Traqie

April Report

Heyo,

Here I am 1/3rd of May behind us with my April report! :D
I didn’t started Ancestors Legacy yet as I had planned last month. I may have to shelve it for another month as I will probably start Distant World: Universe. It’s gonna be my first 4x game, I hope it will be good :X

Soon I’m gonna start Borderlands 2. I keep hearing it’s better in almost every way than the first game, which is ok in co-op and you can read my review of it below.

Oh and one Sakura game just after I find +18 patch since I imagine that’s the way its meant to be played :V It’s one of my current PoP games and I might as well do this one since it’s short.

Borderlands GOTY Enhanced

Borderlands GOTY Enhanced

6/10 Solo, 7/10 in co-op
36.8 hours
63 of 80 achievements

Everyone is playing this right now so I decided to jump the train too. I played like 90% of base game with a friend.
FPS Loot-shooter with millions of randomized guns, four different characters to choose from that each have different abilities and personalities, a dull set of bosses, a world filled with pop culture references and Claptraps is how I would summarize this game.

For an FPS, the gunplay is pretty weak. Even strongest weapons feel weak, lack any sort of kick to them and are overall pretty boring to shoot. Explosions from grenades and rocket launchers are laughable, revolvers feel more like standard pistols and combat rifles are meh. Shotguns sound pretty good and are fun to shoot, at least they didn’t messed that up. Each weapons is randomized (with few exceptions) and not just their stats but their looks and parts. You can get sniper rifles with revolver cylinders and instead of bolt-action to remove shells, it has pump like a shotgun. Or a pistol with a bayonet and huge scope. Neat

Weapons can have elemental damage – Shock, fire, toxic, blast. Shock does a lot of damage to shields, but I found it pretty useless beyond that, most enemies have a lot of health and pretty weak shields. Fire does dmg over time and is probably the most useful overall from all four, but there are some enemies that are completely immune to it. Toxic works like fire with less dmg but can spread and ignores armor. Blast seems to ignore most of armor but then I can’t remember any armored enemies except skags (pandora dogos) in base game. But it does leave a nice red mess and gibs if you kill someone with it :P

Storyline is ok I guess, although I didn’t bothered to read quest descriptions or written dialogue as in game like this and you really don’t have to. The story is easy to follow and understand if you just listen to what characters say in cutscenes or radio. You’re on Pandora, looking for vault that opens every 200 years and you just happen to be right on time! :p

You can spawn vehicles pretty early on with mounted gun, but once you get fast travel they become obsolete pretty fast.

I wouldn’t recommend playing this in solo. While it can be pretty enjoyable and easy to let the game flow with its repetitiveness, there are just better games to play. It’s a pretty basic FPS with some basic and mostly boring talent trees. And the boss battles…oh dear…

The “Bosses” in this game are mostly just tougher enemies with big health and slightly different models. I can recount only two unique looking bosses, each part of storyline quests. Any mechanics are either bare bones or non-existent. I honestly expected a lot more. You mostly just stand still and shoot them and that’s it. Hide every now and then to regen your shield. Repeat. Even the last boss, the supposed guardian of Vault is a joke, there are tentacles you have to shoot that pop up every now and then and that’s it lol. Maybe it’s not a very fair comparison but even the most basic bosses in WoW in low level dungeons had more depth to them than any BL1 boss 🙄

Lots of pop culture references are present, from movies, tv shows, some games too, probably a hundreds more I missed or didn’t knew. I can just imagine Randy’s Pitchford happy baby face laughing after seeing every single one and saying “oh that’s from that movie/comic/game haha!” as he forces his employees to add even more.

I completed two playthrough as Roland (Soldier class) and if I can give you some advice, pick either Brick or Lilith, they’re much more fun from what I can tell during my short playthrough with them. Roland’s ultimate is that he can spawn Scorpio turret, which is pretty useful but it disappears after a short time and cooldown on this thing is very long one. Each class has three sets of talent tree and to reduce turret cooldown you have to get at least to level 20…His other talents aren’t that great either, mostly it’s just bonus to dmg, bonus to turret damage, regen bonus etc. Boring stuff. Brick’s ultimate is by far my favorite, you go into berserk mode and do absurd amounts of damage with your fists, it was really fun.

OST – I played most of game with low volume due to playing with my friend and he has a pretty quiet mic so I didn’t really had a good listen. Wasn’t anything worth sharing from what I could hear during my short solo playthroughs.

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

5/10
5 hours
5 of 5 achievements

Zombie DLC, yaaay…

A new area filled with zombies, midget zombies, thriller outfit wearing zombies etc. Out of two DLCs I played so far this is the worst one. It takes place on an island (Dead Island hahaha…) where the less successful brother of Dr. Zed, Dr. Ned failed an experiment and infected everybody and by that messed the business of Jakobs corporation for whom he worked for. So now it’s up to you to get him and maybe find a cure.

It’s just most of the same. Some areas are literally copy-pasted from base game with slightly different textures and rubbish.

The last boss fight takes place in a huge and open cave, but the boss got stuck for me in the entrance so I just stood in place with my turret and killed him.

If you don’t care about achievements, skip this one.

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx

6/10
10 hours
8 of 10 achievements

Could be a 7/10, but for a lack of fast travel, which this DLC could really use, I have to lower this by one for wasting player’s time.

In this one you get new vehicles to travel and the new areas are huge. Long highways but just straight forward highways and big open areas with huge bugs popping out of sand. There’s a lot of new quests here compared to Island of Dr. Ned, some of them are secret and they don’t show on minimap.

There’s no fast travel because the devs wanted you to travel with new vehicle and that’s an issue to me. The hub area is where you will return most of completed quests, but often the quests to do are on one of the ends of map and traveling one way from hub to objective can take even 10 minutes. And on the road there’s usually nothing but some enemies that you can ignore. It’s always faster to just leave the game after completing the quest and re-making the lobby as you just spawn back in hub area. Traveling is just a huge time-waster in this game. It’s the worst at the beginning when on one of the highways there’s a huge blockade and you had to travel on foot quite a distance too.

The last boss, General Knoxx, is a bit better than anything I saw in base game, but with two people it’s still very easy. Some mobs and medics spawn to help him, but once you kill them you can stun lock Knoxx by just doing headshots.

Overall ok DLC and a lot more interesting than zombie island, but the repeated boring travels between areas makes it 6/10 for me instead of 7.

Castle Crashers

Castle Crashers

6/10
11.9 hours
7 of 12 achievements

Played solo.

Cute little action adventure game in 2D. Although the game recommend controller to play, I didn’t had any problems completing the game on keyboard.

Not really sure what to say about this one. Pretty simple hack’n’slash with different melee combos and magic system. Magic depends on the knight you pick at start, I chosen poison knight and his magic does dmg over time.

Tons of stuff to unlock in base game and Insane mode (NG+). You start with 4 knights but can have like over 50 from what I saw. Different weapons, over dozen of pet companions, the game definitely encourages replaying.

It’s easy to pick up and play, the combat is easy to learn and you can use different melee or magic combos to deal with enemies. It’s pretty well balanced in solo as I rarely had to go back to previous areas to level up, I was on par with most enemies through the whole game. There are four stats that you can level, Strength just boost your damage with melee, Magic does the same for spells and unlocks new combos, Defense boosts HP and Agility your running speed, how fast you fire your bow and how much damage it does. I mostly just leveled up Magic and STR with some defense every now and then and did fine.

You also have companion pets that give you bonuses or help you in different ways. Like with everything else there is a ton of pets to find and unlock.

Almost every boss encounters is unique and fun. Borderlands 1 could use those 😂 At one point you even have to play beach volleyball against enemies to beat the level, but that was a pain in the ass in solo.

Since I played this solo I missed on the chaos that is co-op, I watched some LP’s and sometimes it’s difficult what is going on. I can imagine it’s even worse if you pick one of the unlocked knights that look exactly like one of enemies. Also the XP is gained by doing dmg and in co-op this is obviously going to spread among your team, so you’ll deal less damage on your own and actually gonna have to try work together somehow in this chaos :D

It can also be a little boring on your own after playing for a while. It’s ok on it’s own but I can imagine it’s a lot better with friend/s, so I would recommend playing it with at least one friend.

Story is very simple, evil wizard stole a magic crystal from your king and a few of his princesses and you have to rescue them and defeat the wizard and his lieutenants.

Favorite tracks:
07 – War Machine
08 – Factory
15 – Dark Skies

Vito

Distant Worlds: Universe is a nice game, but it can be a bit confusing at first. You can automate a lot of stuff in the beginning though, which helps. Sadly I can’t remember if there is a decent tutorial for the game, I haven’t played it in ages. Good luck and have fun with the game!

Traqie

Thank you! If game tutorial fails there’s always steam guides ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Hopefully this is not a bad introduction to 4X.

Cece09

Oh I hated general knoxx dlc especially for that no fast travel. Plus it didn’t work for me properly, whenever it would be the car parts traveling if I dare tried to defend myself while in the car it would crash on me. However the collecting was much easier with them so that was good at least and even gave you bonus’s not that I really noticed the difference. Also don’t worry you will dislike the moxxi dlc even more then the ned one, that one is everyones favourite and I bet people are jumping at the chance to repeat it all over again

Read the base game now and I play Lilith and yeah it’s fun going invisible especially since it makes you go faster. Very fun when I play with friends and I just go speeding ahead or catch up with them since my internet connection was always slower at that time. I can also agree that brick can be fun if you are looking for head on action, the only one I never saw used was solider. Since I had 1 friend who was brick, 1 friend as lilith and 2 as mordecai but he can be handy with healing others but screw healing in this game just be invisible girl and heal from that which also made me love her, fast and self healer

Traqie

since my internet connection was always slower at that time

This reminds, when I started playing there was a bug that made the game very laggy for everyone if you had in-game VoIP enabled in config file. Did you disabled it or did they fixed? It was pretty horrible but we turned it off pretty early in game and it was smooth sailing since then.

And yeah Lilith looks and fun and OP from my perspective :P It feels like it’s impossible for my friend to die and I on other hand have to be pretty careful even after investing skill points in survivability. Frankly Mordecai seemed like the most boring one, his ultimate is pretty lame. Maybe he’s more fun with higher levels like Soldier, dunno.

Also don’t worry you will dislike the moxxi dlc even more then the ned one, that one is everyones favourite and I bet people are jumping at the chance to repeat it all over again

If bosses are fun then I might like it :) I don’t expect them to be tho.

Cece09

the bosses get boring after repeating them again and again. quickest I got 1 done was 2 hours and that was with me being lvl 60 and playing with a lvl 10 character to grind it out. Plus the hardest 1 in there crashed on me twice so I repeated 1 terrible grind for 6 hours and it wasn’t fun for even 1 second. Seeing them pull the t-pose was amusing at 1st but after it broke my game it got less fun. Also I have no idea about that VolP i don’t even know what that is to know if it got fixed or not

Traqie

https://old.reddit.com/r/Borderlands/comments/b9xip7/possible_fix_for_coop_play_pc/

This is what I meant, it might help you with lag. But make sure all of your teammates do that.

Also I’m leaving the Moxxi DLC for later, I’ll be starting Claptrap revolution next.

robilar5500

BL2 is better because it’s more of the same, only executed better. If you liked BL, you’ll definitely love BL2. In fact, I think I may have to replay BL2 on my PS4, especially since I never did get around to wrapping up the DLC.