Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a game by a different developer, that manages to feel exactly the same as Borderlands 2. There are some differences like new characters and so new skill trees. Generally speaking though this game hasn’t innovated, which is fine if you liked Borderlands 2. If you thought Borderlands 2 was pretty boring, then you are in trouble. Which means that I am in trouble. Of course there’s the entirely fair question, as to why I bought this game. The honest answer to that question is that my friend has a lousy PC. So in the search for co-op games we ended up on this one. Is it fun? Nope.

I’ll skim through the rationale for why I didn’t care for the game. Which should be fairly obvious between my last reviews and the TL;DR at the top. Essentially Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a looter shooter with bad loot and bad shooting. The cherries on top are of course; the weird vehicle controls, the annoying dialogue, the poor quest design and the generally tedious nature of the game’s level scaling system. There are some bright spots, like decent variety and the fact that the whole thing works in co-op, but generally speaking this game is a game for idiots. Combat is basic, the jokes fall flat, the game manages to feel extremely repetitive, most of the content is bland, it’s just a mess. Why this series became the series for co-op players is beyond me.

As for what this game adds to the series, well it has some background for the perennial favourite character of Handsome Jack. Who isn’t particularly interesting here, and is basically trying to be a hero but becomes a villain. The way this happens occurs slowly across missions, but essentially he goes from normal person to paranoid dictator in a gradual fashion. Yet it’s not handled very well, and it’s hard not to get the impression that our characters shouldn’t have sided with him once he started randomly executing civilians for the lols. The story also involves the vault hunters from previous games spoiling his plans to take control of the world, but they don’t do much. Honestly if you were a big Borderlands fan then I imagine you’ll find this game to be lacklustre in terms of exploring the characters.

Especially as the game otherwise doesn’t add that much. There are one or two new vehicles you get to use a handful of times. Plus the O2 mechanic, wherein you need oxygen to breathe but can also use this oxygen as a impromptu jetpack. Otherwise I can’t really think of anything outside of the new character classes. These are fine but I’m not playing through the game to max level 6 times. So the only thing I really noticed is that you can play as Claptrap. Which is about as much as fun as you’d expect.

With those new additions out of the way, I’ll just reiterate that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel really is more of the same. Just with Australian accents. The combat is the same, the weapon looting system is the same, the UI is the same, most of the enemies are the same, the mission is the same, the dialogue is of the same quality and so on. There really isn’t a lot that’s new. To the point that the O2 system which is arguably one of the biggest additions doesn’t do much. It gives you a new character item slot and it introduces some risk/reward to the game. As you need to breathe (albeit not if you play as Claptrap), you need O2. You can spend it to jump slightly further or revive your companions faster however. Outside of this though, it just makes the outdoor areas a bit tedious. As you need to camp near the O2 stations every now and then. The game does at least still have an appealing art-style. Outside of that though I can’t think of anything it does particularly well.

I mean for goodness sake, this game has missions where you need to hunt for audio logs that are hidden in an office, and then have to listen to them. There are missions where you need to guard a box as it slowly trundles along a conveyor belt while it’s under attack. Even finding these stupid missions can be a pest as they’re scattered around the world, and once you are a few levels above them they give you no XP. So if you need to keep up with the game’s level curve (lest you be punished by health sponge enemies), then you’ll need to quick travel to an area. Then possibly go to a new area from there. Then run to a bulletin board. So that you can pick up a quest that sucks. It’s just not a very well paced game, and even for a mindless shooter there’s so much downtime.

There are some design decisions that are questionable, like co-op making the game harder but these can be hand-waved away or at least justified. Yet the moment to moment gameplay feels at odds with itself. You want to shoot the dudes, but then you need to loot the dudes. So you need to open the inventory screen and faff around there. Then you need to slowly trundle towards the next objective. So that the game can give you another objective. Then another one. So that you can complete a quest that doesn’t give you enough XP. Meaning you need to run to a fast travel station and then fast travel to somewhere near another quest. That will involve shooting dudes, and looting the dudes, and looking at your inventory… and so on. It’s just a tedious game and I have to give credit to Borderlands 3 for improving on it.

In conclusion, I’ve run out of things to say and ways to re-iterate the main point. Namely the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a pretty boring game. It doesn’t change much, and essentially feels like Borderlands 2 again. Which will be great for some people. I shudder to imagine who those people are, but they must exist. As for everyone else, if you want a co-op game look elsewhere. At the very least grab Borderlands 3 or Tiny Tina’s D&D styled mini-campaign before picking up Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

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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.

The post Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep & SHBGH DLC Double-Bill appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

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.

The post Borderlands 2 DLC Double-Bill: Torgue & Captain Scarlet appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Duke Nukem Forever is a game that wears it’s heart on it’s sleeve and that successfully brings across the sheer madcap insanity of the Duke in all of his cheesy, 80’s action star glory. It’s a game with endless one-liners, dumb set pieces, larger than life characters and a constant inability to take itself seriously. Aside from the gratuitous amount of movie references, Duke Nukem Forever also takes the time out of it’s busy schedule to throw in endless little references towards other games including Half Life, Call of Duty and Halo.

Alongside the references the game has also spent a surprising, if not downright overwhelming amount of it’s time on creating interactive elements within the levels. While these are mostly concentrated in the earlier half of the game, they include fully functional vending machines, drinking fountains, microwaves and microwavable popcorn, nudie calendars, dumbbells, flushable toilets and a whole lot more. There are even multiple fully functional mini-games, including Air Hockey, “Alien Abortion” (whack-a-mole), One Armed Bandits and even an entire pinball table. It’s clear that the developers spent a lot of time figuring out ways to let Duke piss around with his environment and honestly it really helps to develop the game’s cavalier attitude towards itself. While having one or two of these interactive elements would be amusing, having so many of them is one of the admittedly rare areas in which this game shines.

Unfortunately this isn’t Duke Nukem’s Farting Around Simulator (DNFAS) and is instead meant to be the heroic return of the eponymous Duke after over a decade spent in developer hell. Sadly, Duke Nukem Forever is thoroughly mediocre and has been saddled with a Monster Truck’s worth of baffling design decisions which were the hottest trend at the time of release. The game does feature the return of The Ripper and the Devastator alongside a shrink gun and freeze ray, but these weapons are significantly handicapped by the amount of ammo that Duke can carry at one time, which is embarrassingly small (I’m sure he would just say he’s too cold…). This choice is then compounded by the fact that you can only carry 2 weapons at a time, which means that the game has to shove conveniently placed Infinite Ammo crates at every location in which you have to face off against hordes of enemies at a time. Much like the abrupt appearance of a multitude of chest high walls in Gears of War, the sudden appearance of multiple rocket launchers and ammo crates is a vivid sign of impending carnage.

And it’s these rocket launchers which best reveal the true issue of this new system, because you can only harm boss enemies with turrets and explosives. But you can only carry 5 rockets at a time, and most bosses require closer to 20+ rockets when you’re playing on the Normal difficulty setting. As such you spend the majority of every boss fight running around, looking for more ammo and occasionally glancing at the boss to make sure you’re not about to get blasted because you haven’t been looking at them. It’s honestly a shame because these boss fights are some of the few encounters in the game that actually require some form of positioning and, for want of a better term, strategy. That’s not so say that’re massively complicated, but they each have their own quirks and they are much, much more enjoyable than the rest of the game’s decidedly humdrum combat encounters.

Which is the main issue I have with Duke Nukem Forever, as it’s a pretty basic FPS experience with rare flashes of inspiration but the tedium of most of it’s combat encounters is too much for even Jon St. John to carry. Due to engine limitations, you only ever fight a small number of enemies at any one time and as a consequence combat encounters will often have 3 enemies spawn in, then you shoot them, then another 3 enemies spawn in, so you shoot them too, then another 3 spawn in by bursting open a hitherto locked door. Then you can proceed through that new entrance for 30 seconds before you get jumped by 2 enemies, who you gun down, so that another 3 enemies can spawn in… and so on and so forth for the better part of 6 hours. Now this limitation in and of itself wouldn’t be a deal breaker, as I personally enjoyed Doom (2016) and that game had a similar problem – albeit with more enemies on screen at once. Unfortunately Duke Nukem Forever tries to balance this lacklustre amount of enemies on screen at once by making Duke surprisingly brittle, as most enemies can do a large amount of damage to the Duke. This would add some challenge to the game but Duke Nukem Forever also has a generic regenerating health system… so what it really means is that you shoot 3 guys, then wait for Duke’s health to regenerate, then shoot the next 3 guys… and so on and so forth.

To be fair, this regenerating health system is called “Ego” and gels nicely with the previously mentioned farting around, as Duke gains an increase to his maximum health by messing around with the environment. This means that it’s in your interest to play the mini-games, sign autographs for fans and slap the alien wall titties.

But even this silliness can’t mask the fact that Duke Nukem Forever is a 7th generation console FPS masquerading as something more than it is. Not only does the game have a limited amount of enemies on screen at a time, and not only are you limited to two weapons at a time, but even the enemy pool is pretty shallow and as such you spend most of the game fighting the same handful of enemies at a time. You’ve got the Assault Troopers with laser guns and jetpacks, the slightly tankier Assault Trooper Commander variant that quickly replaces them and that can teleport (which just makes them annoying to deal with), Pigcops in all their glory who can wield pistols, shotguns, machine guns and RPGs or be berserkers with janky melee animations, the Octabrains who are floating jerks that throw stuff at you or blast you with psychic energy, and the Reptilian Enforcers who have powerful-ish guns that fire homing rockets and occasionally have large metal shields. This is basically it, with most levels having either some Assault Troopers/Commanders or Octabrains (depending on how far into the campaign you are), a bunch of Pigcops and then a couple of Enforcers thrown in when the game is trying to be a bit more challenging. There are also Octolings who are tiny, non-flying versions of the Octabrains that try to swarm you alongside the big fat Assault Commander (essentially a giant pigcop with their bottom half replaced with a metal floation device and helicopter blades), but these enemies are both relatively rare.

Making the enemies even more of a chore, not only does Duke have regenerating health, a small health pool, only 2 weapons at a time with limited ammo pools and a small amount of enemies at a time to fight but he also has to contend with some hit-scan attacks and weird spawning locations. As mentioned earlier, the game doesn’t like to spawn in too many enemies at a time as this game also had to run on the PS3 and Xbox 360, neither of which could handle the sheer unadulterated carnage that having more than a handful of enemies on screen at once would cause. Due to this multiplatform handicap, the game spawns enemies in small groups, but these gaggles of baddies really can spawn in at the most inopportune of timings. Sometimes the Octalings will get stuck on a piece of level geometry and thus the swarm of them (a whole dozen) will become a trickle as they gradually unstuck themselves, or sometimes an Assault Trooper Captain will teleport behind you while the next two spawn in. Generally it means that the only challenge these enemies pose is the fact that they have messed up spawn patterns, making it hard to tell when an encounter is over or has at least entered the next phase. When you combine this fact with the Pigcops amazing ability to utilise hit-scan weapons, which then make Duke flinch and thus waste a limited shot on his Shotgun or Railgun which has limited ammo as it is (and long reload animations because who doesn’t love reloading and iron-sights???), while making the screen flash red most of these combat encounters are just… kind of annoying. I can count the amount of times I died in normal combat encounters across the entire game on one hand, but counting the amount of times I was annoyed at the sheer bitchiness of the AI would be near impossible.

To break up the monotony of these fights, the game does at least have a few sections which don’t involve slowly plodding through brown-and-grey environments so that you can gun down the latest triad of the same enemies you’ve been fighting for the rest of the game. Sometimes it livens things up with a… TURRET SECTION!!! I’m not really sure where Gearbox got their enthusiasm for these from, but there are more of them than different types of enemies in this game so I hope you enjoy them. Sometimes you’re shooting space ships, sometimes you’re shooting pigcops and sometimes you’re shooting both, but either way you had best be prepared for them. Fortunately to prevent things from getting too exciting, they always have a cool-down mechanic in which if you shoot too much your gun overheats. Sadly this cool-down bar is pretty aggressive and as such you need to be quite careful with your shooting lest you become a sitting duck.

Aside from boss fights, farting around with the environment and the occasional frequent turret sections the last major way that the game breaks up the sluggish combat encounters is with a big-ass monster truck. This is exactly the sort of thing that the game needs to be more enjoyable, but unfortunately these sections are flawed. Now don’t get me wrong, running over those lame enemies in my big truck was amusing but sadly there are a few issues with them. First and foremost is the fact that they are kinda short, all clustered together within the story and are frequently handicapped by a recurring gag that Duke’s monster truck has poor gas mileage, so you need to hop out of your kickass monster truck and go back to shooting the bad guys on foot. The second issue is that the physics are kind of janky (a fact that is unlikely to surprise Borderlands fans) and so I found myself needing to reposition myself and by extension my truck more often than I would’ve expected. Lastly the truck suffers from having a really, really annoying engine noise when you’re at max speed which I won’t be able to illustrate fully with my limited verbiage, but suffice it to say that it sounds like they cut 2 seconds of revving a moped and put it on a loop.

One last thing that the game seems to really, really enjoy doing is introducing shrinking sections wherein Duke is made to be tiny and must navigate an otherwise unremarkable level albeit with the handicap of being made tiny. Now I’d be willing to count these sections as being an attempt to break up the monotony of the rest of the game, where it not for the fact that they play exactly like the rest of the game. In fact the only way they differ is that you now get attacked by rats, which made me hate the furry little bastards while playing as regular sized Duke. Oh and that now regular enemies are considerably more dangerous as you deal way less damage and they can stomp you, but these encounters are fairly rare (I think they happen like twice) and so most of the tiny duke sections basically function as platforming puzzle sections. I wish I could say more about these parts of the game, but they’re just kinda… meh and so I don’t have anything to add.

With all that being said, Duke Nukem Forever isn’t a terrible game. In fact it’s not even the worst I’ve reviewed thus far (a dubious honour that belongs to Legendary, at least for now). It does have it’s charms and while the enemies are limited in both quantity and AI it is still a functional FPS game that is smart enough to try and keep things from getting stale. You’ll blast through some combat encounters, then hit a turret section, then hit an abrupt platforming section before having to deal with a mini-boss or normal boss. Then you’ll start moving forwards, only to need to interact with the environment in a certain way to proceed before a combat encounter begins, which then leads to a vehicle section. The game is perfectly capable of keeping itself moving along and at introducing new abilities, enemies or weapons. It even gives you Steroids and lets you punch the enemy NPCs so hard that they explode into meaty chunks! But even writing about this while attempting to remain balanced can’t help me deal with the fact that while these are all cool ideas, they aren’t implemented very well. It’s all serviceable, but even those Steroids are quite rare and as you’re stuck in melee-mode while using them they obviously suck for encounters dealing with enemies that are out of reach (or the vehicle sections, or the turret sections, or the boss sections…)

As such Duke Nukem Forever is a game that’s hard to recommend in spite of the fact that it’s arguably the peak of the bargain-bin FPS “genre”. It’s a game that really does a good job of capturing the essence of the Duke, largely thanks to a great performance by Jon St John, but even with plenty of variety and good voice-acting the game itself is just so mediocre in the areas where it matters most. The FPS combat isn’t good and no amount of quipping can distract from this. Normally I’d complain when a game is short, but much like with Legendary the brevity of the campaign is a blessing as it ensures that only the memories of the game’s highlights really remain. Therefore my final recommendation relies on a simple question, do you already like Duke Nukem? If the answer is yes, then suffer through a mediocre FPS campaign to spend some quality time with the Duke. If you haven’t played any other Duke Nukem games, then start with Duke Nukem 3D and then consider playing through some of his earlier PC and PS1 appearances before even considering this one.

The post Duke Nukem Forever appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

I’ll make one confession at the start of this review, and that is that I didn’t really enjoy Borderlands 1 or 2 as they were frankly, tedious to play through. The combat was riddled with bullet sponge enemies, the loot-able weapons were often fairly similar to each other (and most of them sucked), picking up every piece of ammo and cash one-by-one was boring but ignoring all that money and ammo made life harder for you. Your abilities were often a bit underwhelming and the “Fight for your Life” feature was hit-or-miss (at least in single-player mode) as it depended on relatively weak enemies charging you while you bled out. They honestly felt like a slog through occasionally pretty but often brown-and-grey areas filled with the same enemies over and over and over while you traipsed from one cluster of glorified corridors to another. The only respite coming in the form of painful dialogue which was yelled at you by various characters who were universally annoying and had an appalling sense of humour. As such I went into Borderlands 3 with a bit of hesitation, but it’s quick descent down to bargain bin prices and the fact that it was one of very few PS4/Xbone games to offer local split-screen made me hold my breath as I prepared to dive into yet another Gearbox branded septic tank.

So you can imagine my surprise when I actually felt that Borderlands 3 was a perfectly playable game, even if the split-screen dream was dashed on impact when I tried it with a friend and we found the FPS to be bad, really bad. Normally I don’t care about this as I played a lot of games on the N64, where excessive amounts of fog and FPS dips to the low-teens were commonplace – but even by those standards Borderlands 3 on the “base” Xbone and PS4 was a disaster. Frequent FPS dips from a mediocre base coupled with big visual downgrades, aggressive amounts of texture pop-in and tiny mission text lead to an honestly bewildering first couple of hours as we struggled to see where the baddies where or what the hell we were meant to be doing. For better or worse my friend conceded that the game was shit and stopped wanting to play after about 5 hours (well, he was semi-coaxed with fun tales of Randy Pitchford’s mishaps and then eventually decided that I could deal with my own dumb purchase) so I played the remaining 30 or so hours by myself.

Ironically enough, Borderlands 3 actually opens around around 5 or 6 hours in so what he experienced was the worst part of the game. Once you’ve gained some levels and thus some perk points, each class starts to get more distinct and similarly, once you’ve gained some levels the potential power-level of the loot drops increase enabling you to actually use weapons that are fun, relatively unique and pack a punch. These weapons and abilities then let you tear through most enemies, especially once you reach the mid-game when you have “Legendary” tier weapons and a solid method of playing that takes advantage of your abilities. For me it was the robot FL4K, who could turn invisible and had a gunslinging monkey companion that was able to distract enemies and revive me when I got riddled with bullets. As for the weapons, I mainly used Jakobs guns (each of the 10 in-game gun brands have different specialities, with Jakobs having less ammo but higher damage per shot for example) as it combined great with my ability to disappear and rack up a bunch of free critical hits as everyone shot at my little monkey friend – but don’t call PETA just yet – as he was a tanky bugger and basically only got hurt during boss fights.

Initially when I was playing with my good friend we were baffled by the decision to have big, open levels that often had relatively little to do in them – but once you reach the mid game this design choice becomes clear. Not only does it give each map enough space to include a range of content – some of which only unlocks later in the story, hence our confusion. It ranges from shooting the baddies to tracking down weapon chests to utilising the upgraded movement mechanics to hunt for glorified audio-logs and parts for Claptrap (the perennially annoying robot companion/mascot who was ALMOST endearing this time). It also lets you hang around a map when you want to grind through respawning enemies, as you can circle through each zone killing everything in your path or redo a boss fight to gain some better weapons. Although it’s worth noting that until you beat the game these areas are still tied to the level of the local boss, so if you really enjoyed a zone it’s a bit one-and-done until the main quest line has been cleared.

Fortunately Borderlands 3 is less grind-heavy then previous games in the series as most main missions are structured so that you should be around the right level once you’ve finished the previous one. As such I only had to stoop down to side-missions a few times, at which point I realised that they actually put effort into them! They had about the same amount of dialogue and action as the normal missions, but were (almost) entirely optional and thus you could do them all at once or just ignore as many as you could get away with. The game therefore does a decent job at pacing itself, even if you spend around 10 hours or so thinking the final boss fight is going to be just around the corner which was my only real gripe with the main story missions.

What made this perpetual teasing from the antagonists irritating wasn’t so much the fact that the game had another neat new area with some new enemies to show-off, nor was it the fact that these new areas felt bare-bones or had only been added to pad the game out. No, each zone actually feels about equivalent and honestly the game having MORE content of the same decent quality than I would have expected is not an issue. The issue is the fact that you fight through an area for an hour or two over a couple missions chasing the antagonists, then the game fades to a cutscene that your character isn’t in so you can watch the side characters get absolutely wrecked as the Antagonists blow you a big raspberry and escape to the next area. It makes sense that everyone else treats your character with respect, as everyone else is unfathomably useless and seem to exist to get bullied relentlessly (or just outright murdered) over the course of the story. Fortunately I didn’t grow too attached as they do absolutely nothing, so watching them get picked off one-by-one like dumb teenagers in a horror movie when the player via Daddy (or Mommy) vault-hunter was absent just felt cathartic more than anything.

The story itself has a surprisingly amount of attention paid to it, with about 30 minutes of cinematics and plenty of dialogue going on. Normally these audio transmissions would be a boring irrelevance, but the game does a decent job of hinting at things in them that end up getting revealed slightly later (including the origin of the antagonists) so more engaged players can find them… dare I say? Engrossing. Plus existing fans of the series will be pleasantly surprised by how many existing characters make a return, with most of the formerly playable characters and a raft of previous side characters appearing. Even characters from Tales From the Borderlands and the Pre-Sequel spin-offs get to take part in the love-in, which was a nice touch that even I was able to appreciate.

Honestly the biggest issue with the game’s main quest line was that because it had so, so many areas and enemies the final couple of bosses ended up being a joke. I practically broke the final boss as it was meant to be in phases, with each phase representing one third of the bosses health bar. This was a good idea in principle, but thanks to my guaranteed critical hits and stupidly powerful rocket launcher I went from phase to phase to phase without ever really being in danger. The final boss basically spent 70% of the fight staggered and on it’s knees, while spending another 20% or so of the fight being invincible as it switched phases.

And I think that honestly sums up Borderlands 3 pretty well in hindsight, as it’s a big flashy adventure wherein the player grows more and more powerful while the enemies struggle to keep up. I wouldn’t call it an RPG, but the sense of progression will be familiar to anyone who has ever played an ARPG like Diablo 2 or Titan Quest. You kill the dudes to maybe get a better item and even if they refuse to drop anything good, at least you got more XP and Gold which you can use for new perk points and the ability to outright buy better equipment from vending machines. Plus the fact that the final boss was a cakewalk only underscored my suspicion that this is a game that is slightly too long for it’s own good, even if the quality never dips once you get past the sluggish start.

Last but not least I’ll briefly touch on a few miscellaneous changes this game has made that makes it better than Borderlands 1 & 2. Firstly and most gratifyingly this game has replaced the hitherto disgusting amount of memes with some cute enemies that function as references to other media. I won’t pretend that I encountered all (or even most of them) but from my own experience I can confirm that you can gun down Penn & Teller, Rick & Morty and the Power Rangers.

It also collects some of the rarer items that you are forced to leave behind on the map once your backpack is full, so there is a bit less pressure to sort through your inventory mid-quest. The UI is still a bit sluggish but tracking new quests is less of a Sisyphean task and if you are so inclined you can now view weapons and items up close and in detail. The home hub ship of Sanctuary is pleasant enough and has multiple vendors and slot machines in a relatively compact space so you spend less time bouncing around from store to store and you don’t have to worry about finding a use for your cash. Perhaps most importantly, you can now vault over chest high barriers and/or onto ledges(!) This new feature is then embraced by a few optional collectibles and strategically placed weapon chests which encourage you to make the most of it. Last but certainly not least, the maps are much more varied than in BL1 and more interesting than they were in BL2, so wandering around each zone has it’s own charm (even if jogging through an area you’ve already been in half a dozen times as the enemies respawn is still a bit boring).

In summary Borderlands 3 is a surprisingly solid upgrade over the previous games in the series and is worth picking up if you just want a relatively mindless FPS game that doesn’t take itself too seriously and has a ton of content. Basically every aspect of the game from the writing, to the moment to moment combat, to the character abilities and pacing has been improved. It’s such an improvement that if Gearbox ever releases a definitive GOTY edition with all the expansion packs (6 as of time of writing) then I might just pick it up. Considering that Borderlands 1 was one of my most anticipated and then subsequently disappointing gaming experiences, this is high praise indeed. It’s just a shame that the co-op experience is so weak on the base PS4/Xbone, but at least it’s there unlike 99% of triple-A games.

The post Borderlands 3 appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.