The Gunlust skill tree gave me bonuses for swapping weapons often and increasing my overall damage, and the Brawn skill tree made me a much more capable tank, with bonuses to my health and ability to regenerate. The other three characters each have three skill trees to complement their own specialties while giving them flexibility to play the way they want. If you're not happy with your skill point distribution as you level up, you can reset your skill points and rebuild your skill trees by paying a nominal fee certain vending machines.

Besides skills, you can customize your Vault Hunter's looks with different head and body skins. You start with a handful of different heads and palette swap color sets for your body, and as you play you can unlock new heads and bodies, including rare, detailed skils. I took advantage of the new character customization options to give Salvador a new color scheme and a new head, replacing his mohawk and dwarf beard with a clean chin and a hat. I then used a bright purple skin I found that bore the name of a gun manufacturer on it. My bowler changed color to match the skin.

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