a less cranky review of Borderlands 2 [no spoilers]

Well, I'm ten more levels in and I am having a lot more fun with the game. The two major reasons for that is you get a crap ton of side quests and the side quests have the humor that I was expecting out of a Borderlands game. They are awesome. Not only that, but the side quests are way more involved than in the first game so you find yourself really getting into them and it makes them even more hilarious. The characters are better too. Oh, Ellie, I love you.

The only problem with the side quests is that they don't scale well to your level. If you're careful though, I think you can more or less balance out the story with side so that nothing is too easy.

The main story line is still a smelly pile of skag droppings and I still hate the personalities of most of the main characters. However, Gearbox pulled a dirty trick in the mid-20s quest area that now has me involved with the plot. I don't want to post any spoilers, so I will merely say that Handsome Jack must pay for what he has done.

There are two secondary reasons that I am having more fun as well. The first is that one of my genius friends pointed out to me that when you collect ammo, it goes to the entire party. For the first 15 levels of the game my party was under the impression that the whole damn thing was glitched and that the ammo wasn't registering as full for anyone so when you clicked it and you were full, it just disappeared into the nether. This caused a lot of frustration with trying to pick up only ammo we needed and leaving the rest for others. Yes, I feel dumb now. The game is much easier when you can just pick up all the ammo and it gets distributed appropriately.

The second reason is [redacted due to blatant cheating that I probably shouldn't post to my blog even if we discussed it publicly elsewhere]. Changing the [redacted] so that I have a ton of [redacted] and can [redacted] mostly broke the game since I am overpowered and rich sooner than I should be, but I don't regret it. It gave me a chance to play around with all the different weapons available so I'll know what to look for with other characters that I don't do [redacted] with.

Speaking of guns, they really didn't hold back at all on the creativity front there. Some of the guns are hilariously fun to use. Plus, they fixed rocket launchers! As soon as we manage to get some kind of ammo regen, I am going to be exploding all the things all the time. So far we have only seen an ammo regen mod for Salvador, which none of us are playing. The Gunzerker might be neat in theory, but his skill is worse than Brick's and he's really hard to start the game with. If I can find the patience I will level one up for the ammo regen and then just tank him on skills and give him an inventory full of launchers.

So, yes, I am having fun now. I think we still have a few side quests to go through when I get off of work today before we have to get back to the story quest. I am looking forward to it.