It was a frustrating start for me. The first game eases you into the difficulty curve as you ramp up your character's attributes, like how many items you can hold, and how many guns you can quick-select. In this one, you are thrown into some tough mobs while still wet behind the ears. I've died numerous times. The frustrations for early characters are still there, and amplified. Trying to decide which guns, shields, etc to keep and which to throw away is an ordeal, since stats (still) don't give you anywhere near enough information. This is one area I hoped to see improved, but it really wasn't. Then I reached a certain place (
), and things got a lot more manageable. More quick-select slots, more weapon slots, some good weapons to find, and a place to put my stuff.
Enemies seem smarter this time around. The badasses are more dismaying than ever. Shooting them often feels like hitting them with tennis balls. Enemy spawning also got more hairy. Waves of them keep popping up almost right on top of you. Eventually, they stop, or slow down? (Not sure how this works yet.) But at first, I thought the spawning system was broken, with bad guys popping up so much that you could do nothing but fight them. Looting, choosing gear and exploring seemed out of the question.
Vehicle controls still have the same dumb 2-stick controls. Instead of letting you throttle and steer it with the left, and aim the turret with the right (as it should be), you can only aim in the direction that you're looking. The vehicle always goes where you're looking with the right stick, totally neglecting one entire axis on the left stick (which is only used as throttle). Another hope dashed. Oh well.
Beware of some apparent bone-headedness on the saved data. From what I've been reading, it may be possible to
wipe out your badass rank if you switch characters on the same profile. The intent was to make the badass rank global across your characters (itself a boneheaded thing to do). The reality may be that starting a new character on the same profile wipes out the badass data from the global file (profile). But the challenges you completed to earn it are still considered completed, globally! So there is no way to make up the lost ground on that one profile. If this is true, GBX has some fires to put out, and fuck them for letting this get through to the released version. Since I play solo, what I'll do for now is use a different profile for each character I create. It doesn't matter that I can only go online with Axton. (Yes, I started out with the soldier again. Haha!)