TL;DR – These two DLCs are both geared towards players who have already finished the main story and contain a solid variety of new enemies, but that’s where the similarities end. I’d highly recommend Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep as it’s received a lavish amount of detail and care while managing to provide an entertaining narrative. Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt on the other hand is perfectly fine but is nothing that special and would be a total wash were it not for some of the new interesting enemies.
Quick Note: Gearbox have decided in their infinite wisdom that these two DLCs only scale between levels 30 to 35 on normal difficulty. As such you might want to play them in True Vault Hunter Mode (aka TVHM) which is basically hard mode or risk having them be a little easy if you’ve already finished the campaign. I chose the latter because I found TVHM really, really boring to play due to enemies being bullet sponges but the choice is yours!
In a follow up to last week’s review, I’m taking a look at the other two major DLCs that are included with the Game of the Year edition of Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt (SHBGH) & Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep (TTADK). These two DLCs add some extra chunks of content to Borderlands 2 and are basically more of the same in spite of the relative trappings of their respective content packs. While they don’t change the game that much, the fact that they’re geared towards players who have finished the main campaign – both in terms of the level targets and the fact that they reference events in the main story, make them a natural choice for those who’ve put an end to Handsome Jack’s tyranny but are looking for more.
I’ll start with SHBGH as it has a very poor reputation among fans of the game and is honestly not that bad. Sure, you don’t actually get to do much hunting of uniquely dangerous and rare beasts, but it does at least come with a large variety of new enemies for you to slay. Most of these new enemies take the form of native fauna; including lanky but towering Wetland Drifters which stride the swamps, big floating spores with bigger health bars that slowly glide across the sky, armoured and irritating Scaylions whose torsos keep flipping and Boroks who are similar to skags but with a powerful jump attack and big glowing weak-spots on their underbellies. The striders themselves are mainly constrained to the closest thing to a hub in the new zones from this DLC, which is a bit of a waste, but the other new beasts are mainly used to replace spiderants and skags. Both the Scaylions and Boroks are well developed and mesh nicely with the other hostile animal species in the game, but alas they’re only really used to break up the shoot outs you have with the new human enemies.
These new human enemies are actually pretty interesting however and take the form of a bunch of Savages which come in a variety of forms. You’ve got Gun wielding Triggermen, melee-only Warriors with large shields, Hunters who throw spears at you and Witch Doctors who are a total pain in the arse to deal with. The latter has the ability to not only heal other Savages nearby, but when his allies receive healing they will also level up. As such if you don’t prioritise the Witch Doctors you’ll find yourself facing a large batch of human enemies who may be multiple levels higher than you. When you consider the fact that the Witch Doctors can heal themselves and that the Warriors are hard to shoot due to being largely obscured by their large shields, battles against the Savages can quickly become surprisingly difficult. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there are six types of Witch Doctor (Slag, Burning, Shock, Crippling, Vampire and Badass) each of which have their own types of “magic” attack. All of them except the slag Witch Doctor can shoot their bolts of elemental damage out of their staffs and turn into a “tornado” that moves rapidly and damages you when it touches you. Of particular note is the truly tedious life-stealing attack that heals the Witch Doctor, meaning that they can heal themselves and allies or drain your health to heal themselves. If you spot them, I’d strongly suggest you just run past the Witch Doctor as it’s exceedingly difficult to kill them unless you’re running a build with a heroic amount of burst damage. And to make things even trickier, the placement of various spawns (especially the large floating spores) means that you often end up fighting Savages while the wildlife tries to tear you and them apart, making combat in this DLC chaotic albeit engaging.
Unfortunately these new enemies are forced to carry this whole expansion on their backs, as outside of the new enemies there isn’t a ton worth mentioning in this DLC. The bosses are tanky but not particularly interesting to fight, generally just being larger enemies of the existing new creatures with the exception of the final boss which is just tedious. None of them deal that much damage and most of them just stumble around trying to get into melee range, with the final boss only taking damage via 3 specific weak-spots and having multiple invulnerability phases. The new antagonist also isn’t that interesting, just being another example of Gearbox writing a character who is self-aware enough that he deflates all of the threat, stakes and tension in any situation he’s in without necessarily making anything funnier. Hammerlock also doesn’t get that many lines in the DLC that bears his name, so there isn’t much of note here outside of a new raid boss and some hidden bosses.
Instead of dwelling on SHBGH further I’d just like to say that it’s an extra 19 missions (7 main + 12 side) for those of you who really wanted more Borderlands 2. With that out of the way, I’m going to start talking about Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep because it’s abundantly clear that’s where the majority of Gearbox’s effort went while they were making the Borderlands 2 DLC. There are multiple reasons for thinking this, from the fact that it integrates itself very well with the game’s main narrative through to the myriad small details and touches that are present which are otherwise missing from the other DLC packs. In Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon’s Keep no expense has seemingly been spared, with almost every character making appearances and a lot of unique enemies, textures and even mechanics having been included so that you can enjoy a new adventure that actually manages to feel adventurous. The central premise of this expansion is that your character(s) are part of a D&D style campaign being run by Tiny Tina, with the previous protagonists from Borderlands 1 taking the part of the players (not to be confused with your Borderlands 2 characters).
Due to this narrative setup, the DLC lurches from madcap scenario to madcap scenario as Tina (who is an extremely unprepared Dungeon Master) and the other characters influence the plot. Aside from the screenshot above, some examples of this include: Torgue randomly replacing an NPC and refusing to let you pass his gate until you blow up two blimps, Brick ruining a rescue mission by demanding you punch the person you’re rescuing so hard they explode and Tina letting you bypass minutes of back-tracking via a convenient teleport. Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep even lets everyone take a seat at the table, as it keeps pulling in various quest-givers and friendly NPCs that were in the both Borderlands 1 & 2. From Marcus and Claptrap all the way through to Salvador and Handsome Jack, almost every character reappears and the DLC does so with such gusto and at such a pace that there is rarely a moment’s pause throughout the entirety of the main quest chain. As a consequence the entire DLC is as close as Borderlands gets to being genuinely humorous and it’s also extremely good at keeping you (the player) guessing, as you have no idea what is going to happen next.
Well, with the obvious exception that you’ll be shooting something no matter what madness is going on with the DLC’s “plot”. It’d be tempting to think that Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep was so focused on re-introducing all these characters and coming up with a series of silly scenarios that it might go easy on the new enemies. Instead there are a surprising amount of new foes that only appear within this expansion, including but not limited to; Skeletons, Orcs, Dwarves, Knights, Spiders, Golems, Dragons and even Treants. Each “type” mentioned has multiple sub-classes (with the partial exception of the Treants which only come in 2 forms) meaning that this expansion has over 40 new enemies for you to slay. The main quest chain also does a good job of mixing up the foes you face at any given time, so that it doesn’t ever threaten to get tedious as you push through one area to the next. Indeed most areas focus on a few enemy types, but they often end up engaging each other which helps to add to the sense of chaos.
Alongside focusing on certain enemy types, these zones are also varied in terms of their visuals and appearance. Your party start off in a coastal village before fighting through a foreboding forest, a series of graveyards, Dwarven mines, Orc huts, castles and finally the evil wizard’s tower (but not before taking a quick detour through the dungeons of course). Unfortunately these zones are forced to largely reuse the DLC’s relatively minimal bespoke musical score, but there are at least enough tracks that things don’t get too drawn out across the length of the main quest line. Those of you who intend to play through all the side missions might get fed-up of it by the end however. But don’t let the limited music selection get you down, as to complement the appearance of these new zones the developers have also taken the time to update various textures and models, with new chests, lootable containers and vending machines among other things appearing within all these new areas. There’s even a new kind of chest that awards loot on the basis of a dice roll (which is fully animated of course) and which lets you gamble Eridium to add another dice and thus be more likely to get higher quality loot.
The one other major new mechanic that’s been introduced throughout the campaign is the inclusion of various “Shrines” which cost Eridium to use but provide temporary buffs to the player. These include defensive buffs, increases to your melee damage and more ammo among others. These shrines have been strategically placed throughout the main quest-line and therefore their appearance is a wink to the player that the upcoming combat encounter is going to be more difficult than most. There are also a couple of quasi-new mechanics in the form of a handful of “puzzles” and platforming challenges, which utilise existing features but put them to good use so as to break up the otherwise endless sequence of combat encounters. Finally there are also some new customisation options, weapons, grenade mods and so on. These are broadly more of the same, but are worth noting for those of you who don’t think that 40+ new enemies and an engaging quest line weren’t quite enough.
To sum up, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep is an enjoyable DLC that adds a lot of new content and does a great job of conveying it’s story which is genuinely enjoyable to playthrough. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Borderlands 2 as a result and am glad I saved the best for last as it was the last of the Borderlands 2: GOTY edition DLCs I played through. As for SHBGH, it’s not as bad as report and does have it’s share of interesting new enemies, but generally it’s not great and could easily be missed by more casual Borderlands 2 fans.
