So the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is set on Elpis, Pandora's moon and covers the reasons how Jack became the head of Hyperion and crash-landed the Hyperion station onto Elpis prior to Borderlands 2. Being a moon, Elpis doesn't have an atmosphere and has lower gravity. The former means you have an O2 tank strapped to your head that constantly bleeds oxygen and you need to refresh it through tank drops from enemies, or huge jets of O2 coming from the ground dotted around the landscape. The latter means that you move really slowly compared to on Pandora, and your jumps put you at this agonizingly slow trajectory, almost like you're waddling through the air, and you can't do anything aside from cut your leap short by sending your body directly downward via crouching.
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| "Everyone say, 'Hi Hyperion Station!'" |
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| A volcanic moon vista with Pandora in the distance. You can see the purple Eridium Rift that happened when the first Vault was opened. |
This ground pound is also a new combat mechanic and the one I was referring to previously. All the enemies can do it so while you're trying to pick people off from afar, as one might expect to do with a gun, the baddies who are behind you are running up at you in order to stomp on your head while your back is turned rather than firing from cover. I'm not a fan because I'm not practiced enough to manage reacting to attacked from all angles, I need to be able to see things to know where they are.
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| Kragons are the Skags of Elpis, they come out of the ground and will swarm you as you traverse their territory. |
The first boss fight feels like a "fuck you" from the developers. It's a guy called Deadlift who has electricity powers, and the arena you're in is a multi-level indoor area with jump pads to get from one level tot he other quickly. Did I mention this game has jump pads as a motion mechanic? They're like the regular awful jumping but worse because they're 2-3 times longer in distance. Anyway Deadlift has a huge Big Daddy-inspired subnautical suit of armor, electricity powers, and can electrify any of the platform levels at will. As far as I can tell the player cannot disable the electrifying stations either before or when they are engaged so you just have to wait until they turn off, I guess?
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| What a dumb tag line. |
I've gone into the Deadlift battle four times now and have died every time either before or just after taking his shield down, but I still have his health bar to go through before I finally beat him. I think this is supposed to be like fighting Boom & Bewm in Borderlands 2, but it's come far too early in the game. I have a garbage shield that keeps getting blasted down before I have time to let it recharge completely, and the most accurate guns I have have the lowest damage. At least with Boom & Bewm they are a mini-boss battle in the fourth story mission in an area where you have a number of side quests you can go do to level up more if you haven't already. Deadlift is near the end of the second story mission in the Pre-Sequel and there are no side quests in the area to level up more because it's still in the tutotial-ish segment of the game.
All right, after the sixth time I finally killed Deadlift. I had to rely on my character's trigger skill no less than four times within the fight which I think is ridiculous. As in inversion of my earlier complaint about the guns I had available before the fight, once I was past Deadlift the game wouldn't stop throwing new guns at me. There were at least three of the larger gun chests in the next area just lying out in the open, not even a minor puzzle in my way to them. it felt really weird.
I don't think I'm going to bother playing much more, the low gravity mechanics are driving me crazy and it feels like I can't keep an advantage when I'm in a fight which is much the opposite from when I'm playing Borderlands 2. There are also some weird model interactions: apparently you cannot land on diagonal surfaces at all, there have been several jumping puzzles where it took me a lot of experimenting to find out the exact place the developers wanted me to jump to and everything else felt like I was hitting an invisible wall and sliding back down; also it appears that my character is much shorter than the first NPC quest-giver as every time I've interacted with her she seems to be looking straight ahead which for her is about 6 inches above my head.
From my experience so far I would not recommend Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel unless you're really a completist for either game collections or story. If you already own the first two you can check out the Borderlands Triple Pack to see if you can get a good deal on the Pre-Sequel, but I wouldn't bother if it's more than $5. Save your money for Borderlands 3, hopefully it's developed by Gearbox again.
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