Borderlands 2. Gun porn. Loot porn. Post-apocalyptic/setter-ish environments. First person killer simulator. Strong sense of style. Colorful characters, variety if enemies. Humor that’s both crude and kind of witty, juvenile and self-ironical, and full of references to other post-apocalyptical works. Did I mention gun and loot porn? Guns guns guns.

It’s a very polished game in many ways, down to small details like the menus and how it possible to mark guns in order to know what to do with them. 

And it’s a somewhat enjoyable game if you’re in the right mood. Unfortunately that isn’t enough. Though it’s an accomplished game that I’m sure achieves what’s it sets out to achieve, I’m just not really the target audience. To me the game feels pretty empty and meaningless. The characters are colorful but to me uninteresting. They’re deliberately cartoony (on several levels) which isn’t really what I’m looking for. The quests and the main story are likewise cartoony and uninteresting, but a lot more ambitious that in the first game. Which for me actually might be a negative since I don’t buy into it anyway, so it just steals time from the better aspects of the game.

And that would be the shooting and the gun porn. It can be pretty fun finding new weapons and checking their stats and trying them out, although I have to say it’s a little too much of it — too much looting and too much menu-crawling trying to decide which guns to keep and which to sell. Although I suppose one has a choice, it’s not mandatory to loot or to put effort into choosing the very best guns to keep, but it’s hard not to given the way the game is structured. But even if the game toned down this aspect the difference wouldn’t be huge, the bad parts would overshadow the good.

I’m not done with the game but I’m not at this point sure I will finish it. I think I hope I’m strong enough to resist continuing — it’s hard justifying spending more time given all other games I have — but I suspect I’m going to finish. At the very least I should be able to just do the main story and resist the urge to complete it all. (Edit: turns out I’m too weak to complete a certain part of the main story, so I need to do a few side-quests to level up.)

As for the enemy ai: as with many other games they’re unrealistically good at detecting where I am after being fired upon. For example, if I am at a great distance half-hiding behind a rock and fire my sniper on an explosive barrel behind them, making it explode and cause chaos and hurt — they immediately know where I am and start coming at me, even though they should barely be able to see me at that distance, even less within a second from having an explosion go off nearby. They just don’t need a second or two to figure out was just happened or a short moment to look around; they just instantly know where I am. It’s not a sneaker game or a game of immersion or realism, so I suppose it’s not really a failure, but as a stickler for immersion I do notice these things. And yes, there are also other considerations such as balance and hitting the right level of difficulty, and changing this element alone could very well have made the game too easy.

I’m sure a lot of folks love this game, and rightly so if this is your kind of thing. Borderlands does its thing really well. It just isn’t my kind of thing.