Borderlands, a game made by GearBox and 2K Games, strayed away from what the traditional model of a shooter, delivering  first-person/four-person co-op gameplay in a very cartoonish style graphics. Borderlands 2 is no exception to Borderlands standard.

The game starts off a couple years after the end of the first; the player learns what has happened in the time between games and picks between four new characters. The characters are all new physically with brand new upgrades.  After being selected, each character can be customized.  Once a player has finished character generation, they end up in the open world of Pandora where they can do anything from missions to driving around killing bandits.

After playing the game for a couple hours and going through about 10 or 15 missions I didn’t like it. I had played through Borderlands but it took me a year or so because the game gets boring really quickly. It’s the same repetitive thing over and over. You get a mission from someone and then you run all across the world, sometimes killing enemies along the way, and then you run back and get $20 or some useless piece of equipment.  It just feels like a waste of time.

After about an hour, I had to take a break. I was bored out of my mind and couldn’t concentrate or keep playing.

The game runs almost exactly the same as the original Borderlands, with the only new features being the new characters and their guns.  Two of the characters almost have the same abilities with just a few tweaks to them while the other two characters have very bland non-unique abilities that anyone could have thought of.

The story was very confusing and slow and half of what happened seemed useless to the game. It was as if the creators wanted to make people laugh and enjoy the dialogue rather than have an actual story.

Overall I would not recommend buying or playing this game unless you’re a die-hard Borderlands fans and didn’t feel the ending of the last game gave enough.  This game plays almost the same way as the first and takes the story line of some of the characters of the first game farther while developing the new characters while taking the Borderlands story just a bit farther.

Correction:
This story has been corrected to reflect that GearBox and 2K Games designed Borderlands 2 rather than Bethesda Games.  Clarion regrets the error.  -D. Mancoff