picked up borderlands 2. been kinda blitzing through it, despite not being particularly crazy about it. one of those games where you kinda bounce between superficially enjoying it and disliking it, but invariably finding yourself deeply dissatisfied after you've stopped playing, like you've done something unusually worthless with your time.
i don't know if the whole borderlands thing just wore out its welcome with me, but i don't remember feeling quite like this with the first one. that wasn't a particularly noteworthy game either, but it was pretty well designed and at times an reasonably funny game. i think what gets me in this is how empty and senselessly derivative absolutely every part of the story is. they were guilty of that in the first one, but they're much more guilty about it here, like virtually everything the story covers needs some internet meme validation or another dreadful pop culture/movie reference, the rest just standing on the already flimsy shoulders of the first one. i was plowing away at all the sidequests for a while but eventually lost full interest when i began dreading what menial task they'd couple with an empty humorless reference.
i'm kinda lacking positive things to say about the game, really. it's playable much of the time, enough minor changes to the item/combat system to feel like an evolution of the first game, but none of that really seems to add up to anything. they throw shit at you a bit harder in this than in the first game, which makes the whole experience a bit more wearying most of the time, although that might just be a function of my being notably less eager to grind in this one. i don't find much of the locations too engaging anyway, and not visually intuitive most of the time, but that was often the case in the first one as well.
i almost kinda chalked this up to just being tired of grinder shooters, but i had actually been mindlessly playing the mass effect 3 multiplayer off and on before going into this, and somehow hadn't gotten seriously tired of it, so there's probably something at least peripherally wrong with this game for me to be so repulsed by it.
i'd say avoid this if you're on the fence about it. you really need to WANT to like this game to get anything out of it.
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