Week 10 - Borderlands 2

Borderlands 2 (XBOX 360)

Story

• Set some years after the original game where the first "vault hunters" opened the vault hoping to find treasures beyond their wildest dreams when instead they found a monster. After defeating the monster they went their separate ways.
• What actually happened is that this extremely rare and powerful element called "eridium" was released and it drastically affects many creatures and weapons. 
• Handsome Jack the president of the Hyperion corporation has seized this new material and has used his resources to dig for a new vault and release the Warrior, which will help him cleanse all of Planet of Pandora.
• You play as a vault hunter (Either Salvador, Axton, Zero or  Maya)and must find this vault before Jack and save the people of Sanctuary the last batch of sane humans. 
• Greatly Improved over the 

Mechanics

• Combines excellent minute to minute first person shooting with a fantastic random weapon generation system and an excellent upgrade system that allows the player to customise their character to the way that they want to play.
• "Badass" Rank system that allows you to put minor statistical boosts to things like gun damage and reload speed for completing challenges, these carry over to all character unless the player decides to turn them off.
• Driving greatly improved from the original , very responsive, weighty and fun to drive.
• Excellent co-op jump-in jump-out
• Co-op can vary from being very frustrating to the most fun you can have due to the levels of other players in comparison to the host. If they are too high they will be instantly killing  everything leaving nothing for the host to do and if they are too low then most of the time spent will be reviving them.
• Due to the non-shared/non-level specific loot it if  the other players grab the loot and don't give it up this can cause major problems among the players
• However if you have a good friend that you play with this will hopefully not be a problem and you can share and work together.  
• The new interface and trade system are fantastic.
• The trash/favourite system is such an excellent addition allowing players to quickly and easily sell all their trash and not their prized loot accidentally letting players get back into the game faster.

Aesthetics

• Cel-shaded
• Distinct style
• Genuinely funny dialogue expertly written
• Excellent characters that have wonderful  personalities
• Some character animations are a bit stiff
• No way to access previous dialogues if they were missed 
• Nice character customisation with skins and heads, improvement over the original but not taken to the levels seen in a lot of modern RPG's
• The NPC talking is converted to a radio broadcast as soon as the player leaves the area excellent for players who want to get going as fast as possible.

Technology

• Some texture popping
• Draw distances
• Some frame-rate drops (when it gets really hectic)