Metascore

Universal acclaim - based on 24 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 506 Ratings

  • Summary: Play as one of four new vault hunters facing off against a massive new world of creatures, psychos and the evil mastermind, Handsome Jack. Make new friends, arm them with a bazillion weapons and fight alongside them in 4 player co-op or split-screen on a relentless quest for revenge and redemption across the undiscovered and unpredictable living planet. Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 24 out of 24
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 24
  3. Negative: 0 out of 24
  1. A seriously engrossing game that really, truly blends shooters and RPGs to brilliant effect. [Nov 2012, p.75]
  2. 100
    Borderlands 2 is huge, intense and addictive.
  3. Sep 18, 2012
    100
    Overall, Borderlands 2 is the sequel we were all hoping for. Gearbox has clung rigorously to what worked the first time around, and fleshed out the experience with refined customisation options, more variety, and a vastly more interesting story. With fantastic co-op support, there's tonnes of longevity on offer here, and no doubt future DLC will sweeten the deal. Looting and shooting doesn't get much better than this.
  4. Sep 29, 2012
    85
    Light on story and heavy on guns, Borderlands 2 is saved from XP strip-mining by a sharp sense of humour and a slick, destructive multiplayer. [Nov 2012, p.90]

See all 24 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 5 out of 121
  1. 10
    Everything I look for in a video game. Borderlands 2 features a unique world and a fantastic online community. The loot system in Borderlands 2 is flawless. This game was well thought out and user feedback is taken into consideration. This game is a must buy! Expand
  2. Its Borderlands, not different from the first one much, though the weapons are a little more diverse and the plot gets going quicker which is good being the first one was a little too spaced between the fun moments. The problem I have with the game is that you see a camp of baddies, you shoot one and they all go nuts, you kill them, you move forward and more baddies spawn, repeat a thousand times more add some boss battles and you got the whole game. But its still enjoyable, just as Skyrim was good for at least 50 hours before you realized that you are just stuck in a loop, and by then you got your moneys worth unlike most games released. Expand
  3. I do not review a game before completing it. I just finished as a necromancer and it was great. I usually prefer more open worlds like Skyrim for Fallout3 but this was close. The mission areas were more open than any COD game I have played. The weapons were neat and the missions were more than the fetch type you get in Oblivion. I just kept getting this stale feeling while playing this game. I was doing the same shooting tactics with levitating enemies and throwing grenades. This game would of benefited greatly with more magic like in Bioshock and it would of easily jumped it up a few number grades for me. Worth picking up but not at full price. The 25 dollar black friday sales I saw were perfect. Oh also the story and humor... Never played first Borderlands. Claptrap was annoying. Jack was funny at first but got a little bit old after a while. The plot got extremely interesting once you started working with Roland. It just had so many side missions that did not develop the plot and those were mostly completely devoid of the humor found in the main quests. Also I will try to describe this without spoilers. The end of the plot builds you up and then leaves you dropped off like the last Tron movie in 2010. Expand
  4. Let me say this right off the bat: Borderlands 2 is not a bad game. Borderlands 2 is NOT a bad game!

    On the surface, Borderlands 2 is a ver
    y good-looking, witty, polished shooter that seems like it would deliver everything the first game had to deliver, and some more. However, beneath that charming exterior lies an extreeeeeemely slow and repetitive shooter that makes anyone with a working gag reflex to put the game down and play with Microsoft Excel instead.

    I loved the first Borderlands, I would play and play before sleep (and then not go to sleep), I loved the gameplay; the RPG and the First Person Shooter combination was unlike anything I ever seen, I remember thinking that Borderlands was everything I wanted Fallout 3 to be. So, what went wrong with the sequel?

    First of all, do you recall the tutorial section of the first Borderlands where Claptrap escorts you around the bandit camp? That section took around 15 minutes and the game threw you into an open world, giving you a few quests to start yourself off. In Borderlands 2, someone thought it would be a marvelous idea to expand that 15 minutes of tutorial into a span of 2 hours, 2 mundane hours of you going through the same, boring, ice environment, listening to that poor excuse of a "funny little robot" called Claptrap yelling in your ear through the whole thing. I don't know about you, but I didn't find any gameplay in Borderlands 2 before reaching Sanctuary fun in any way shape or form.

    Gameplay remains the same as the first Borderlands: Shoot and loot, there are tons of different guns with different stats, you can swap them in and out at any time in your inventory, you can equip different shields and grenade mods too, for those who have played the first game, this will feel familiar to you. Speaking of shoot and loot, the shooting is the main course of the game, it begins to feel repetitive and boring killing the same type of enemy over and over and over, with the occasional "badass" enemy or miniboss thrown in to slow you down, looting remains the same; you go to anything that has a green light and mash the loot button to loot stuff, although, 99% of the time, you won't find anything that's better than what you currently have and you'll end up selling the loot instead, which begs the question of why not just have cash as loot instead in the first place if it's not going to be better items.

    My main complaint about Borderlands 2 is how slow the game feels, quests seems to drag on and on over long stretches of maps that feels longer than they should be, and to make maters worse, the quest rewards don't seem to be ever worth it; let me give you an example: I'm level 25 and I need 15k EXP to reach level 26, I look up some quests on the billboard that are around level 23 to level 25, and how much EXP do they give? 1000 EXP? Are you kidding me? That's not even 10% of what I need to reach the next level! The enemies barely give any EXP worth mentioning, so in the end, it's all just a huge waste of time. In the first game, you would be rewarded EXP for completing challenges, so maybe that's why this game feels so slow in the leveling compared to the first, I don't mind the "Badass Tokens" system they implemented in this one for completing challenges, but why can't we have EXP on top of that?

    My final gripe of this game is the so-called "humor". I'll be honest, I didn't find the humor in the first game funny, but the writing was tolerable, in Borderlands 2, the developers seemed so pleased with themselves that they decided to rub the humor in so hard that it will forever leave a shameful imprint of claptrap on your face. I watched a stream of someone playing the game for the first time and as soon as the "0 as a number" appeared in the intro, about 15 people in the chat went "Lol, that is so clever!"

    ...

    Not... really... It was kind of uncomfortable to witness and I was surprised my brain didn't slip out of my nostrils to escape further humiliation.

    In conclusion, I would say that Borderlands 2 is not worth £40 (I paid £60 for the Collector's Edition...), maybe pick it up at £15 if you really want to, but I say stick with the first game, if you haven't played the first one and you're really aching for a quirky, first person shooter with RPG elements, then I say definitely pick this up.
    Expand

See all 121 User Reviews

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