In typical Borderlands fashion, you're immediately introduced to an energetic and annoying robot named Claptrap and instructed to follow him. Presequel was created after 2, but takes place before 2, hence "pre sequel". You work with the future antagonist Handsome Jack.
The gameplay is just like Borderlands but with lower gravity. Despite the change in locale, it generally looks to contain similar locales, but just more spacey and more blue rather than yellowish/orange wastelands. You get rocky areas, lava, and many mechanical structures. The way the game feels different is the floaty jumps and new slam attack (hold crouch button when in the air). You need to top up your air either with canisters from downed enemies or find other air sources. These can be in the form of: pockets of air; activate machines; or go indoors. Although it initially feels like a survival mechanic, you later find better equipment so you can fight for longer and then mainly forget that the mechanic exists; especially since most story missions spend most of the time indoors.
As you play the game, there are loads of side-quests to distract you if you wish; although to meet the recommended level in the story missions; maybe they are actually mandatory since I did complete many of them. It’s the usual "go here/fetch this/kill this'' affair. The game has a very comedic tone, so the characters are often extreme. Most have Australian accents or similar, although there was one that seemed like they had a derivative of a Cockney Rhyming Slang, so were English.
The game is a mix of FPS and RPG type games. When targeting an enemy, their shield and health bar is displayed. In traditional RPG-style, numbers appear to show the damage you are dealing to them. You can deliver a critical hit to almost every enemy by shooting their weak spot such as a humanoid’s head, the inside of a monster’s mouth or the mechanical joint on robots.
As you kill enemies, you level up and gain extra health. You can assign a skill point in the 3 talent trees. I chose Athena who seemed the default main character. She can raise a shield which absorbs energy then releases it for large damage. She also gains bonuses to melee attacks, especially in the specialisation path I chose. There’s many character’s to choose from but I didn’t think the menu did a good job explaining how they played. You can play as Claptrap who sounded a bit of a wildcard character.
As usual in these games, I thought my health drained rapidly once the shields were depleted, which happens a lot when it throws many enemies at you. The shield system and the way the vehicles handle is very reminiscent of Halo. The shields do have stats like all the other items, so some recharge faster and some have stronger protection, or possibly extra bonuses like health regeneration or extra resistance to elemental damage. Regardless, I thought the shields take a rather long time to start recharging.
There is an achievement type system which awards you with “Badass Tokens” which rewards you with minor boosts - not that you notice it. I tried to choose perks to boost my shield but I never felt I had a shield that had enough protection or regeneration speed.
When you run out of health, you go into a downed state and start to bleed out with the screen slowly fading. If you manage to kill an enemy in this state, you get 'second wind' where you instantly heal 50% health and full shields. Second Wind has a blurry, slow mo effect, and you can't aim down sights, or throw grenades. If you bleed out, you respawn at the last New-U station with a small financial penalty. Although I quite like this mechanic, it often comes down to luck if there still is an enemy in range and doesn’t flee. It also depends on the weapon you are holding as trying to no-scope with a sniper is often difficult, whereas a pistol is optimal in accuracy, speed, and capacity.
There is a fast travel system but it's fairly limited too as you have to find a post to initiate the fast travel option and can only travel to other posts that you have discovered. There is no fall damage which can be useful when backtracking in some areas. Your character can sprint as long as you want without becoming fatigued and the floaty long jumps in this game are even better. This is a huge plus when travelling long distances when you don't have a vehicle. Shortly into the game, you get to spawn vehicles at certain access points but these are few and far between and many of the map layouts are awkward for direct navigation.
Borderlands has a high emphasis on looting, but in my opinion it's far too much loot. Quite often there will be 3 or 4 lockers next to each other with an item or cash in each one, as opposed to having one locker with lots of loot inside. Often the enemies will drop several small wads of cash rather than one stockpile. Maybe it makes sense for multiplayer where you will be battling it out for ownership of the treasure, but for single-player; it just makes it more tedious.
It is quite limited with what you can carry at first. You do gain more weapon slots as the story progresses up to 4 guns in the end, but I don’t understand why you can’t just equip 3 or 4 at the start when there’s various enemies and the guns have clear pros and cons in different situations. Any additional guns/shields etc are in the Backpack section of your inventory which has limited space, but this can be vastly upgraded with the rare currency. The UI for managing your items seems a bit clunky and wasn’t always responsive or intuitive with the mouse. The angle of the UI and animations makes it even harder to interact with.
In battle, scrolling through weapons brings up the statistics and manufacturer but not the name of the weapon which is weird. Sometimes I would assign a new weapon, then forget which slot I placed it in. Even when I remembered the name, I had to go back to the inventory to check.
There are three types of vending machines: weapon, ammo, and medical. While each one sells items in their specialty, any item can be sold to the machine. I rarely felt the need to actually buy items from these given the amount of drops. The rocket launcher ammo and grenades were more limited though so I used them in some sections.
Much fuss is made of the randomly generated weapon system. The guns are separated into different categories: combat rifles, revolvers, sniper rifles, SMGs, shotguns and rocket launchers. Each gun has a manufacturer which has certain characteristics such as higher damage or faster reload times. As you progress in the game, weapons can have elemental damage like shock/corrosive/incendiary, or extra properties such as firing multiple bullets. Items are colour coded to show the rarity, white being common through to orange for rare.
Since you will be picking up new guns with every kill, you would think you'd be swapping out weapons every couple of mins. However, often new loot is similar or worse than what you have so I simply glance at it, then usually just keep it to sell at the vending machines. It might have been a better option to allow you to modify your existing gun, rather than having hundreds of useless weapons that you don't care about. It was quite hard to compare the guns without actually testing them out though - the SMG’s had low damage but since they have high fire rate, then they can be much more effective. Weapons can have bonus zoom, more recoil etc so can be more unwieldy than first thought. You might want a particular weapon type but it’s good to have a mix since you are constantly changing the range you are fighting in, so might need to switch that shotgun for a sniper, or incendiary (good against flesh enemies) to corrosive damage (good against metal enemies).
The grenades can have the same elements as the guns like corrosive/incendiary, but also have some other effects like singularity which sucks enemies in, and if they don't die, they are clustered for you to finish them off. Some grenades can be bouncy which often isn’t a favourable trait.
Early on in the game, time and time again you see the same old enemies so it ends up feeling stale. As you progress far into the game, the enemy variations increase and you will see completely different styles of enemies. Despite being in a different location, the enemies just seem reskinned version of the usual enemies; so the humanoids are like the usual Bandits, Brutes, Psychos and Midgets.
Most enemies are too agile; they love to dodge and stagger around. Combined with the low accuracy of many weapons, you spend most of your time reloading and strafing. Later on you get enemies that phase in and out, then can be shielded. Other enemies have hit and run tactics, especially the flying or jumping ones; and there’s a lot that leap about or have jetpacks here. When you have a cluster of enemies that are all jumping and charging at you at different times, you are spending more time dodging.
There’s quite a few barrels which you can shoot. These have the various traits like incendiary, shock and corrosive for some easy group kills.
I am a fan of cel-shaded graphics and the game uses them well. I guess it does make the somewhat boring locales of desolate wastelands look better than it should. If you look carefully, Borderlands can be quite a brutal game; bodies explode, limbs fly off, flesh melts from acid and it's all so gruesomely entertaining.
I found the difficulty quite imbalanced. It generally seems challenging, but then spikes to near impossible near the end, dragging out the game for way longer than necessary. The bosses were unfair with their insane amount of shields, and multi-stage structures. They all seemed to have an attack that was either one-hit death, or nearly, and you can’t always see it coming when there’s so much happening on-screen. I played single-player, and I did wonder if the game plays differently in co-op. The difficulty could be more balanced, but no doubt it scales up with more players.
There's enough content within Borderlands but I'd say each mission takes a bit longer than it should due to the way you navigate the levels, the limited fast travel, then the sheer amount of enemies. In many areas, you often clear out a batch, then more spawn in. After picking up the loot, you move forward for several seconds, then it triggers the next waves.
It’s similar to Borderlands 2 but not as good. It still has all the same flaws though so I felt it probably just deserves the same score. The series has some great ideas and all the core mechanics are there, but it ends up feeling like a total grind and a chore to play due to its design choices.