Shoot them with corroding shots, then get ready: now it’s a corrosive virus immune to your attacks that hits you with corrosive explosions.
The “viruses” are challenging mobile tanks that pelt you with elemental damage from afar and adapt their attack patterns according to yours. So the mechanical dog programs who run you down bear a close resemblance to skags, and some of the “virus” and “malware” enemies leap and charge at you very much like the bullymongs of Borderlands 2. Instead, it reuses some of the content from previous iterations, tweaks them, and weaves them into the game. Gameplay Claptastic Voyage does not tremendously change the Borderlands experience. I’m truly at a loss, here.įor more in-depth appraisals of the content of the Borderlands franchise, see the content warnings in my reviews here and here. Coarse language (everyone is always calling everyone else and their mother is an “a****le” in the Borderverse) continues to be a factor, but with the lack of “actual” death and the complete absence of Mad Moxxi, both violence and sexual innuendo are at an all-time low for a Borderlands game. The one character who dies (in a memory) has a conspicuous “CENSORED!” bar thrown up before he’s crushed by a giant meat press. In fact, since all the enemies are technically digital projections, no one actually “dies” in this DLC, and there is no gore, either. Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill? Content Warning Nothing tremendously different from any of the other Borderlands games. And so you chase this rogue program into Claptrap’s Subconscious and Sub-Subconscious, where you learn more about Claptrap’s personal feelings about being berated all the time, and the landscape becomes more and more farcical, like a twisted, modern version of Alice in Wonderland. Jack of course never cares about anything more than getting that H-Source, but if you’re questing as one of the “good” playable characters, your more noble goal is to stop this rogue AI from killing everyone. After joining forces with a rogue program to undo Tassiter’s defensive subroutines, you are (predictably I think one of the characters even jokes about how predictable it is at one point) betrayed by said rogue program who in fact wants to take over all of Claptrap, eradicate human life, and conquer the galaxy. After fighting through malware, spyware, viruses, and the digital equivalent of white blood cells, the H-Source vanishes from your grasp, and you’re forced to delve deeper and deeper not merely into the Tron-esque “Nexus” and “Motherlessboard” zones, but into Claptrap’s embarrassing allegorical “memories” where we see more and more why pretty much everyone insists on mistreating him despite his upbeat and friendly demeanor. (That’s Handsome Jack from behind Claptrap’s eye.) Of course, it would be no fun if everything went off without a hitch.
After scouring the guts of Helios’s engineering tunnels and doing just a tad of creative jumping, the antiheroes enter Jack’s secret lab where he takes a play out of Tron’s book: he wants to “digitize” the vault hunters and send their digital projections into the depths of Claptrap’s mind to retrieve the late Tassiter’s super-powerful “H-Source” file, which will grant Hyperion’s megalomaniacal new CEO even more power to crush any and every one attempting to roadblock his burning, bloodied path to glory and order.Ĭataracts of this severity will require the expertise of an Opthalmologist. Handsome Jack calls his mercenary cronies to the mysterious Deck 13 1/2 aboard Hyperion’s Helios station. To think that all this time you assumed robots didn’t have feelings! Storyįollowing the events of the main story line of Pre-Sequel, Jack, now officially known as the dastardly “Handsome Jack” from the Borderverse’s latter chronology, follows all possible avenues to consolidate his power, and some of those avenues lead to strange and unexpected places. Instead, this DLC is chock-full of narrative significance, new weapons, new locations, challenging new enemies, and some key revelations about the lovable Claptrap told through allegorical manifestations of his subconscious. Claptastic Voyage is no mere money-grab, as many players complained about the Holodome expansion. Introduction “A Claptastic Voyage” In the first major DLC expansion to Borderlands: The-Pre Sequel, Gearbox and 2K Australia deliver one of the best experience in any Borderlands game to date. Developer: Gearbox and 2K Australia Publisher: 2K Games Genre: FPS/Action-RPG Rating: M (Violence, Blood, Sexual Themes, Language) Price: $9.99