*Borderlands 2* is a first person shooter with RPG leveling. It's distinctive
with it's cell-shaded graphics, over the top weaponry and characters. We saw
a *demo* of early Borderlands 2 gameplay where the player begins in a cold
wasteland, and quickly comes across some ice-dwelling monsters. These showed
off the *improved enemy AI* in the game: using their environments
intelligently, enemies don't simply attack, but will find objects to throw
at you too and try to stay on higher ground. With humanoid enemies, this
increased intelligence is even more pronounced - they work in teams to
out-flank you, retreat when wounded and more. All the battles in Borderlands
2 were reassuringly dynamic and dramatic, without feeling scripted. The range
of weaponry is really varied, with the new use-once-and-throwaway-guns called
Tediores looking really cool - they have ammunition in them, but you can also
throw them as grenades, making them very flexible. The mission demoed saw you
teaming up with a female siren in two player co-op mode, to rescue Roland, a
character from the first game. He has been captured by a large hovering
robot, hiding out in a lair guarded by weaponized mining robots. Fighting
through these as Roland is being taken away through the industrial complex,
we saw enemy backup robots being fired in from a moon base, which looked
really cool and emphasized the incredible scale. The moonbase can attack
anywhere on the planet of Pandora, run by 'Handsome Jack', who is trying to
violently bring law and order. There was plenty of macabre, violent humor
along the way, and the demo finished with the start of what looked like a big
boss battle. The player was flung off a high damn structure by an enormous
robot. Views from here, when there was time to look, were really impressive,
and the huge landscape we could see is apparently all explorable in
Borderlands 2. *Developers Gearbox were keen to make the point that they feel
many game sequels are just 'content dumps', additional levels with no
substantive changes, so they want to make Borderlands 2 a genuinely new game
with real changes, and from what I saw, they are well on the way to achieving
that.*Download *Borderlands 2 Preview* in Softonic
