Borderlands is a game we really got into on first release, quickly leveling up our Siren (Linda) and Soldier (Steven) in our first playthrough of the story, then starting over to hit Level 50, the original level cap. Then the DLC came out, we lapped up Dr Ned and then waited for the next installment. Along came Mad Moxxi and disaster struck.. the save file for my Level 50 Soldier corrupted. For a while this put us off playing but eventually I started up another Soldier and got him to Level 20 in short order. We then used him as a seed for the Arena events backed up by Linda’s level 50 siren and often joined by Ghost World and Finley666. However that DLC has some serious issues that made the gameplay very frustrating, outside of the lack of XP and second rate weapons drops. If anyone dropped out of the session due to an internet blip, there was no way to get them back in and you had to drop out of what could have been 45 minutes work and start over. That’s just never going to be fun on any level. And so our interest in the game wavered, even though we had bought the next DLC, Secret Armoury, we never actually got to it as we were holding back my soldiers advancement so we could eventually get through the arenas.
Time passed. The game, which had gone from a single copy to two when we got the second Xbox lay unused. We’d dropped the cost of two Discs and two copies of all the DLC into this franchise and had not gotten the most out of it.
And so it was this last weekend we decided it might be time to go all the way, skipping the arena DLC so we both started up new characters. Linda again went Siren (if you are only going to put one female character in your game that really limits things guys #sidenote) and this time I chose Hunter. We had begun right back at the beginning, and struggled to remember how to play for the first few levels. Odd how it seems to take longer to re-learn a game than to originally learn it. And despite the time that’s passed that game is still a whole pile of fun. The art style does just enough to keep it looking good despite coming straight from playing something like the tour de force of LA Noire’s engine. The loot based carrot method of progression is something we are perfectly happy with though we have struggled more this time as without the ammo resupply capabilities of the Soldier we are running low all the time.
On top of this there is also the latest DLC Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution that we don’t own at present which is also meant to be good so it could be this next month will see us finally get the full story of Borderlands and have a great many hours of fun together doing so.
Watch us, we’re dancing!
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