Sooo. Have had a couple of coop play sessions of Borderlands 2 this weekend and it has been a decently fun time so far. We decided to play the game since the Handsome Collection is currently available for only 6€ until the 17th of June I believe and includes a bunch of DLC and the game had interested us all from before already so it was kind of a good opportunity for it. Now I have been playing Gaige the Mechromancer which is one of the DLC character. She is actually a pretty cool character that as a special ability to summon a robot called Deathtrap that seems to be very efficient at meleeing enemies down and I recently got him the extra ability to fully restore the shields of an ally—this has proved rather useful in helping the party keep alive in sticky situations.
Now the game is a shooter looter or shlooter which means shoot down lots of enemies with a few bosses at times and loot new cool guns and equipment however here the game it feels has a couple of problems. The shooting—so far at least and to be fair we aren’t that far in—isn’t that great since it is so innaccurate though some of the guns feel kind of cool. This is made worse by my biggest peeves with this game: limited ammunition and somewhat bullet-spongy enemies at least in four player coop—the enemies health scales with amount of players I believe. There just isn’t enough ammunition in the game for all four players so you end up having to buy more at the kiosks selling it but simultaneously some weapons are designed around low damage high fire rate making these weapons make zero sense in a coop situation since you won’t have enough ammunition to kill anything with them—you could probably empty all of your ammunition into a single of the normal tougher enemies.
The low ammunition of course is made worse by the bullet-spongy enemies, since it can be very difficult to kill one of the “badasses” alone and when three or four of them spawn at a time your whole time might need to be a bit clever with their ammo in order to actually be able to kill all of them. This got especially bad at a spot in the game where waves of enemies spawned including a couple of the tougher enemies where pretty much all of us were running low on ammunition I think.
Now, different weapon types use different ammunition and you can carry several weapons so it is plausible that the idea is that you should be switching weapons as needed—and the game even encourages this through elemental effects on the weapons which cause them to deal extra damage to different types of enemies—but this also doesn’t really feel it makes sense to the core mechanic of the game which is looting cool weapons which you then aren’t supposed to use if you need to switch away from them. I actually very much like both accurate high damage weapons like snipers as well as more spray-and-pray weapons like miniguns but find myself steering away from the latter since I know I won’t have the ammunition to sustain their usage. I can understand ammunition in something like a survival game where resource management is a core part of the game but here it just feels like it doesn’t really fit that well—at the same time games like Diablo 3 have something similar simply through having to manage health and potions so maybe it is something that is part of the genre since they are both games centered around loot but I just feel having to bother with ammunition and not being able to use the cool weapon you like because you’re out of ammunition detracts more than it adds from this game.
Other than that though, as said Gaige feels pretty awesome to play with her robot buddy, we’re still pretty early in I think so we don’t have that exciting guns yet but I already have a couple that are pretty fun to use and the fights seem to be pretty dangerous or at least we pretty often have knockdowns with the occasional complete deaths sending you back to a save point. Even the shooting, I think the lack of ammunition is coloring my feelings of it a bit, since the guns in themself feel pretty cool but it’s just frustrating not to be able to hit anything except for close range when that’s really dangerous and you are heavily limited by ammunition and not being able to use the weapons I would more like to use because I no longer have ammunition for them—even the bullet-sponginess would be more forgivable in that case since I understand it’s one of the simpler ways to add some difficulty but when you feel you use a limited resource to no effect it just ends in frustration.
Despite all that, I have been enjoying the game and am looking forward to the next play session which I expect will be on Monday since all of us seem to like the game. Now here’s hoping the third installment coming later this year will fix some of these problems, maybe we’ll have a new fun game to play once we’re done with this one.