You ain’t got time to make a profile!
Playing more Borderlands; I just did the first DLC pack, the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. It’s pretty good. The thing I liked the most about it was that the environments weren’t goddamn brown — everything was green and orange and spooky. And dark. Really, really dark. Dark to the point where it could be difficult to see the mobs, which, I think was part of the point — it’s taking a bit of a cue from survival horror and surrounding you with zombies, see. And making them hard to see makes them scarier, right?
The zombies are pretty fun. Being zombies, they’re very melee-centric (though they can vomit on you at short range, and a few types can throw barrels). And they come in big waves, so you better be goddamn ready to press A. As a siren, I found myself at a pretty sharp disadvantage, since speed and mobility are pretty much my whole game, and the zombies spawn all around you and mob you so as to limit how much you can move. Really, it’s a totally different style from the ranged-combat-centric mobs that dominate the original Borderlands.
The game’s humour is right about on par with the original, which is to say: it’s stilted and not very good, and the actors oversell it. Marcus does the intro and outro narration, and he’s still fairly funny when the dialogue permits, but, outside of that, the only funny bits that are actually funny relate to the titular character, Dr. Ned, and how he’s exactly the same as the original game’s Dr. Zed. He uses the exact same model and skin and voice, except that he has a giant outrageous fake mustache stuck to the outside of his surgical mask. That’s pretty funny. And there’s recurring dialogue about how he’s totally not the same character, which isn’t bad either.
The scenario’s not very long — maybe six to eight hours, which isn’t a ton — and there’s only the one New-U station right at the entrance, so any time you save and quit you’ll pick up right at the beginning (location-wise; it saves your progress through the quests, of course). The quests are mostly pretty standard, with one big goddamn annoyance; there’s a series of quests to bring some brains to this friendly zombie, and you can collect brains from any zombie you kill with a headshot. You can even pick the brains up if you don’t have the quests, which is nice. But there’s a cloud on the horizon: they don’t accumulate. So you can collect a whole shitload and think you’re doing great, and then you pick up the quest and your counter says goddamn 0/10. One or the other, Gearbox. Either I can pick the brains up and they count, or I can’t collect them at all. This is just obnoxious.
