Borderlands 2: The Peak of 2010s Gaming

Borderlands 2 is a looter shooter first-person game that was made by Gearbox and 2k. Borderlands 2 takes place on the planet Pandora, a ravenous planet where everywhere you step, you would likely get shot, eaten, or even both at the same time. The game follows you, a freedom fighter vault hunter a part of the Crimson Raiders, in your fight against Hyperion and their Big boss, Handsome Jack, who plans on enslaving the planet in the belief for the greater good. But what I find that makes this game extremely good is that the combat, characters, and setting of the game are what make it great.

The first thing about the game that struck me was the combat. There are so many guns that affect the gameplay and how your character’s abilities work so well with them. Certain characters' abilities summon death robots, trap enemies in a huge bubble, or summon a turret. The characters in this game are completely different from one another, but what makes this game “revolutionary” is the guns. As stated by the Guinness Book of World Records, the game has roughly 17.5 million guns, so there is an extremely good chance you are always getting a new encounter with your enemies, looting a chest, or completing a new side quest. With all of these, every time you fight a boss, it makes the encounter more interesting as every time you start a new game, you are already beating the boss differently than before. Not only does the combat in this game is the character.

Now, the characters in this game are extremely unique and always bring someone a smile when playing it. Rather, it is the very annoying and hardly loveable claptrap who needs their trap like, dude. No one cares about your birthday. You have a vault hunter from the previous game who is a basic dumb brute but has more personality that makes him so different, like, for example, that he had a puppy between the first and second games. But the biggest character in this game is the main villain, Handsome Jack. Handsome Jack was one of the best villains of his time and still is a part of the greatest villains list. One of the many things that makes Jack such a good villain is he is always with you throughout the game through the communication of the echo network and is the giver of some side quests as a way to spice things up for the player. The final reason why he is such a good villain is his motives. You see, Jack doesn't see that he's the bad guy. In fact, he believes you are. Think about it: you are part of a group of people who are currently trying to take down a corporation that has done nothing but try to make a planet that is nothing but ravenous psychos and terrifying wildlife into a paradise for people to live on in peace. However, what Jack is doing in this madness is, while yes he is killing terrible people, he is also killing a lot of innocent people who are just trying to live their lives. What makes his character so good is he acknowledges it and believes it's for the greater good. Now, with these characters comes a very good atmosphere around them that makes the world-building so much better.

The setting in this game is amazing if you ask me. As I said before, it takes place on Pandora, a ravenous planet filled with different forms of wildlife that want to kill and bandit crazy people who want to eat just as much. Different areas on the map make it so much fun to explore. You have multiple frozen areas that have bandit’s corpses lying around due to dying of the cold, Hyperion’s paradise civilization where loaders constantly work to make it the best place to live, pretty landscapes of plains where you see what happened to civilization visited by Jack that did not agree with him, spoilers they are all dead. The setting of the game really helps turn this game into a masterpiece.

Borderlands 2 is a sequel to a game that was amazing for its time. While multiple times games have tried and failed to upstage it, none have been able to be up to the standards of this quite literally game-changing release.