But the craziness of the combat is what makes the series worth it. It's the most satisfying skill in any Borderlands game I've used, although it's also diametrically opposed to how a normal sniper would behave. But when other skills boost your gun damage and fire rate even further and you gain access to weapons and explosives that ricochet onto nearby enemies, the resulting chaos becomes a delightfully maniacal room clearing mechanism. Her action skill is enjoyable at first, a brief moment of auto-aiming bliss with increased fire and reload rates that guarantee critical hits while zoomed. Having spent time with the Enforcer at EB Expo, I spent most of my playthrough enjoying the rapid fire capabilities of Nisha the Lawbringer, the default sniper class for The Pre-Sequel. The Gladiator, Lawbringer and Enforcer are the other options, with two of the three having featured in Borderlands 2 as a boss (Wilhelm and Nisha). The fact that many of Claptrap's skills are so skewed towards co-op - and the skills that aren't often have trade-offs - makes the robot more of a support class and a half-baked vault hunter rather than a genuine hero. And sometimes it makes you incredibly resilient while trashing your accuracy.īut while the variety of powers are intriguing initially, the inconsistency makes Claptrap more of a novelty. Occasionally this results in a support AI that attacks your enemies sometimes it spawns a rubber duck that bounces erratically while reflecting all bullets. Its action skill, Vaulthunter.exe, calculates the current situation - are you playing alone, how much health do you have, how many enemies are you facing - and gives you an Action Package to match. Out of the new vault hunters, only three have an identity of their own, with the fourth being the wonderfully divisive Claptrap.
It's a shame 2K Australia didn't use the setup more often, since the punch lines are delivered without requiring the over-the-top exposition or visual tropes that Borderlands often relies on. It's a clever arrangement, although the possibilities for humour are used very sparingly. The original heroes play a part in The Pre-Sequel as NPCs too, creating some intriguing interjections from the "present" about the events that unfold. The rest of the game effectively becomes the backstory in between the first two Borderlands games, with the occasional quip from the "present" questioning the motivations of the character and the plot tracking Jack's rise to power. It opens up strongly enough, with the vault hunters from the first game - Lilith, Roland, Brick and Mordecai - interrogating Athena, one of the new playable characters, about her motivations for supporting Handsome Jack's tyrannical reign. The issue is that if the humour in the first two iterations did little to spur you on, you'll suffer similar apathy - but then that sentiment can be applied to The Pre-Sequel throughout. Such a degree of nuance was never the Borderlands style, however, and I'm not being genuinely critical here. It's more Australia through the eyes of Crocodile Dundee than Rake. But even with all that local talent, The Pre-Sequel still feels Australian the way an American would see it.
There is a lovely parallel between Elpis and Australia: both housing unrefined characters and an unbridled sense of humour in a land far, far away. Taking the franchise from Pandora to the icy wastelands of Elpis with a mixture of characters equal parts bogan and ocker is something that only Australians could do Gearbox themselves would have never been able to pull it off. It's not like 2K Australia hasn't put their own stamp on the series. Because for all the humour 2K's Canberra-based studio have managed to inject, all their ocker charm and ingenuity, The Pre-Sequel is just more Borderlands - different, but not structurally or practically so. It's particularly painful, since the response will automatically be a dealbreaker for many gamers, even though I would like nothing more, as an Australian and an avid gamer, to see every able person to support what will be the largest release from our sunburnt land this year.ĭid you enjoy Borderlands, particularly Borderlands 2? If the answer is no, then I cannot recommend The Pre-Sequel. The most heartbreaking, and yet essential, question about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel happens to be the simplest. Alex Walker gives his verdict on the new Aussie blockbuster.