Borderlands 2

Overall: 7/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Story: 4/10
Music: 8/10

Good game! Really fun mechanics with great replay value. Play it for that, though, not the story. They manage to leach just enough emotional impact out of the characters to make it worth finishing the story but not enough that it ever really hits home. Investing you more heavily in a few, more important NPCs that you develop a relationship with might have helped that. But then again, never what the game was trying to excel at. The outside lord (non-story) is decent, and sets a good atmosphere, but gets repetitive after a while. Similarly, the enemies you can fight, by the end, feel quite similar. If you’re playing right, there’s an optimal strategy for each PC, and once you have it down, you can just run through the game doing the same move set on most enemies. Even slagging becomes fairly irrelevant by late game, especially for big bosses. Their attempts to spice it up involve usually adding armor or resistance, or making a specific spot vulnerable. This adds more annoyance than strategy, however. Still, the actual “gun-feel,” if you will, is excellent, and it remains a great game especially in co-op. In fact, I’d say that’s where it shines, as playing with friends lends a whole new level of strategy to how you stack your skills and play styles together. Last thing, the gun generation system is great, BUT being able to progress with guns you like a lot (pay for an upgrade) would make it even better as there’s little to no incentive to do anything other than farm a few bosses until you get the best gun for your level and stick with it for a while until it simply is unusable. Overall, good game, great for it’s time, the story is lacking but still well worth a play through for the mechanics.