New-U? No U.

So I finished up my first playthrough of Borderlands 2 yesterday, after about 3 weekend sessions. I have a few thoughts, and some of them are spoilers, so if you haven’t already been spoiled on a 3-year-old game, uh, watch out.

• The Gunzerker is a ridiculously fun class. You get to play at any range, and while there are bonuses available to pistols, you’re not locked into them by any stretch. The bullet regeneration makes it feel like a whole new game, in a great example of addition by subtraction. By removing the concern of running out of ammo, it relieves a fairly pervasive stress that permeates the whole game, particularly after about the halfway point, where they throw numbers at you and start increasing quantity as well as quality of foe.
• Mal in Eridium Blight gave me a pistol called the Fibber. There are a lot of variants of this gun, as is the Borderlands way. I got a hell of a variant, though. It’s a pistol, but it shoots a very slow moving blast of pellets like a shotgun. In my case, they’re also slag rounds, and the damage output is in the area of 8-10k per round at a time where SMGs are doing 200-400 damage a round, and shotguns are doing maybe 3k. Point-blank, this thing was absolutely lethal. It took care of the Jack fight, which I could tell would be a hell of a fight if you came in underpowered, in well under a minute. For that matter, it took care of every boss fight from the moment I got it onwards pretty much by itself, or gunzerking with another slow projectile weapon, just making a wall of sluggy slaggy death.
• I have some gripes with the use of death as a plot device in this universe. When a rather important character dies in a cutscene, it’s from one shot to center mass. Like, I’m pretty sure I had a 500-ton gorilla-man jump off a cliff and land on my head. It was a minor inconvenience, but I think it barely broke my shield. One shot to center mass? Call that a light snack. Like, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of these Hyperion New-U stations scattered around the world. In fact, there’s one not a hundred yards from where this takes place. Oh, and one person dies from one gunshot when some others survive being in a cargo plane that’s hit with a fucking moonshot, the same moonshot that they use to make sure the Warrior is really dead, with nothing more than a little limp? Get the fuck outta here.
• I’m very ready for True Vault Hunter Mode. All the boss fights were too easy on normal mode. The Bunker, Saturn, Jack and the Warrior were all downed on the first try, solo, with no deaths. Come to think of it, the only boss deaths I had were from the stretch from Bloodshot Bunker/Ramparts to Friendship Gulag, with Mad Mike and W4R-D3N. And Captain Flynt. So all in the early game. What’s keeping me interested is a video I saw of a maxed out Gunzerker with extra points in Inconceivable and 5 Shots or 6, using the Sham with rockets and basically getting to fire two rocket launcher machineguns with infinite ammo. That’s rad as hell. Once I experience that, I don’t know what I’ll do. Might play a Psycho. Krieg amuses the hell out of me.
• I have a shitload of Golden Keys, well over 250 of them. And no gun has been better at the time than stuff I managed to pick up through normal gameplay. Two legendary grenades, two legendary pistols, a legendary shotgun, and the Fibber I mentioned above. But I’ve gotten very lucky with shields and relics from it. I love that they’re still releasing codes, even though it’s not even the newest Borderlands game.
• If you picked it up like I did, fucked around to level 10-15 and put it back down, play a dang Gunzerker. It may have been the most fun I’ve ever had with a shooter.
• Jack ended up being an interesting character, and the story becomes very troubling if you consider that he might be telling the truth about Angel. But when you look at how Hyperion and Opportunity operate, it’s obvious that he’s at least untruthful in some areas and more than a little bit of a sociopath. I didn’t feel great through the final monologue. But he wouldn’t give a shit about Pandora or the people in it if there wasn’t Eridium there. Given that this is only five years after the first Borderlands, it makes you wonder about the timing of things with him and Angel, if he was telling the truth. It’s a pretty cool story, lots to think about.