Jack and Claptrap's Bogus Journey

It has been a long time coming but finally, freaking finally, I have played through Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. On the one hand, it’s honestly surprising it took me this long to get through the game. I am a giant fan of the first two titles in the BorderlandsConceptually, Borderlands is Mad Max but set on an alien planet, with magic. The game play might be action-shooter-RPG fare, with a bit of Diablo thrown in, but the aesthetic is pure, Australian post-apocalyptic exploitation. series. I fell in love with the first game, enjoying its sparse, stripped down, Mad MaxStarted with a single 1970s Australian exploitation flick (a popular genre in the country at the time), the Mad Max series went on to spawn three sequels, an entire genre, style, and what many consider the greatest action film of all time, Fury Road. Not bad from a little low-budget film about cars smashing each other after the fall of society.-style aesthetic. It had a bit of humor that didn’t detract from the storytelling (what little there was) added to really solid, enjoyable shooting that had RPG elements layered on. It felt like the whole package.

And then along came Borderlands 2 and it upped the first title on everything. The story was more involved, the characters were deeper and more interesting to play, the levels were more diverse and detailed, and the shooting was so much more robust. But, of course, the real star of the show was Handsome Jack, the villain you loved to hate (and hated to love). While the game could get a little too humorous, a little too out there at times, Jack was this charismatic, grounding force that kept you playing. He was the voice in your ear, egging you onwards, giving you the fire to push through to the end… and then to play it over again and again.

The thing with Handsome Jack is that he was the first true villain we got in the series. Sure, there were people that taunted you throughout the first game, from Commandant Steele of the Dahl Corporation trying to get the Vault Key to open the Vault in the main story, to Commander Knox, Doctor Zed, and even Claptrap in the expansions, but none of them were really so present, so in your face, or so charismatic that they felt like real threats. From minute one of Borderlands 2, though, Jack was there, he was laughing at you and mocking you, and he was working against you. He was your villain, all the time, and it worked. It worked so well.

Thus Jack immediately cast a shadow across the whole series. From this point forward the games either had to try and one-up Jack with their new villains, or they had to go back and be all about Jack in some way. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel decides to go with the latter route, telling a story all about the rise of Jack, from lowly pencil pusher on the Helios station at Pandora to ruler of the planet… except, not entirely, either. And that is really where the problems begin.

For those that have played Borderlands 2 but didn’t touch the series past that point, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is essentially a standalone expansion for the second game. It uses the same engine, just with a few tweaks, and then adds in a new storyline, new levels, and some slightly modified enemies. If you played the second game most of what you have in this interim midquel will seem all that different. Sure, the vault hunters you play as have new powers, and there are some tweaked mechanics, but if you played the second game you can then get into this title with little remapping of your impulses. It’s not perfectly one-to-one, but it’s close enough.

The two big changes to the mechanics come from the setting of the game: Pandora’s moon, Elpis. Due to a cataclysm that struck the moon some time earlier, what was once a flourishing habitat is now a blowout wasteland (which should sound familiar to fans of the series). The trick is that Elpis has lower gravity and lacks a breathable atmosphere. This really isn’t a bad thing when playing the game, though, because it allows for long, enjoyable jumps paired with air-boosts you can make to traverse the game with speed and ease. Plus, with upgrades, you can even do a buitt-stomp towards the ground, dealing bonus damage. The air jumps become second nature in the game, so much that it is hard to go back to playing without them (which you frequently have to do later in the title, but we’ll get there).

The game also swaps out Slag damage for Cryo. These are cold element guns that can freeze enemies in place. A frozen enemy not only can’t move but also takes increased damage from other damage types. It’s like Slag-Plus, in effect, and you really felt it when you had a good Cryo gun. In fact, the times where I’d swapped away from Cryo made me regret my decisions. I clung to a Level 9 Vladof pistol for most of the game, even when it was horribly underleveled for where I was at, because it had a high elemental effect chance and I could use that to mow through enemies. Cryo is so good.

Stuck on Elpis, your job is essentially to help Jack fight against a band of soldiers trying to stop him, and Hyperion, from controlling Pandora. This, in the perspective of the game, is a bad thing because, at that point, Jack wasn’t such a bad guy. He just wanted to stop these soldiers, the Lost Legion, and their leader, Tungsteena Zarpedon. But while he’s fighting against Zarpedon, Jack is also battling his corporate masters at Hyperion who want him dead. He needs four (expanded to six) helpers to battle against the Lost Legion, free Elpis, and help him gain control of Helios so Jack can “save” the planet.

This is a solid basis to build a plot, especially since you know that Jack’s intentions aren’t all that great (having played through Borderlands 2). He views himself as the hero of this story, and you’re his trusty sidekicks running his missions. But where the game’s story fails is in that inevitable fall from grace you’re expecting. Jack has to go from guy trying to protect Pandora from the Lost Legion to someone willing to compromise every one of his morals just to get the job done, turning himself into a villain in the process, and that transition never actually happens. The game is so in love with Jack that it very rarely critiques his actions at all and, in effect, makes everyone working against him (even the heroes of the previous games) into the villains just to keep Jack as, well, Jack. It doesn’t work.

There’s a mission halfway into the story that gives a hint of what could have been. Jack, via your vault hunters, has an A.I. core he rescued from a bad man on Elpis. His goal is to get that A.I. core, which has a personality and acts like a person, into a factory so it can be used to guide and lead the process of building a robot army. The only thing is that when the A.I. core is plugged in, it has to be wiped and reformatted. In essence, to use the core its personality has to be lost. The core begs for time so it can be backed up, so it doesn’t get killed when it’s plugged into the machinery, but Jack reasons that there’s no time to do a proper backup, that he needs the robots now to fight Zarpedon and Hyperion, and so he makes the decision to kill the personality and wipe the core. It’s a harrowing moment for the characters and shows that first g;limmer that Jack is not a good guy, deep down.

It’s also the last time a mission like this happens. After this, the game steadfastly refuses to engage with what you just did, and it never gives you or Jack any other moments where a decision like this has to be made. The story, which is supposed to be about Jack losing his morality and becoming the villain we know he’ll become, never actually forces him to become that villain. We needed more of these missions, moments where Jack has to compromise himself for what he sees as the greater good, so he can continue to be the “hero” in his head even as he does truly terrible things.

And curiously we don’t even get one of the biggest moments that you would think would be in this story: we don’t get a scene where Jack straps his daughter, Angel, into her throne and forces her to work for him as his prisoner. That was a big thing in the second game, how he was a monster for doing that to his own kid, but that moment apparently happened before Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, so we can’t judge him on that part either. It’s like many of the bad things we know he was supposed to do already happened but they didn’t affect Jack or make him into a bad guy. The transformation this story was supposed to bring never occurs.

And it’s weird because you’re supposed to be playing as bad guys working for an even worse guy. Vault hunters are generally morally gray anyway, but the characters you have here are largely viewed as villains in the context of Borderlands 2. There’s Jack’s enforcer, Wilhelm; his future girlfriend, the Sheriff of Lynchwood, Nisha; the gladiator, Athena, who betrayed Dahl in the “General Knoxx” expansion of Borderlands, but was still a kind of double-agent; and Jack’s fragtrap, Claptrap. The expansion then also added in Sir Hammerlock’s morally ambiguous sister, Aurelia, as well as Jack’s Body Double as two more characters to add to this dubious heroism squad. You know who you are, and it’s not a good dude. The game should have doubled down on this.

Instead it feels like the game is squeamish about actually being a story of a bad guy, so it does everything it can to distract you. It spends a long time on Elpis, having you run missions for the locals (all of whom speak with Australian accents because this game was made by 2K’s Australian team). It spends a lot of time, in fact, ignoring the main plot of the game that you kind of forget what you’re even supposed to be doing here. And, let me just say, the people you’re helping on Elpis are annoying as hell. When people talk about how cringe the humor of Borderlands can be, it’s Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel that really showcases all the worst impulses of the writing. I was so annoyed by the people of Elpis that I struggled to engage with the story at all.

It also doesn’t help that the missions are awful. Because of the air-jump, which I generally like, the designers felt they had the freedom to build really large, expansive, and weird levels for you to explore and, wow, do I really hate these things. There’s a vibe of, “you can traverse anywhere, so we’re going to make you,” to these maps, and it frequently got so confusing and so hard to judge what I was supposed to do and where I was supposed to go that I got lost. This happened in just about every zone of the game, and I was so over it.

But then, late in the game, they put you on Helios station which has normal gravity and they force you to spend hours moving like in Borderlands 2 and I hated this as well. The low gravity traversal is so great that when I was forced to play like “normal” again, I just wanted to go back to Elpis. Mind you, I hated the missions on Elpis, but at least the movement was fun. The missions on Helios aren’t any better, but it also wasn’t as fun to move around as well which made the experience even worse.

On top of all of this, the basic missions are obnoxious as hell to complete. More often than not the game would hand me a mission that wasn’t just across the map from where I was, it was several zones away. It loved doing this thing where it would give you a mission to complete that required you to run through two other zones to get there (because the zone you needed to get to didn’t have fast travel), all so you could complete the mission which was located on the far end of that map. Then you’d have to traverse all the way back to turn it in, only for the game to then give you another mission back in that distant zone, all the way across the map, to then complete as well.

Could it have given you all these missions at the same time? Yes, but it didn’t. Could the designers have put fast travel stations in all the zones? Yes, but they decided not to. Why? Because the goal wasn’t for you to have a fun time exploring the game. The goal was to waste your time because, without forcing you to do all this busywork running hither and yon, you’d realize that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel is easily a third of the length of Borderlands 2, but you paid full price to play it. If they didn’t stretch everything out to the nth degree, you’d quickly get through the game and wonder what you paid for.

This all sucks because there really are glimmers of a game that I want to like here. The basic controls of the game are great. I loved the air-jumping and speedy traversals. I wanted all the Cryo guns I could get my hands on. And the few moments where the story actually showed you Jack’s potential descent into madness were strong. There’s a core idea here that I like, but the team in charge of it simply didn’t make that game. I don’t know why – perhaps they were on too tight of a turnaround, or the studio nixed any ideas that would make Jack too much of a villain, or who knows what. Regardless, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a compromised game that isn’t much fun to play.

I went in the first time, when the game was first released, wanting to love the game. I went in this time simply so I could get through it and have the whole experience. Both times I came away with a single thought: I never want to play this game again. It’s Borderlands 2, but worse, when it could have been so much better. It’s a sad excuse for a game that could have been awesome but it fails to live up to even its own lofty desires. Whatever could be good in this game is ruined by so much cruft – bad writing, bad missions, bad level design – that I’d rather play anything else than this title.

Well, maybe not Borderlands 3. We’ll have to see if that game really is worse than this one…