LOS ANGELES— 2K Games on Tuesday showed off its upcoming sequel to the first-person sci-fi dungeon crawler Borderlands at E3, and gave gamers their first chance to try out the Commando and Assassin classes.
Borderlands 2 has been shown at previous events, but only with the Siren and Gunzerker classes showing off their respective supernatural abilities and blind rage gunslinging. The Commando is more similar to the Assault class in the first Borderlands, and the Assassin class is a stealthy long-range and melee fighter similar to the Hunter class from the first game. I spent time as Zero, the Assassin character, as I played through a mission at 2K Games' booth.
I got a chance to try the Gunzerker class earlier in the year, and the Assassin played very differently. While the Gunzerker was very hardy and loaded with heavy weapons (with a special ability to wield two machine guns at once), the Assassin requires much more finesse. He lacks the strength or endurance to handle up-close fighting, so he relies on long-distance weapons like sniper rifles and stealthy skills to use melee attacks that kill enemies before they can fight back.
The Assassin's special ability is a combination cloak and decoy that projects a hologram of the character in front of you while you turn invisible. The skill also highlights the weak points on enemies, increasing the chances of getting critical hits on enemies while cloaked.
The demonstration put me in the middle of a high-tech city, a sharp contrast from most of Borderlands' bleak desert environments. A cheerful robot guided me to destroy statues of the tyrant Handsome Jack, the ruler of the city. The statuary was conveniently bulletproof and grenade-proof, so I had to look for a construction robot that could cut through it.
The action began when I searched for the robot. Enemy combat engineers and robots jumped out of the woodwork (in many cases, teleporting out of the woodwork) and attacked me under the orders of Handsome Jack.
As with the previous Boderlands game, the enemies have different strengths and weaknesses. Combat engineers are much more susceptible to acid and fire weapons, while robots are weakest against explosives. Ten-foot-tall "Badass" robots act as mini-bosses, packing much more power and taking much more punishment.
I had to follow the construction robot while it destroyed the statues, and deal with robots and engineers that attacked both the robot and myself. Borderlands doesn't penalize you for dying aside from a cash fee each time you respawn, but it takes up valuable seconds that leave the construction robot vulnerable. At one point in the playthrough, the enemies destroyed the construction robot, forcing me to return to the beginning of the area to restart the mission.
Borderlands 2 doesn't seem to offer anything significantly new over the first Borderlands, with the classes appearing very similar, the enemies very familiar, and the action nearly identical to the previous game. This isn't a bad thing, though. Borderlands offered a surprisingly effective mixture of first-person shooter action and role-playing game-like look farming, and Borderlands 2 will offer more of the same in a genre that often demands more of the same. It's less like Halo 4 on a desert planet and more like Diablo 3 with guns.
Borderlands 2 comes out for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC this September.
For more from E3, see the slideshow below.
