Review: Borderlands 2

I remember back when the president of Gearbox tweeted that he would want Borderlands 2 on the PS Vita, but his studio was too busy to make it. If Gearbox found a developer that wanted to do it they would let them port it over. Well Iron Galaxy has taken the responsibility to port Borderlands 2 over to the PS Vita. The big question is did they succeed?

Borderlands 2 is a first-person shooter with a mixture of role-playing elements that make it stand out in today’s oversaturation of generic first-person shooters. You play as one of 6 vault hunters, each with their own unique skill tree and special abilities. You complete quests, beat enemies, defeat bosses, collect various kinds of loot, and gain experience points to level up your character's various skills and abilities. If Diablo and a first-person shooter fell in love and made a baby, Borderlands 2 would be that baby. 

Some people might fear that the controls will not be all that good considering the the PS Vita has less buttons than its PS3 counterpart. Well controlling the game works just fine on the PSVita. I can do everything that I can do with the PS3 controller with ease. The game has many preset controller layouts for you to mess around with or you can just change everything you want with a completely customizable layout. Some functions use the back touch pad and it is not terrible. For you to use the back touch pad you have to touch closer to the middle (From the left or to the right.) to activate one of the two functions so there should be no accidental presses, at least from how I hold my PS Vita. I customized my control layout to be more like Killzone: Mercenary controls and it controls just fine.

Borderlands is known for it's unique cel-shading styled graphics and the graphics look great on the PS Vita. I was amazed that they were able to recreate one of my favorite PS3 games on the Vita and still make it look good. Do not think it is the same quality that you will find on your PS3 though. There had to be some changes so it would run on a portable system. The draw distances are shorter, not as much detail, and no ragdoll physics for enemy deaths ( They just explode with blood going everywhere and the body disappears.). To me, even with those tradeoffs the game still looks great.

The game has a ton of content to play around with. There are a variety of different quests that kept me hooked on for the entire time. Heck, I still have to do more side-quests and complete the DLC content that came out for it. Speaking of the DLC, this version comes with 6 of the content packs that came out for the PS3 version. You will get the first two campaign add-ons, (Captain Scarlett and her Pirate’s Booty and Mr. Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage), Gaige the Mechromancer and Krieg the Psycho characters, along with the Vault Hunter Upgrade pack and the Collector’s Edition Pack, which increase the level cap to 61 and gives you some new heads and skins for your characters. Unfortunately absent are two campaign DLCs, "Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep" and "Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt"; also missing is the "Ultimate Vault Hunter Upgrade 2" which increases the level cap to 72 and the all of the "Headhunter" packs.

The game even comes packed in with online cooperative play. Though it might be a deal breaker to some, it is limited to 2-players. I do not mind it though as I think it's good enough for the lesser amounts of enemies in a area compared to the PS3 version (PS3 version might of had 14 enemies there but the PSVita only has 10 for an example.). Plus it's less people trying to steal your precious loot.

Playing through the game I did notice some bugs and framerate drops. The drops in the framerate do not happen enough for it to ruin my experience with the game, although it is a little worse in co-op. Do not get me wrong, it could be better. Hopefully future patches can get rid of some of the framerate drops. The only other problem I had would be the load times. The PS3 had long load times also and the PS Vita's load times are just little longer that is it, just a little.

Borderlands 2 for the PS Vita is nearly identical to the Borderlands 2 that was released a couple of years ago. So if you already own it then you are just paying for the option to play it on the go. If you never played it, definitely think about getting this game. You'll be getting a game filled with a huge amount of content that you can take wherever you go. Borderlands 2 is a great portable version of the console game with a few minor issues.