On The Border Again – Borderlands 2 PS Vita

I will never forget the day i first fired up the first Borderlands, it was a whole new world to me in terms of open world fps and eventually it went to be my multiplatform GOTY that year, it just felt so “new”, fresh and damn fun to play in co-op albeit i never figured the whole humoristic approach of the game per se… sure i did giggle a lot throughout the game but i would have played it anyway if it was deadly serious as it was the gameplay that made me play it…play it for months!…play it until the “sir grind a lot Mr. platinum”.

So.. 2 years later the sequel arrived and i just had to get it but for some reason the game didn’t scream out “buy me!!!” like the first one did and i guess that was because of the main focus of the teasers and trailer… the humoristic plot.. and it seemed that the action gameplay had gone a bit on the backburner by making it “too much for its own good”.. 4 hours or so later i stopped playing the game…and since then i always planned on restarting it and play through it… needless to say that never happened… why?.. who knows… was it the 100+ hours gameplay, was it because of the “boring” world graphics?.. was it because of all the annoying unskippable text and speech?.. well yes to all of the above..
Borderlands 2 was announced early in the Vita launch cycle but it never came out and most people thought that it was canceled and by the sound of things it was indeed canned as Gearbox went out and asked for a developer to take the port and finish it and publish it… luckily Sony stepped up and eventually the game popped up a few weeks back..
I had mixed feelings about buying it as i still hadn’t really played it on the PS3 and i feared that this Vita version would not be up to scratch and with that… it went on the backburner.
A few days ago I and a few fellow gamers started discussing the upcoming Borderlands prequel that is due for release very soon and typically me i had to ask if someone had given the B2 Vita version a try yet?. no one had but several had pondered about it but not bought it so far. Last night i went and bought the game “on sale” and decided to give it a proper try as i longed badly for a new “killer-app Vita title” as after all the first Borderlands was a pure gem so…
Ok. I have now played the Vita version for at least 5 hours and i can safely say that this game is a top-notch port of the PS3 version, it seems like it is identical to the PS3 version as it is Cross-Save between PS3 and Vita as well as the same joint trophy list (damn!) but there are a few differences and one of them is that Online Co-Op has been reduced to 2 player instead of 4 and there might be other things that have been downscaled or changed in the Vita version but i have yet to see any.
Borderlands 2 Vita hasn’t been an easy game to port for sure so this ain’t a quick and dirty port for sure but it is clear that they didn’t have the guts to change stuff like menu’s and so on so that basically means that the menus have only been scaled down in resolution so font sizes are too small..way too small for my eyes anyway…

So how does it all play? , well it is not smooth as the FPS can dip below 20fps frequently and while i still think the graphics are boring i can safely say that this ain’t PS Vita’s fault and i am sure the graphics will get better when and if there is a new location without snow in a later level etc.
Controls don’t feel cramped, my hands work fine with the game and while i use a “slot in grip/handle” for my Vita , well some games still cramp my hands due to awkward controls so all in all i am confident that most of you guys will have no problems playing the game with or without a slot in grip/handle like i have. (see picture).

Bosses and aiming can be a bit hard at first but as you progress and upgrade the game gets a bit easier on the aiming side of things so if you don’t like it at first then wait until you get to level 5 or something (and remember to upgrade as often as possible)
The aiming gets hard due to the FPS dropping but as the weapons get more powerful the easier it is to hit something…

If you decide to buy the game then let me know so we can play some online co-op as the Borderland series is meant to be played in CO-OP.