Borderlands: The Secret Armory of General Knoxx

System: PC
Release Date: 2010
Published By: 2K Games
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

The new Crimson Lance units are pretty fun, but why does it take so long to get to them? I don't mean that they only show up at the end of the game -- they're the brunt of the content. What I mean is that, for some reason, Gearbox has elected to place all of this expansion's content at the end of long fucking roads, and you have to drive back and forth over and over and over. I'm in dead earnest when I say that this game lost a full point off of its rating for not supporting the fast travel that's already goddamn built into Borderlands.

The vehicles weren't fun in Borderlands, and they aren't fun in General Knoxx either. Only this time, there are more of them. They still suffer from the same major problems that the vehicles in the main game had: first, that they don't scale with gear, which, in a game that's designed entirely around increasing player power via gear, is a show-stopper, and secondly, you can't aim and move at the same time.

Now, in multiplayer, you sure damn can, which probably mitigates the awfulness a great deal. But when you put vehicles in a single-player game, you have a choice to make: you can make the turret turn independently of the vehicle, which adds a big steep learning curve to the vehicle controls that you may not be able to justify when the vehicles are basically a footnote anyhow, or you can lock the turret and vehicle controls together, which means you can't aim and move at the same time. Gearbox has opted for the second option, but has tried to smooth out the rough spots with a "lock-on" feature. This doesn't help much, though, since the lock-on doesn't lead the target -- it shoots at where the target is now, which means it doesn't hit shit.

Now, none of this is new -- the original Borderlands was exactly the same -- but General Knoxx is so vehicle-centric that it's a much bigger problem. It's weird that Gearbox added a bunch of new vehicles and then spent the time to design and implement long, boring roads to drive the vehicles down if you want to get to the game, but did not bother fixing the vehicle mechanics so they'd be fun.

The characters are pretty much standard Borderlands fare. Most of them carry over from the original Borderlands, and Moxxi makes a second appearance following her debut in the unplayed-by-me Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot. She's pretty annoying, but, fortunately, she's also pretty minor. General Knoxx is the major new addition, and I really really want to like him. His voice actor is actually quite good, and really stands out from the just-passable of the rest of the cast. Unfortunately, the typical Borderlands dialogue drags him down; his presentation is excellent, but all he's saying is self-consciously wacky bullshit like you probably thought was funny in middle school, but which doesn't cut it here in 2010. It's a shame, really, since, if you don't really listen to what he's saying but just focus on how he's saying it, it can be pretty fun.

When you're not driving around, the game is pretty much Borderlands. There are new mobs to fight and quests to enquesten, and it adds some new gear and raises the level cap to 61. If you liked Borderlands and you don't mind all the nonsense driving, it's worth a play. If you didn't like Borderlands, nothing here is going to change your mind. Unless the reason you didn't like Borderlands is because it didn't have enough long, straight roads you could drive a car down to get to the levels, in which case, hey, guess whose prayers just got answered.

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