T w e n t y S i d e d

Roland decides that the best thing to do is steal the vault key from Handsome Jack. This means “hijacking” a train by blowing up the tracks and then stealing the vault key.

Along the way we meet Mordecai. Like our meeting with Lilith, the game goes out of its way to make his appearance a sort of awkward surprise reveal.

After that we meet Tiny Tina. Let’s talk about her…

Tiny Tina

If I’d been in charge of Borderlands 2 and Anthony Burch had come to me with the idea of making one of the main characters a 13 year old girl, I would have told him he was crazy. “There is way too much murder and torture in this universe, and we’re trying to play it for laughs. We can’t put a child in there!”

But Tina works. In fact, she nails the madcap tone the game is going for much better than any of the returning characters. She’s a demolitionist, and having this kid plot large-scale destruction while also engaging in frivolous little-kid chatter is kind of dark but also really amusing.

But her sidequest is where things get really dark. She throws a “tea party” for Flesh-Stick, a local psycho who killed her family. You have to capture Flesh-Stick and he ends up strapped to a chair where she can blast him with electricity. At the party she has tea and crumpets with her stuffed animals while also shocking Flesh-Stick. She basically tortures the guy to death while the player fends off the waves of psychos coming to rescue him. It’s completely screwed up and it even made me a little uncomfortable, but I really like that the game has an identity now. You can compare this to the “busted girl parts” of Borderlands 1. You might like this part, you might not, but at least we can tell where the humor is coming from and what the story is trying to say.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 13: What a Twist!”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The player reaches the imprisoned Roland at the end of the dam. The Hyperion robots have him in a plot forcefield and the player has to deal with the constructor robot to free him. As the name suggests, the constructor robot makes other robots.

This Dam Fight

This fight is a little wonky. There’s a save point right before the fight, so you respawn nearby if you die. That’s nice. The problem is that there isn’t much ammunition around. It’s a long, long battle across the top of the dam, and I’m often a little low on bullets by the time I get to Roland. There’s no way to replenish your ammunition before the fightThere are few boxes around, but those are a very small supply compared to the upcoming fight..

If you’ve been picking up loot along the way, then you might be able to switch to some trash weapon to get you through. For example, if you’ve depleted pistol and shotgun ammo with your two main weapons, then maybe you can get through by equipping a crappy assault rifle. But it’s not usually very fun to go into a major boss battle equipped with trash weapons. And of course, this is a boss fight so trash weapons might not be strong enough to get the job done. This fight in particular is all about doing damage as quickly as possible so you can hurt the boss before the next wave of mooks appears.

You can jump back to town to refill, but the fast travel point here is one-way. Guys respawn when you change zones, which means you’ll have to re-do the entire fortress all over again – both inside and on top of the dam – in order to get back to the bossThis happened to me on my first run through the game. I didn’t pick up on the detail that yellow travel stations were one-way, and so I had to re-do the entire dam. I was not happy.. And by the time you get there, you’ll probably be right back where you started: Standing on the threshold of a boss fight and low on ammunition.

It’s not that this fight is “too hard”. Sometimes it’s a breeze, and sometimes it’s a bit of a slog. But how difficult it is usually comes down to luck: What quality of weapons are you using, and are they ammo-hungry? Have you been spending your inventory upgrades on backpack space, or ammo capacity? If you happen to be relying on a shotgun and an SMG then you’ll probably be fine. If you’ve been relying on assault rifles and sniper rifles then you’re going to be starving for bullets before you’re done crossing the dam.

The constructor also has a way of eating bullets. In a normal boss fight you’re usually dealing with a boss that has a fixed pool of health. But the constructor can just keep spawning in reinforcements. Kill two robots, then back off because you’re low on health and shields. By the time you’ve recovered there are two more robots on the field. You’ve just spent a bunch of bullets and made no progress towards killing the boss.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Borderlands Part 12: Rescue Roland”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.