TL;DR – If you liked Borderlands 2, then you’ll LOVE these Borderlands 2 DLC packs which are more of the same. If you didn’t like Borderlands 2 then all of this Borderlands 2 DLC will be… more of the same. Same narrative tone, same gunplay, very similar enemy types (albeit reskinned) and around 3 or 4 hours of “main” content each alongside a little over a dozen side missions per DLC. I wouldn’t say either are enough for a full review, hence why I’ve bundled them together as a “double-bill”. With all that being said, it’s more Borderlands 2 for those who wanted it and at least one of them is enjoyable enough.
Quick Note: Gearbox have decided in their infinite wisdom that these two pieces of Borderlands 2 DLC only scale between levels 15 to 30 on normal difficulty, meaning that they’ll be really easy for players who’ve already finished the main campaign. As such you can either play them while working through the main campaign, play them in True Vault Hunter Mode (aka TVHM) which is basically hard mode or be overpowered. 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 my first “double-bill” review I’m taking a look at Captain Scarlett and her Pirate Booty (CSPB) & Mister Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage (MTCC). These comprise two of the Borderlands 2 DLC packs and both feature your character entering a new collection of zones so that they can shoot a bunch of dudes and ultimately collect a ton of new loot. Both campaigns are fairly short if you only care about the main missions, with each clocking in at just over 3 hours but they do both contain multiple areas and close to 20 side quests each. Both campaigns are also centred around their titular characters and don’t offer much that’s new to the overall formula of the game.
Starting with the lesser of the two CSPB, I had relatively high hopes for what promised to be a mini-Borderlands campaign with a sand pirate theme. Not only do you get a new type of vehicle (the floating sand-skimmer) which has a new type of weapon (the harpoon gun). As dumb as it sounds the Harpoon gun is honestly the most enjoyable aspect of this mini-campaign, as it impales for modest damage before exploding for a lot of damage. It’s a bit trickier to utilise than the other vehicle weapons in the game, but it feels great to use and is very effective at shredding enemy vehicles once you’ve got the knack for aiming it. You can also use it to pulverise the new sandworm enemy type, which are basically just worms that pop half of their bodies out of the sand. These guys are initially teased as a big threat in the opening cinematic, but honestly they’re pretty underwhelming as there aren’t many types of them and their weakspots are kinda half-assed in comparison to the spiderlings (that forced to you shoot their thoraxes butts to deal any real damage) and the skags (that you could only crit while they had their big mouths open). Plus you mainly encounter them while in your sand skimmer and so you just run them over most of the time…
Much like those poor sandworms, the pacing of this Borderlands 2 DLC is also as flat as roadkill on the motorway. The DLC starts with you meeting Shade whose appearance gives off some Gonzo journalist vibes but who turns out to actually be pretty boring (and needy). Once you’ve done a couple of obligatory introduction missions, you then meet up with the titular Captain Scarlett and begin a series of fetch quests that are exceedingly tame and don’t offer too much in the way of variety. First you need to shoot some dudes for her, then shoot some dudes for her and pick up a quest item, then shoot some other dudes so that you can pick up a quest item, then chase after 4 quest items, while dudes shoot you, then you go somewhere else and shoot some dudes to grab another quest item, then you take all these items to her, so that she can give you a new quest item and then you take it to an area (after shooting some dudes), so that as you leave it you can shoot some more dudes… After all that you get two boss battles in fairly quick succession and then get a bunch of loot items after scaling a pirate pyramid. It’s honestly very, very one-note and doesn’t make much use of either the cool new vehicle or the potential for pirate themed shenanigans.
Fortunately there are plenty of enemy NPCs who are pirates and who seem to be having a lot of fun. In this bit of Borderlands 2 DLC all of the enemies are replaced with pirate versions of themselves, which are generally pretty similar but have a few tricks up their sleeves. The Enforcers now dual-wield anchors for example which let them block bullets or pull you in (pudge hook style), some of the psychos are replaced with corsairs that can disappear and re-appear in puffs of black smoky gunpowder and there are even spooky, scary skeleton pirates that have life-steal. While these new bandits definitely give this DLC some life and charm, most of the enemy types are basically just reskins and so most combat encounters haven’t changed very much from the base game. Renaming the midgets as Cabin Boys was pretty funny though, even if they seem to be really rare in the new zones.
But honestly even these stout crews of hearty lads can’t hide the fact that this is a pretty basic series of missions with little of interest happening. The “twist” that you have to fight Captain Scarlett doesn’t even count as a spoiler because the game keeps telling you it’s going to happen and the rest of the characters are one-note. Shade is obsessed with you and is the only guy left in a town full of corpses, so sometimes he pretends to be another (dead) character which means he puts on a silly voice. There’s also Herbert who is a stalker that’s obsessed with Scarlett and then a pirate gang leader called Sandman who’s actually super short, but other than that there’s really not much here. As for the enemies, aside from the disappointing sandworms and pirates you only have to worry about spiderants and… Loader bots. There really isn’t much here that’s new or different and as mentioned earlier, the missions are very boilerplate. The boss battles were kinda cool, as you get vored by the Leviathan and then have to gun down a mammoth skag while inside it before bursting out and dealing with a very big, angry worm. But outside of those 2 fights the entirety of this Borderlands 2 DLC release is kind of a blur and I had no interest in playing much of the side content.
Then there’s MTCC, which is a much more enjoyable Borderlands 2 DLC but one that also doesn’t offer that much in the way of new content. The main draw is Mr Torgue himself, who is a classic Gearbox BIG LOUD MEATHEAD character but I honestly found him kind of endearing. The DLC starts with him hijacking a broadcast from that dork Tannis in which he announces that he’s built an arena over a newly discovered vault so that he can going to host a gladiator tournament to find the Ultimate Badass. You’re then dropped into a new area, told to interact with a terminal to sign a “legal waiver” which then explodes in your face while Torgue (essentially) yells that WAIVERS ARE FOR PUSSIES. The whole DLC is about as silly as you would expect and it’s it kind of over-the-top madness that Gearbox does fairly well.
Of course you’d have to be silly to think that Gearbox created a whole new batch of enemies to fight in this DLC, as much like with the pirates in CSPB most of the enemies here are reskins with some slight tweaks. Unlike in CSPB, the baddies in MTCC are split into 4 gangs and each gang has their own gimmick and shtoyle. You’ve got the Torgue employees who are generally the same as the Halcyon workers from the base game, albeit with “cooler” looking loader bots. Then you’ve got Momma’s boys who are a gang based around a mirror universe Ellie who is a big, fat psycho cannibal with a fondness for motorbikes. Rounding things off you’ve got Pete’s Burners who are basically just reskins of normal bandits but with slightly more flame based attacks and Flyboy’s bandits who aren’t even reskins but who do have a lot of buzzards (the gunship enemies from the first game).
The enemies themselves don’t offer much of note and it’s hard not to get the feeling that by splitting their efforts across 4 gangs, Gearbox lacked the ability to focus on making any one gang particularly noteworthy. In their defence, you only really deal with each gang for a mission or two at a time as the entire premise of the DLC is that you have to kill various gang leaders to rise up the ranks so that you can be the aforementioned Ultimate Badass. Plus the team at Gearbox used the time they saved on making each gang unique by making the areas much more visually varied, as this DLC takes you from city streets to open plains through to bars, factories and of course the arena. This also extends to the missions, as they’re much more varied than the ones in CSPB. Sure there are plenty that are basically just “go here and shoot the dudes to open the gate so you can shoot more dudes”, but you also have arena fights against multiple hostile groups of enemies who are fighting each other, alongside one or two racing missions. Plus there are some missions with time-limits like the one that requires you to shoot down airships and collect their cargo or the one that asks you to kill every badass enemy in a bar while regular enemies keep respawning.
The boss fights against the various gang leaders are also pretty cool, with these fights clearly being where a lot of the development time went. You’ve got Pyro Pete who has a variety of seemingly unique flamethrower attacks across multiple ranges, Momma with a motorbike bigger than her fat ass that shoots a variety of rockets at you, a giant blimp that circle-strafes around and Truckasaurus on steroids that has a ton of health and a lot of deadly attacks. All together MTCC does a good job of mixing up the gameplay (at least as much as it can within the purview of Borderlands 2) so that it doesn’t get too monotonous.
Finally there a few other neat touches within MTCC including a unique currency that can be used in his unique vending machines that only sell Rare and above graded weapons, plus Moxxi returns in the from of a bar in which you can gamble this new currency and her likeness is featured in some “collectable” portraits of her that occasionally drop from enemies and that serve as achievement bait. In a shock twist that I was not expecting, this DLC also gives Tiny Tina an amusing line of dialogue which is a herculean task that I thought could not be done. Yet MTCC pulls it off somehow
In conclusion, out of the two DLCs I would recommend MTCC and personally wouldn’t bother with CSPB unless you’re truly starved for Borderlands 2 content. Torgue’s campaign is pretty much on the same level as the rest of Borderlands 2 in my humble opinion, as it’s able to keep itself varied and features a cast of both returning characters and a couple of new ones that are entertaining enough. Even outside of Torgue himself the other antagonists you deal with are relatively memorable and I’d consider this DLC to be a worthy follow up to the base game. Unfortunately I felt that Captain Scarlett’s story was pretty boring by contrast due to the lacklustre quest design and large amount of repetitive gunfights and backtracking involved. Either way I feel like the best thing to do would be to use these Borderlands 2 DLC packs as a way to side-step the occasional need to grind some side missions in the main campaign, as both packs are too easy on normal once you’ve cleared the campaign and tedious on TVHM due to the fact that most enemies become bullet sponges.
