Borderlands 2 a Gamer Girl's Review

Borderlands 2 was the much needed upgrade to the classic and well loved Borderlands 1 game that came out in 2009. If you have no idea what borderlands is or what the game is about, here it is in a nutshell. Borderlands is a first person shooter, with rpg elements, and a lot of loot. The things that made Borderlands 1 and now Borderlands 2 stand out in a sea of first person shooters is that cartoon art style (cell-shading) and the level of randomized loot that is in the game.



The Good

Guns
Let just start out with the good, and why I've spent hundreds of hours, playing and replaying Borderlands 2. The loot, the game boost that they have somewhere in the bazillion mark of available weapons in the game, if bazillion is even a number. And they are right, I have played this game through with every character more then twice and there are a lot of guns and grenades. If you want to snipe they have sniper rifles, if you want to mow someone down you can  use a sub-machine gun or rifles, if you want to blow something up they give you grenades, rpgs, and shotgun. Borderlands 2 basically has everything you could ever think of, which is what really made this game fun for me. I can play with any play style I want, and I can change my play style at any time to fit any situation.

Leveling
Who doesn't like rpg's? Well maybe I shouldn't say that, but if you like rpg's Borderlands 2 has enough rpg elements to make it feel like you are really turning your character into a kick-ass gun toting, powerhouse. The game starts you off with four characters, that have there own special abilities, making each one unique. (there is DLC currently out if you want to get an additional two characters.) Each character has there own skill tree with three branches, which allows you to make your character more offensive, defensive, or a little of both. The skill tress are well balance so you don't feel like you're playing at a disadvantage if you pick one character over another or if you pick one skill tree branch over another. Another plus to the leveling system is that you can reset the points you put into a skill tree branch at anytime. So if you started down one particular skill tree branch and wanted to relocate your points to suit how you are currently playing or just because you want too you can do that. It gives the game more replay value.

Art style
Not everyone is a fan of the cartoon art style. In fact I have friends who refuse to play Borderlands just because of that one reason. But the art style fits the game, and here is my reasoning behind that. If  the game had a more realistic art style it would be hard to buy into the fact that it takes over 100 bullets to kill a boss sometimes. People would be expecting one-shoot kills and etc like as if they were playing Battlefield or Call-of-Duty. Secondly the art style lends itself to the playful nature of the writing team. The jokes in this game wouldn't be half as funny if they were delivered in a more realistic art style game. Now onto how the game looks. It looks beautiful. The first borderlands game what literally stuck in brown, and neutral colors. But Borderlands 2 changed all that, and actually give us colors (red, deep blues, etc), and the cell-shading looks better then what it did in the first borderlands game, which already looked good.

The Bad

Character Customization 
This is the only thing I can really fault the game on, besides one other thing (but the other thing is more of a personal matter then a actual flaw I see in the game). Borderlands 2 offers character skins. Its Gearbox's way of letting people customize there characters. But it doesn't really work. Yes you can change you characters clothe with preset outfits, but all the outfits look the same, except they changed the colors. I'm sorry but that is not customization or at least not the customization we expect form a game developer like Gearbox. When we think about being able to customize our character we are thinking size, height, skin color, eye color, nose orientations and etc.I am not saying that this takes away from the game. You are in first person view, so its not like you can see your character beyond there hands, but this is the touch that Gearbox is missing out of there Borderlands 2 game. With all the different types of guns, and grenades, and locations that are in the game it would have been nice to have all different types of characters too.

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat
This is a wash, rinse and repeat type of game. But I wish it was more then that. You have to play the game twice just to max out your character, so i feel like you never get to see your characters full potential unless you repeat the game again. Which means playing and listing to the same content over and sometime over again. Now when you play it over again it is on a harder difficulty level, but after a couple of hours, due to the fact that you get better and stronger guns, you are basically just playing the game over and over again. Now this is more of a personal matter, since the game is meant to be repetitive to a point but playing a game 3 times with 4 or 5 and yes sometime 6 different characters is over kill.

Overall Score: 9/10

Hey this game provided me with so many hours of fun that it deserved the high score. The bad things that I did mention about the game never took away from the game play. I didn't even talk about the hours of fun I had playing co-op with family members, friends, and other random players online. There is no other game on the market that makes playing co-op this fun, and with such great game mechanics, letting other players drop in and out of your game, without messing up your game missions, or save file.