Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

I came into Pre-Sequel right off the back of a Borderlands 2 binge, which is probably exactly the right and wrong headspace to bring to it. The right, because you'll instantly clock all the lore connective tissue tying Handsome Jack's rise together. The wrong, because comparison is ruthless, and Pre-Sequel can't hide that it's running on the same engine, the same structure, and a smaller budget of new ideas. What it does add, though, earns its place. The moon of Elpis runs on low gravity, and that single physics change reshapes how firefights feel. Cover stops being a safe crouch-and-wait option when enemies can pop up over a ledge, and you can slam down on skulls from height using your OZ Kit. Those kits double as limited oxygen supply and a jetpack-style boost, and the best builds weave them into elemental ground slams that detonate cryo-frozen enemies on impact. Speaking of cryo: replacing Borderlands 2's much-maligned slag element with ice damage was a genuine improvement. Freeze a flying enemy and watch them shatter on the ground. It's satisfying in a way slag never managed. The Gun Grinder lets you feed redundant weapons into a blender and recoup something new, which keeps the loot loop feeling active rather than just vendor-trashy. Laser weapons add a sci-fi aesthetic that fits the space setting, even if they rarely outclass a well-rolled Jakobs rifle in raw output. Each of the four base vault hunters, plus two DLC additions, comes with three-branch skill trees that hold up for a second playthrough, and character variety is genuinely good: Athena's Kinetic Aspis ricochets between targets, Wilhelm deploys combat drones, Nisha's Showdown mode auto-aims in a western-shooter fantasy, and Claptrap's Vault Hunter.EXE randomly picks from fifteen subroutines every activation, which is either chaotic fun or nightmare fuel depending on your patience. Here is where I have to be honest with you, because filler quests are my nemesis. The mission design is where Pre-Sequel sags most visibly. A significant portion of side quests reduce to "find the ECHO recorder, press the button, shoot the guys." The low-gravity traversal that should inspire creative mission design is almost never actually used by the quest structures themselves. The Helios Station environments, which occupy a large chunk of playtime, feel underpopulated and corridor-samey compared to the lunar surface. The Handsome Jack backstory, which sounds like it should be compelling on paper, ends up checking off his villainous traits like a to-do list rather than letting them breathe organically. If you played Borderlands 2 first, the revelations land with a quiet thud. If you somehow play Pre-Sequel first, you will be missing significant context. The game is also quite rough for solo players at higher difficulty tiers, particularly in the True Vault Hunter and Ultimate Vault Hunter modes, where the scaling can tip from challenging into punishing without co-op support. Bugs have persisted too, including occasional broken spawns and geometry oddities, a legacy of 2K Australia being shut down shortly after launch without the post-release support the game deserved. The honest read on Pre-Sequel is that it sits in a specific and slightly awkward gap in the franchise. It is not the leap Borderlands 2 made from the original. It is more like an extended, well-crafted chapter that trusts series veterans to fill in what's missing. The loot loop still works. The class builds hold up. The co-op experience, particularly in a four-player squad abusing cryo chains and OZ Kit slams, is a genuinely good time. But if narrative payoff is your metric, the story stops just short of the line it was set up to cross.

Monika · Scout Team

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