Borderlands 2 Review in Progress
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Outside of guns, Borderlands 2 presents ample opportunities to let your stats-obsessed side come out. Some of the most enticing drops end up being shields and class mods. Even the most boring shields have varying stats that affect their recharge rate and time before they start to recharge, but rarer pieces of equipment do cool things like explode in a burst of fire when depleted, which can be a huge boon when you're surrounded. Class mods too have a dramatic effect on the way you play, with randomly generated stats that directly augment your talents and can give you dramatic boosts to important things like reload speed or damage with a particular weapon type. They can even give you boosts that apply to anyone else you're playing with, making them particularly useful and great loot for the more party-oriented among you.
One thing I complained about with the original Borderlands was that for all the loot you got, none of it allowed you to change your appearance. This is a shooter first and foremost, but there's enough RPG elements in Borderlands that it always felt bizarre that I couldn't do more to change my appearance. Even a few armor slots I could swap out to further augment my character would have been great. Borderlands 2 didn't go the armor slot route, but the team at Gearbox did add a ton of new skins to switch between. Customization here is a bit disappointing in terms of how bare bones it is, as you can only change up the entire skin of your head and your body, but it's still better than the even more limited options from the first game. At least now you can play an online match with several other people using the same class and clearly tell who's who. And, if nothing else, it gives you yet another type of loot to chase after through the first playthrough and beyond.
So far Borderlands 2 is doing basically everything right with loot: it's abundant, it changes up your character constantly, and it's exciting to pursue.
Going by the tone so far I'd expect a very high score from IGN.. and probably from other outlets too.
