EXPLOSIONS????
I finished Mr. Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage add-on for Borderlands 2 last night. It was a lot of wild, over-the-top fun, up to (but not including) the big fight at the end against the Badassasaurus Rex and your ultimate foe. This is because, for all the things the Borderlands team does right, they really suck at making interesting solo boss fights.
It’s a thing that can one-punch you. With area effect attacks. Which you can’t effectively dodge. In the middle of a large, open, completely empty and featureless arena. The strategy for soloing any boss in Borderlands is “Get killed so you respawn just outside the fighting zone, find the one corner the boss can’t hit you but you can just snipe at them, stand in it and plink away until they die ten minutes later.” It’s not fun, it’s not exciting, it’s just grindy.
It was particularly disappointing in the case of the Badassasaurus because it was such a visually nifty boss– I wanted to be able to see it while I fought it! But no. Because if I could see it, that meant I didn’t have enough cover, and got one-punched. Sigh.
But I don’t want to harp too much on that, because the rest of Mr. Torgue was all the best stuff Borderlands has to offer: action, a lot of loot-and-level fun, and wry satire/spoof that goes from being smirkingly humorous to break-your-furniture funny.
On finishing that, I started the third add-on, Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt, but so far I can’t say I’m impressed. As charming as Hammerlock himself is (“That’s just a bit of ribald humor for you. Ha, ha! Quite ribald.”), the whole “white guys vs. savages with some Heart of Darkness riffs” thing is way too creepy for me to enjoy. Also, there’s a really huge and annoying difficulty spike, in the form of the “witch doctor” enemies that buff their allies, insta-heal upgrade them to tougher versions just as they’re about to die, and do piles of damage to you, all simultaneously. Even the random encounter wandering-monster types have huge hit points and do tons of damage; I’m guessing the developers were like “Oh, you think the game was too easy, eh? TAKE THIS! Heheheheheh!”
Ugh. If Torgue has all the good stuff from Borderlands, Big Game Hunt seems to have all the worst. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to sustain my interest in it long enough to finish; what I might do is go back to the regular story and finish getting up to the level cap, then come back and power through BGH at +5 levels over, just to get through it.
-The Gneech
