Still Playing: Borderlands 2

EDGE is offering an editorial explaining why they’re still playing Borderlands 2 long after release, putting an unexpected focus on the game’s writing. Here’s a snip:

In Fargo, the Coen brothers inverted the darkest and dirtiest Hollywood genre, film noir, by setting it in the brightest, whitest place they could find and here, in the backyard world of Pandora where everyone’s a psycho-killer, Gearbox signifies the same sort of mischief by opening its science fiction western in the iciest glacial hell it can muster.

It may be sci-fi but for me the opening to Borderlands 2 is the old, heroic Hollywood west of Wayne, Cooper and Ladd literally frozen in time and unearthed to be satirised and slapped around (The Heavy’s intro track says it all: (This ain’t no place for no hero)). This is still a man’s world, of course, only it’s a more honest and treacherous tale of capitalism, one in which the biggest gun and the fastest trigger wins the loot, rather than the strongest jaw or the most golden of hearts winning the day, or the girl.

Despite the tongue lodged firmly in its cheek, Borderlands 2 is surprisingly relevant and cutting: There’s subtext all over this dirty ol’ town. From ammo vendors that tell us (If you shop anywhere else I will kill you), to an attitude towards the indigenous life of Pandora that comes across in derogatory naming conventions like (Bullymong), this is a knowing and sly commentary on how the west was really won and how its lands were laid to waste in the process.