#BORDERLANDS 2 PRE SEQUEL SERIES#

Oxygen-granting beacons are placed so frequently that it's nearly impossible to travel long without running into one. If you run out of O2, your health wlll start depleting relatively quickly and continue to do so until you can find more air.Īt first glance, this sounds like another interesting wrinkle to the basic formula, but for the most part, it's really not a practical concern. With the moon being an oxygen-free environment, players also have to keep track of an ever-depleting O2 meter whenever they're outside one of the oxygenated zones that dot the lunar surface and appear inside buildings. It just isn't Borderlands without a ridiculous selection of guns. It's enough to make the staid, stop-and-pop, cover-based action of other first-person shooters seem a bit boring in comparison. This situation, or something like it, happens all the time in Borderlands: The Pre-sequel. It's hard to describe how satisfying it is to double jump over an enemy, use a butt slam to send out a wave of icy cold that freezes him in place, and then shatter his frozen body with a shotgun blast to the face. The combination of the new verticality and the new attack option makes the Pre-Sequel feel like an entirely distinct experience. This new maneuver quickly becomes key to strategy in the game, acting as a crowd-clearing mechanism and a more effective melee attack to fill in the time spent reloading.

Hold down the crouch button in mid-air and your character quickly slams down to the ground, causing an area-of-effect shockwave that knocks back all the surrounding enemies. Now, rather than just circling around on the ground, players can also take to the air to go over the opposition, raining destruction from above or reaching for cover behind a ledge that would have been inaccessible in normal gravity.Īnd then there's the butt slam. Firefights in previous Borderlands games mostly took place on a single plane, where players strafed around and sought cover on the same level as the enemies firing at them (with the exception of things like elevated walkways, of course). Just skipping down the moon's rocky surface with this double jump is almost worth the price of admission on its own, to the extent that the few short sections of the game that take place in 'normal' gravity seem pedestrian in comparison.įurther Reading Review: Borderlands 2 sure does provide more Borderlands, all rightIt might sound like a minor change, but this one modification makes the already-worn Borderlands formula feel just new enough to make all the difference. The addition of an oxygen pack early on in the proceedings grants a slight double jump, allowing for even more height and the ability to change direction quickly in mid-air (even without that move, characters are enjoyably maneuverable when arcing through the sky). A single leap can go two or three stories high, extend for dozens of meters laterally, and leave a player airborne for three to five seconds. More importantly, though, Elpis has a lower gravity than Pandora, giving players an exquisitely high and floaty jump. It also gives the developers an excuse to give the majority of non-player-character moon-residents an Australian accent, which really emphasizes the 'otherness' of the location (if Australia is Earth's 'down under,' I guess Elpis would count as Pandora's 'up over'). This adds a bit of rustic, craggly charm to the setting. I mean that quite literally-the vast majority of the awkwardly named Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel takes place on Elpis, the moon hovering ominously in the skies of Pandora, the planet from the first two games. So more power to the team at Gearbox and 2K Australia for taking that formula and leaving it on solid ground while they traveled to the freaking moon.

#BORDERLANDS 2 PRE SEQUEL SERIES#

It's just that, even after only two games, Borderlands was already feeling like the kind of franchise that was going to stick to a predictable, proven formula, perhaps for decades-the kind of series where if you'd played one game, you'd feel like you played them all. It's not that the Borderlands games are bad-on the contrary, they provide some of the most finely tuned, all-out shooting insanity this side of the Serious Sam series, especially when played cooperatively with friends. The 2012 sequel to the 2009 original largely provided more of the same mix of shooting action, RPG-style leveling, and a ridiculously huge selection of ever-more-powerful guns. Game Details Developers: 2K Australia, GearboxĮven though it only has two games to its name, Borderlands was already kind of feeling set in its ways.

Borderlands 2 pre sequel