Playing A Game Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel - Claptastic Voyage PC

My misgivings about Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel centered around its creative shortcomings and ineffectiveness: the new features weren't engaging, the new enemies weren't fun to fight, and the "new" story and characters weren't exciting or surprising. Claptastic Voyage suffers in the same ways. While it attempts to mix things up with a cool TRON aesthetic, it crumbles under the weight of nonsensical missions and grindy encounters.

The story's focus on Claptrap is pretty regrettable, similar to games like Jazzpunk and Matt Hazard -- while aiming to lampoon annoying tropes, it ends up succumbing to them. Not just because there are too many Claptraps and they all talk too much, but because of the world elements inspired by Claptrap. I mean, pop-up ads! Obstacles that suddenly rise from the floor as you walk. Flying robots that whizz around and obscure your vision. Stuff like this is just brazenly un-fun.

And while these elements may have been meant to punctuate the flow of the story, that flow is just ... awful. The main quest should be simple, but is stretched out by a series of contrivances; every time it feels almost over, some new, seemingly-random plot device appears to steal the objective away. It doesn't help that so many of the levels are either generic glowy cubes, or rehashes of areas from previous Borderlands games.

(One level, near the end, did make really impressive use of gravity-defying geometry and boost pads. That part was great. The rest really wasn't.)

An unfortunate consequence of this uninteresting game world is that my partner and I were utterly uncompelled to do its side-quests. And this, in turn, meant that we were underleveled as the campaign moved on. For the most part, this wasn't a problem; enemies with flashing red skulls were still no match for us.

The final boss, though, was a tiring chore with an unreasonable health bar. ... and then it turned out, that wasn't the final boss. The "real" final boss was an even bigger bullet-sponge, and its attacks destroyed us almost instantaneously. (Fun anecdote: as Wilhelm, my partner used the Termination Protocols skill to die, revive, and immediately die again back-to-back for about a full minute.)

We could have gone back to do an hour or two of sidequests, and probably stand a much better chance in that fight. But neither of us cared enough to keep playing.

Claptastic Voyage is basically competent, and - with the exception of that final boss - about as enjoyable as the middling, mediocre parts of other Borderlands games. But its ambitions above that, few as they are, fall.

Better than: Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt
Not as good as: Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock vs. the Son of Crawmerax
I probably shouldn't get my hopes up for the next Borderlands: but I really want someone to come up with a blend of action and humor that lives up to Borderlands 2.

Progress: Got to the ECLIPSE boss, and died a whole lot.

Rating: Meh