Late to the Party Video Game Review: Borderlands The Pre-Sequel

                The Borderlands franchise is probably my second favorite game franchise (right next to Mass Effect).  Naturally, when The Pre-Sequel came out, knowing that it was going to most likely be the final Borderlands game for this console generation, I had to pick it up.  The first Borderlands was great, the second was one of the single best games I have ever played.  The best thing about the franchise has to be the fact that you get so much for your money when it comes to content.  Not only are there multiple characters to choose from, making replaying the game fully justified every time, but the simple fact that the length of the game itself, even before the DLC is factored in, is massive makes it one of the best values in gaming.

                Naturally, I was hoping for more of the same with The Pre-Sequel.  To ensure the maximum amount of content available, I even obtained the “season pass” to ensure that I would have the DLC as soon as it was released.  In the past, this was never a waste of money and I was convinced that it would not be this time.  In terms of DLC, two of the season pass offerings are the “Handsome Jack Doppleganger Pack” and Sir Hammerlock's Sister, which are both playable characters.  While this is all well and good, I do not purchase a DLC pack with the thought that it will contain characters.  I want content.  I want to purchase missions, and levels and more things to play with, not just a new character when there are already four playable characters available.  There are also two "missions" that revolve around shooting wave after wave of bad guy in hopes of leveling up.  This is just a cop-out.  I don't pay extra money, basically the cost of another game, in order to have these bogus "missions".  There is one story mission that was released revolving around Claptrap, everyone's favorite hunk of junk robot, but upon downloading it recently, I was informed that I needed to update the game to play it, and was never offered the opportunity to update the game, making it a waste.  Believe me, if I knew that this was what the Season Pass would have entailed, I would have left that on the rack.  

                Okay, now on to the game itself.  Everything you have come to love about Borderlands, the design, the humor, it is all there.  There is less of it as this game is decidedly shorter than its counterparts, but it’s there.  The writing is very good and does a great job of fitting in between the two previous games (this game takes place before Borderlands Two, hence the Pre-Sequel).  There are quite a few nods to things that happen in Borderlands Two, and how they got that way.  My favorite has to be the scientist that shoots a Thresher (a worm-like creature that was the bane of my existence in Borderlands Two) from Elpis, the setting of this game, to the planet below, all so they can terrorize me in the future (past).  Those little in-jokes to the longtime players are what kept me going through a lot of stale missions. 

                That is one thing that I can honestly say I was not impressed by compared to the previous games.  The missions were boring.  I am the kind of guy, especially when it comes to Borderlands games, that likes to complete every side mission, to level up as much as possible before I head in to the finale.  This game was no different, but more often than not I found myself not wanting to complete a mission because I just couldn’t be bothered to go on another “fetch quest”, or to think that I had completed a mission only to be told that something else had broken in a machine I was supposed to fix so I need to go back out for yet another part.  It was like going grocery shopping with someone with ADHD.  It got to the point where, when I completed a goal, and it actually finished the mission, it surprised the hell out of me.  I didn’t even finish all of the side missions as I could not bring myself to do all of the driving missions.  I have always hated the timed, or driving missions in Borderlands games, and this was no different.  Instead of struggling through them, I just skipped those missions altogether this time around.

                The mechanics are all the same as you would remember in a Borderlands game.  The only new thing is the lack of gravity in certain areas, which leads to your jumps taking you further and giving you the ability to butt-slam.  I played the entire game and butt-slammed once, it’s no big deal as far as I’m concerned.  Being on the moon also leads to a lack of oxygen when you’re outside, but given the abundance of oxygen vents and air canisters, I was rarely lacking oxygen anyway.  The only other innovation was the inclusion of laser weapons, which, I honestly only used when necessary.  I beat the game with a shotgun, that’s about it.  I will say that the bosses were a lot more difficult this time around than they were in the last two games, but that could be because of the fact that I failed to complete all of the side missions this time around.

                Overall, the game was fun, but it failed to live up to its predecessors.  I wanted more than anything for this to be Borderlands Two,  but it wound up feeling like a bunch of DLC missions put out between the two games to further the story.  I hope that a second playthrough does more to instill confidence in me, but if this is the last Borderlands game I play (I do not own, nor will I purchase a next-gen console) I am severely unimpressed.

Comic Review - Borderlands Origins: Roland

            I, like most other people that enjoy video games (look at the sales numbers, it’s true), love Borderlands.  I am not a FPS guy for the most part.  Tried Call of Duty, couldn’t get into it.  Haven’t even touched Halo yet.  Borderlands though?  Loved it.  I picked up the original in a bargain bin for probably $20 and couldn’t stop playing it.  The visuals were incredible, the story had just enough to move things along without being intrusive and getting in the way of the real fun; shooting bad guys and picking up loot.  Borderlands 2 was just as good if not better.  Hell, I’m only part of the way into it and I can already see a better story with great characters and humor that you rarely find in videogames. 

            When you take a videogame that I think so highly of, and then tell me that there is going to be a comic book created using the setting and characters, that is the point that I push all my chips to the center of the table.  I was “all in” for a Borderlands comic book, especially since the Mass Effect comics by Dark Horse were so well done.  IDW does a pretty decent job with licensed content as well (Transformers and Ghostbusters are two that come to mind as some of the best licensed comics of recent memory) so I was very optimistic about this endeavor going into it.

Cover:

            And then I saw the cover.  It is just plain boring.  A stoic shot of the title character?  Okay, I guess that works thematically because the book centers on Roland, but there is a distinct lack of dynamism in the image itself.  He is just standing there, holding a smoking gun, that’s it.  Hell, you can’t even see anything below his mid-thigh.  The bounty hunters from the first game (which I assume this “origins” series will be exploring in detail) are touted as some bad-ass individuals.  You’re telling me that you couldn’t come up with an image of him killing a Skag, or something a little more than just “generic shot of title character”?

            One of the things that I enjoy the most about the video game series is the art and graphics.  They are equal parts realistic but with a cartoony edge because of the particular cell-shading technique used.  Instead of using that technique, Augustin Padilla just draws it how someone from 1994 would and Esther Sanz colors it with just a wave of her muddy brush. 

2/10 - This could have been done better, and has been done better in the games themselves.  The logo is nice and clear, but that was obviously created by the video game guys too (why didn’t they just let them handle the book?).

Story:

            The story itself was written by Mikey Neumann, the creative director for the games.  This is great that they were able to get someone on board that had a hand in the creation of the games, and obviously Neumann knows more of the backstory of these characters than just some random writer off the street.  The story itself, however, is very generic.  I realize that Roland, as kick-ass as he may be as a playable character in the game, is relatively generic himself.  He is basically a rogue soldier, something that we have seen many times before.  Why does he go rogue though?  Well that is something that this comic is going to explain.  I realize that they only had one issue to do this, and they really do pack a bit into the allotted pages, but there could have been so much more done with this storyline than the basic “Roland got set up by a higher up in the organization, his team was killed and he was left for dead”.  Yawn.  Give me more conspiracy theory, give me more backhanded deals, give me something different than I have seen time and time again. 

            If you are going to do a basic plot like this, you have to give something extra, something to make it your own.  The Lord of the Rings, you may have heard of it, is basically just a quest story where instead of searching for the macguffin, they are trying to dispose of it, but Tolkien made it his own by expounding on the relationships, the dynamic in the group and by raising the stakes of failure to astronomical levels.  I realize that we are dealing with a twenty-four page comic book here and not a three novel epic, but this can be done on a smaller scale too.  Make me care about Roland and his team so that when they are killed it resonates with me.  Don’t just assume that I care about Roland because he was my character during my first playthrough of the original game (he was). 

           

            There are certain beats in the dialogue that do not make a whole lot of sense either.  The character Scraps on Roland’s team seemed to be starting a fight with Roland, and then five pages later (in the same scene, mind you) he is defending Roland, ready to tear his teammate’s head off for questioning their leader.  I wonder how this was not caught by the writer on his read-through, or at the very least by the editor. 

2/10 – Overall the dialogue feels about as wooden and lifeless as the rest of the plot.  There is so much potential and to have it go unrealized is a shame. 

Art:

            If you like the art of the games themselves, you will probably be highly disappointed by the art of the comic book.  The art feels as generic as the story which is sad considering how the art of game was so much different than pretty much anything on the market at the time.  The art of the game was bright, vibrant and detailed while the art here just looks like a something out of early 90s Extreme studios.  I’m not saying the art is terrible in and of itself, but when you are expecting something that looks at least similar to the video game and you get something else entirely, it can be quite disappointing. 

           

            The art itself can be hard to understand at times too, especially on the page where apparently everyone dies.  However we do not see them really die, and the camera angle flips so at first I thought that it was just a firefight with both sides receiving casualties instead of the massacre that it apparently turns out to be. 

This page is all kinds of confusing.  Which would make a little sense if it was an actual battle and not just a slaughter.

First you have the stiff, generic shot of the main character, then you have a plot device written plainly for everyone to see.  Is this a matter of bad writing or the writer having to condense ideas to fit the page requirements?

Who tailors suits to get wider when they hit the forearms? This is why you never see Popeye in anything but short sleeve shirts, because this makes no sense.

            I do like the design of the rhinoceros-looking creatures, though I am not sure whether Padilla designed those or someone else.  Regardless, he pulls off the stampede scene well by filling the page with the creatures, heightening the fear of being crushed by those massive creatures.

This is a cool panel, even if it does feel a bit Lion King-ish with the whole being led into a stampede plotline.

2/10 – This could have been so much better if they had just gone with a different style that mimicked the game more.  Other than that I am not too high on Padilla’s art and storytelling ability  anyway.

Overall: 2/10 – The groundwork was there for this to be an incredible supplement to some of the best games of this console generation.  I blame the one-issue format for some of the writing issues, having to try and condense Roland’s origin instead of giving it a little more leg room to get us interested, but ultimately the whole thing misses its mark.  It did make me want to go and play the game though, so good job with that.