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IGN Preview of Borderlands 2
I was blasting past loader robots in Borderlands 2 when a fire thresher attacked. This flaming squid-like beast burst through the ground and whipped its tentacles at me and my co-op partner, then dove underground to reposition. Every time it emerged and murderously flailed its appendages, I fired back, destroying individual tentacles, reducing its writhing tangle of fire into something resembling a Blooper from Super Mario Bros. A few final shots to its body and it went down and spilled loot, as is the rule in Gearbox's Diablo-like first-person shooter sequel.
Enemy behavior seems to be a lot more sophisticated this time around, whether it's a fire thresher or packs of smaller, more swiftly dispatched enemies. Like Diablo they attack in big groups. By combining varying attack patterns into one assault wave Gearbox ensures it's difficult to get bored.
Take the aforementioned loader robots, for example, bipedal machines that lumber around the battlefield bristling with weapons. They don't die as you blast of pieces of their bodies, instead stumbling toward you, armless, practically helpless, but still determined to end your existence. In a slice of Borderlands 2 shown at a preview event, rarely was there only one type of loader on the battlefield. Some assault you with colossal should-mounted guns, some crouch down and charge you at high speed, and some wander around with wide-reaching blades spinning in front of them. Shoot the blades and your bullet will reflect right back, forcing you to try and find a way to flank or aim carefully, not an entirely simple task considering the usual chaos on the battlefield.
Skags from the first game return. Some simply charge, and some more powerful 'badass' versions tower over your character's head and crackle with electricity, tagging you at long-range by vomiting up spheres of lightning. Other fanged beasts skitter across the ground at high speed, leaping when they get close, turning invisible to throw off your aim, and retreating and regrouping if you manage to withstand their initial assault.
This means, at least in the areas shown so far, that motion is much more important to survival. Standing still and pressing the trigger isn't going to result in any kind of success. Enemies will swarm, lunge, retreat, circle around behind you and generally require you to make more decisions per moment to survive. Do you have an elemental weapon better suited to take on that corrosive-type skag at close range? Is it time to throw that grenade with the pulsing fire damage because you know the target enemies are going to stay still for a few seconds? Is it safe to hide behind that rock to regenerate your shields? Has your action skill cooldown expired so you can phaselock the highest threat on the battlefield? Is your Gunzerker partner paying attention and ready to focus fire on the phaselocked enemy to kill it and trigger a group health regeneration effect?
It's a weird word, phaselock, but an exceptionally useful skill. Available to the reworked Siren class, a phaselock suspends a target, helpless, in mid-air for a brief period of time. This serves two purposes initially: disabling the target and making it easy to shoot. By investing in the Siren's skill tree, phaselocking becomes a much more versatile skill.
As you quest and kill across the world of Pandora, you level up and earn skill points. Not every skill can be learned by the time you hit the level cap, but you can fill out quite a bit of a class' three skill trees. With the proper upgrades, phaselocking can create an explosion of fire, replenish your health, root other nearby enemies to the ground, give a percent chance another enemy could be phaselocked, revive friendly players, and cause enemies to switch allegiance and fight amongst themselves. One of the end tier skills even adds an extra degree of control to the phaselock, letting you slam an affected enemy into the ground like a bomb, damaging anything nearby.
The Siren can be customized to play better as a healer or damage dealer, and has numerous crowd control bonuses aside from the obvious benefits of phaselocking. Contrasting that is the Gunzerker, who's more about inflicting harm and tanking, with skills that allow him to bolster reload speed, swiftly replenish ammunition, and increase accuracy. His primary action skill, where he can temporarily use any two weapons at the same time – a rocket launcher and a pistol, a shotgun and a machine gun, two sniper rifles, whatever you have available – can further be modified to reduce its cooldown, boost movement speed, and taunt enemies to your position. Basically, with the right build, it seems like the Gunzerker can be played so he's frequently dual-wielding, regenerating ammunition and health the whole time.
Most know Borderlands has a lot of guns. Borderlands 2 has more than the first, and the amount of detail on each model is incredible considering how many weapons are in this game, and how each weapons could potentially have so many variants. From revolvers to assault rifles you'll find weapons with different elemental damage types, firing rates, magazine sizes, round types, reload speed and a lot more. Some weapons don't even reload, you just throw them away after emptying the magazine and magically pull another from your belt.
Assuming the skill trees of the other two classes, the Assassin and Commando, aren't horrible, and assuming the rest of Borderlands 2's pacing and encounter design match what's been shown so far, it's very likely Gearbox's shooter could turn out to be better than the first. It includes all the loot-driven mania of Borderlands, seemingly better class, enemy and weapons design and, hopefully, a more developed story. Of course if you didn't enjoy running around shooting stuff and opening treasure chests (which, by the way, have all-new great-but-unnecessarily complicated opening animations in Borderlands 2) in search of some ideal weapon set, then you're probably not going to like this game, either. This is a loot-driven experience, through and through, and from what's been show, an excellent one.
Enemy behavior seems to be a lot more sophisticated this time around, whether it's a fire thresher or packs of smaller, more swiftly dispatched enemies. Like Diablo they attack in big groups. By combining varying attack patterns into one assault wave Gearbox ensures it's difficult to get bored.
Take the aforementioned loader robots, for example, bipedal machines that lumber around the battlefield bristling with weapons. They don't die as you blast of pieces of their bodies, instead stumbling toward you, armless, practically helpless, but still determined to end your existence. In a slice of Borderlands 2 shown at a preview event, rarely was there only one type of loader on the battlefield. Some assault you with colossal should-mounted guns, some crouch down and charge you at high speed, and some wander around with wide-reaching blades spinning in front of them. Shoot the blades and your bullet will reflect right back, forcing you to try and find a way to flank or aim carefully, not an entirely simple task considering the usual chaos on the battlefield.
Skags from the first game return. Some simply charge, and some more powerful 'badass' versions tower over your character's head and crackle with electricity, tagging you at long-range by vomiting up spheres of lightning. Other fanged beasts skitter across the ground at high speed, leaping when they get close, turning invisible to throw off your aim, and retreating and regrouping if you manage to withstand their initial assault.
This means, at least in the areas shown so far, that motion is much more important to survival. Standing still and pressing the trigger isn't going to result in any kind of success. Enemies will swarm, lunge, retreat, circle around behind you and generally require you to make more decisions per moment to survive. Do you have an elemental weapon better suited to take on that corrosive-type skag at close range? Is it time to throw that grenade with the pulsing fire damage because you know the target enemies are going to stay still for a few seconds? Is it safe to hide behind that rock to regenerate your shields? Has your action skill cooldown expired so you can phaselock the highest threat on the battlefield? Is your Gunzerker partner paying attention and ready to focus fire on the phaselocked enemy to kill it and trigger a group health regeneration effect?
It's a weird word, phaselock, but an exceptionally useful skill. Available to the reworked Siren class, a phaselock suspends a target, helpless, in mid-air for a brief period of time. This serves two purposes initially: disabling the target and making it easy to shoot. By investing in the Siren's skill tree, phaselocking becomes a much more versatile skill.
As you quest and kill across the world of Pandora, you level up and earn skill points. Not every skill can be learned by the time you hit the level cap, but you can fill out quite a bit of a class' three skill trees. With the proper upgrades, phaselocking can create an explosion of fire, replenish your health, root other nearby enemies to the ground, give a percent chance another enemy could be phaselocked, revive friendly players, and cause enemies to switch allegiance and fight amongst themselves. One of the end tier skills even adds an extra degree of control to the phaselock, letting you slam an affected enemy into the ground like a bomb, damaging anything nearby.
The Siren can be customized to play better as a healer or damage dealer, and has numerous crowd control bonuses aside from the obvious benefits of phaselocking. Contrasting that is the Gunzerker, who's more about inflicting harm and tanking, with skills that allow him to bolster reload speed, swiftly replenish ammunition, and increase accuracy. His primary action skill, where he can temporarily use any two weapons at the same time – a rocket launcher and a pistol, a shotgun and a machine gun, two sniper rifles, whatever you have available – can further be modified to reduce its cooldown, boost movement speed, and taunt enemies to your position. Basically, with the right build, it seems like the Gunzerker can be played so he's frequently dual-wielding, regenerating ammunition and health the whole time.
Most know Borderlands has a lot of guns. Borderlands 2 has more than the first, and the amount of detail on each model is incredible considering how many weapons are in this game, and how each weapons could potentially have so many variants. From revolvers to assault rifles you'll find weapons with different elemental damage types, firing rates, magazine sizes, round types, reload speed and a lot more. Some weapons don't even reload, you just throw them away after emptying the magazine and magically pull another from your belt.
Assuming the skill trees of the other two classes, the Assassin and Commando, aren't horrible, and assuming the rest of Borderlands 2's pacing and encounter design match what's been shown so far, it's very likely Gearbox's shooter could turn out to be better than the first. It includes all the loot-driven mania of Borderlands, seemingly better class, enemy and weapons design and, hopefully, a more developed story. Of course if you didn't enjoy running around shooting stuff and opening treasure chests (which, by the way, have all-new great-but-unnecessarily complicated opening animations in Borderlands 2) in search of some ideal weapon set, then you're probably not going to like this game, either. This is a loot-driven experience, through and through, and from what's been show, an excellent one.
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