I’ve made a mistake in my treatment of the Borderlands series. I rated the original based on the fact that it was a very bad single-player game that became tolerable once you added a couple of friends to the mix, and while this is more-or-less true it’s not really how the series should be approached. Borderlands isn’t a single-player game with a co-op mode, it’s a co-op game you can play on your own if you want — although you never ever should because it’d be a lot like playing through an MMO on your own; without other people to distract you the soul-crushing pointlessness of what you’re doing comes to the fore and drives you insane. If the game is approached from this perspective then the dull and repetitive solo experience suddenly doesn’t seem like such a big problem1. So there’s a disclaimer on this review: I’m not reviewing the single-player mode of Borderlands 2. It’s not awful but it is painfully average, and I don’t think you should play it if you’re without a group of friends who can carry you through it.
- And it is dull and repetitive, as I discovered when I had to play catch-up on my own from the start of the game through to level eleven. ↩